AndyRussian invasion of Ukraine
Siberian Light opposes the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Click here to donate to the Red Cross Ukraine appeal.
Final results are in from Sunday’s Moldovan elections. The Communist Party, as expected, triumphed, but not by as many votes as predicted. Here’s the breakdown of the three parties that forced their way over the five percent threshold and into 101-seat parliament of this former Soviet country.
- Communist Party: 46.1% / 56 seats
- Democratic Moldova Bloc: 28.4% / 24 seats
- Popular Party Christian Democratic: 9% / 11 seats
So, what next? Well, so far, no sign of protests in the streets. Moldovans seem pretty happy with the result. The OSCE has reported that the elections were, “on the whole”, up to OSCE standards, which doesn’t really give the opposition much to get their teeth into, even if they were united enough to do so.
The next big step is for the newly elected parliament to choose their next President. This, according to Publius Pundit, is where things could get interesting again. 61 votes are needed to elect a President and, of course, the Communists are currently 5 votes down. Vladimir Voronin, the current President, is going to have to do some deals if he wants to stay in charge and, if he can’t garner enough votes, there is the possibility that the Communists will lose their nerve and put forward a compromise candidate. If the opposition can unite for long enough, Publius reckons, we could be in for a bonus election which would favour the opposition:
If 61 votes are not achieved for a candidate within three tries,
parliament is dissolved and a new parliamentary election is held. This
would potentially garner even more votes toward the opposition.
I’d say, though, that things seem to be very much in the Communist Party’s favour right now. The two opposition parties are most definitely not united, and I don’t think they’ll be able to stand together through three rounds of voting, especially when the Communists start throwing incentives at them left, right, and centre. Which they will. And, even if the two party leaderships do manage to keep it together, think how much is going to be on offer to those five individual MPs to entice them to defect…
I hate having to agree on this. I try to remain optimist in this kind of situation, but my gut feeling from the beginning of the election wasn’t so hot. What’s worse, there were supposed to be protests starting today and I haven’t heard anything about it yet.
Hopefully the increased pluralism alone will help.