Toak Maia Sandu and the ruling party use a “comfortable majority” In Moldova, the pro-Western PAS party won the parliamentary elections, putting the fight against corruption and poverty at the top of the agenda. Now President Maia Sandu will be able to implement what she promised the voters
The triumph of pro-European forces
The pro-presidential party “Action and Solidarity”(PAS), following the results of the July 11 elections to the Moldovan parliament, won a majority of 63 out of 101 seats. This means that now it can independently form a government without entering into coalitions with other parties.
In order to implement most of the promises made during the election campaign in the next four years, to conduct a socially oriented policy, increase pensions and salaries, and start fighting corruption, this result is enough. The little that the PAS will not be able to change the Constitution without allies.
On the morning of July 12, the elected members of parliament from PAS held a closed meeting at which they discussed the future composition of the leadership of the parliament and the government, its participants told RBC. The speakers read the first number of the party list of Igor Grosu, the prime minister-the second number is Natalia Gavrilitsa.
The elected parliament will be able to meet for the first session no earlier than in one and a half to two weeks, the CEC must officially summarize the voting results and submit the report and all documents related to the election process to the Constitutional Court. The COP will make a decision within ten days from the date of receipt of the documents: to approve their results or not. The first legislative decisions should be expected from the parliament no earlier than August, and it will fully work in the autumn, when the session opens, predicts the third number of the PAS electoral list, Mihai Popshoy.
Igor Dodon, one of the leaders of the bloc of socialists and communists, the main opponent of the PAS in these elections, called on supporters before the voting day to be ready to go out to protest in case of the defeat of the bloc. But the morning after the election, the ex-president of the republic congratulated the competitors on their victory and said that no one should go out on the streets: “People are tired of protests, people are tired of politics, people want concrete results.” Dodon also stated that his party is now going into opposition, adding that ” we did not have such a professional opposition that they [PAS] will have.”
The bloc of Socialists and Communists won 32 seats in the parliament, the party of “Shor” of businessman Ilan Shor, who fled the country,won six seats,other political forces did not enter the parliament.
PAS Reform Program
Founded by the current President of Moldova, Maia Sandu, PAS is a pro-European party, one of its main priorities is rapprochement with the European Union. However, during the parliamentary campaign, the party devoted most of its time to social issues and issues of public support.
“European integration is one of the five key points of our program. This is our strategic vector. The fight against corruption and European integration together— not necessarily in this order— is our political DNA,— says Popshoy. According to him, during the election campaign, the European vector was not articulated, because “everyone already perceives us as a pro-European party”.
PAS expects that the European Union will help the country to carry out all the necessary reforms, including judicial and prosecutor’s offices. A month ago, the European Commission approved a 600 million euro assistance plan to help Chisinau overcome the financial crisis and implement an ambitious reform program, Ursula von der Leinen, the head of the EU executive body, explained at the time.
According to the opinion poll “Barometer of Public Opinion” conducted before the elections, in a hypothetical referendum, 56.8% of Moldovans voted for joining the EU, 27.9% for joining the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The rest either found it difficult to answer, or did not want to participate in such a vote. PAS wants to bring the number of supporters of European integration to 70%, one of the interlocutors in the party told RBC.
Popshoy is sure that against the background of the “tug of war between the West and the East”, representatives of the former leadership for a long time thought only about their own selfish interests. “In this tug-of-war, they managed to interrupt the anti-corruption agenda with a geopolitical one. But people are tired of it, ” he adds.
Now the PAS has a comfortable majority, the politician continues. “There are several fundamental proposals to change the Constitution,” it is necessary to change what concerns the removal of immunity for corruption crimes. And, for example, to simplify the confiscation of illegally acquired property. There is also a more comprehensive reform of justice and many more things, ” he lists what PAS will need two-thirds in parliament for. “And I don’t think the opposition won’t vote for it,” he added.
One of the traditional controversial issues for Moldova is the issue of relations with neighboring Romania. According to Popshoy, PAS cannot have an official position on the issue of unification of the two countries. “We [in the party] have both those who are for it, and those who are skeptical about this idea. And this is normal. We got 53% of the vote & mdash; if we were a unionist party, we could not get such support»,— he says.
Supporters of unification with Romania— the Alliance for the Unification of Romanians and the National Unity Party & mdash; received less than 2% of the votes in this election.
Reasons for the defeat of the left
According to the survey “Public Opinion Barometer”, Moldovans are most concerned about social problems-poverty (57.4% of respondents put it first), high prices (52.6%), the future of children (45.3%), corruption (43.5%) and unemployment (31.2%). Meanwhile, the left in these elections focused on geopolitical issues, accusing Sandu andits problem is that they are not independent and act under the dictation of the West. As a result, the bloc, which was supposed to promote the social agenda, turned out to be on the opposite flank. While Sandu and PAS almost completely refused to declare any geopolitical plans and offered a socially oriented program.
The interlocutor of RBC, close to the PAS headquarters, also called the complete rejection of pre-election debates with socialists and communists, which they sought, the right decision, because they inevitably reduced to disputes about the geopolitical choice of Moldova. As a result, the Socialists and Communists, on the one hand, were unable to mobilize the left-wing electorate, and on the other hand, they did not convince supporters of rapprochement with Russia to vote for them. The results of voting in Pridnestrovie speak eloquently about this: less than 12% of residents of the unrecognized republic came to the polling stations, less than 30 thousand people (62% of them voted for socialists and communists).
It was also important that Sandu reached the elections with the image of a politician intolerant of corruption and an unblemished reputation, in comparison with Dodon. And the latter was not helped even by the fact that the bloc put the leader of the Communist Party, Vladimir Voronin, as the first number of the list.
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