Moldovan elections

Moldova's elections

In the balance
Aug 6th 2009 | CHISINAU
From The Economist print edition


The ruling Communists narrowly lose an almost-fair election
ALREADY the poorest country in Europe, Moldova has lately been doubly cursed by its politics. Protests after a parliamentary election on April 5th turned violent and led to three dead and hundreds detained in beastly conditions. Blame for that is still unclear: the authorities say that they were fighting off hooligans; protesters say that provocateurs hijacked their peaceful demonstrations against election rigging.

A mixture of international pressure, domestic discontent and a deadlocked result led to a rerun last week. Despite renewed claims of ballot-rigging the ruling Communists did worse than last time, with only 45% of the votes and 48 places in the 101-member parliament, a loss of 12 seats. The Democratic Party of Marian Lupu, a former senior Communist who split with the party after the April troubles, now holds the balance of power, with 13 seats. He could put the Communists back in power, or govern in coalition with three former opposition parties. They are a fractious lot, including some who want to reunite Moldova with Romania (to which it belonged in the pre-communist era) and others lobbying for business interests.


The immediate issue is who should replace the country’s serving president, Vladimir Voronin. He masterminded the Communist Party’s return to power in 2001. His second (and constitutionally final) term expired in April. The professorial, polyglot Mr Lupu would certainly raise Moldova’s international profile (it could hardly be lower). But some in the anti-Communist camp doubt his credentials.

Beyond that comes the task of kick-starting overdue reforms. Moldova’s wobbles between East and West have left it isolated and neglected. Mr Voronin has veered heavily towards the Kremlin in the hope of settling the frozen conflict with Transdniestria, a breakaway region backed by Russia. Despite yielding on issues such as the status of Russian military forces there, his soft line has brought no results.

The biggest boost to reunification would be economic and political success in the rest of Moldova. But Mr Voronin’s crony-capitalist approach has kept the economy backward. The machinery of government is stuck in the 1990s. Relations with Romania, which should be Moldova’s main advocate in the European Union, are astonishingly bad. Whatever coalition emerges, the new government will have plenty to deal with.

Moldova pre-election (Europe View)

Wooing wrong
Jul 30th 2009
From Economist.com


The tough sell of soft power
FOREIGNERS visiting Moldova have plenty of people to talk to. Poverty and geopolitical woes mean that the country attracts an above-average bunch of outsiders. But local voices are even more impressive. One of them is Natalia Morar, a feisty 25-year-old investigative journalist. Finding Ms Morar at home in Moldova used to be rather difficult—she worked as an investigative reporter for New Times, an independent magazine based in Moscow. But in late 2007 she published an article called “The black cash of the Kremlin” about the way in which rake-offs from business were used to finance Russian politics. For that she was expelled from Russia (and even marrying a Russian colleague has been not enough to get her back into that country).

Now Ms Morar is in trouble in Moldova too. She was charged with sedition after the protests in April against election-rigging. Since then she has been unable to leave the country. That makes it easy to meet Ms Morar to discuss both authoritarian crony capitalism in Russia and its more diluted but still unpleasant local equivalent.

It is harder to meet another luminary of Chisinau life: Alex Grigorievs. A Latvian-born veteran of that country’s independence struggle, he runs the National Democratic Institute, an American-funded think-tank that has been trying to help Moldova’s fractious politicians to work together better—“coalition-building”, in NGO speak. That has gone down poorly with the authorities: Mr Grigorievs has been hounded out of the country and is now based in Odessa, in neighbouring Ukraine.

Other countries that are supposedly getting closer to the European Union have similar stories. In Belarus, the authorities are hassling an independent protestant church, New Life, (which just happens to be popular with the country’s downtrodden Roma minority). In Azerbaijan, two hapless bloggers have been jailed for producing an amusing and harmless video sketch in which a donkey holds a news conference in front of a respectful audience of journalists (any resemblance to the country’s politicians and their relationship with the pliant local media is entirely coincidental). And in Georgia Vasili Sulkhanishvili, the director of a London-based asset-management company, has been arrested and placed in solitary confinement until he pays $1m to settle a dispute about back taxes (there are doubtless two sides to the issue, but the story so far supports those who believe that the bad old ways of doing business in Georgia are not yet extinct).

An alarming aspect of all this is that western protests have been so minimal. The American embassy in Moldova, for example, has not exactly championed Mr Grigorievs’ case. Nor has anyone much been sticking up for Ms Morar. An official invitation to Brussels, Berlin or London, say, would signal opposition to the way she has been treated. It is the same story in Azerbaijan (where the West worries about pipelines, not bloggers) and in Belarus, where the regime’s relations with Moscow are pleasingly icy.

The assumption seems to be that by overlooking abuses of power, the West can persuade the rulers of the countries in Russia’s shadow to loosen their ties with the Kremlin. If so, that is a disastrous mistake. Geopolitical armwrestling favours the more ruthless partner: Europe will never beat the Kremlin there. The long-term hope for expanding the EU eastwards lies in its soft power: the idea that political freedom, the rule of law and an open economy work, whereas protectionism and cronyism do not. If the West doesn’t believe that, and promote it, why should anyone else?

Europe view on Left/Right

Europe.view

Who's left? Who's right?
Apr 23rd 2009
From Economist.com


The enduring uselessness of traditional political labels

THE terms “left” and “right” and right don’t mean much in politics anymore and in the ex-communist world they are particularly confusing. Last week’s report in The Economist on Moldova described that country’s ruling Communists as a “centre-right” party, which attracted some sharp feedback. At first sight the idea of centre-right communists sounds as odd as “moderate Trotskyites” or “secular jihadists”. But most other conventional labels would fit the ruling crowd in Moldova worse.

The lamentably crude but sometimes convenient conventional political spectrum counts “left” (or sometimes “liberal”) as egalitarian, and thus sceptical of bankers and rich people, pro-social spending, pro-gay and dovish in foreign policy. “Right” (or sometimes “conservative” is pro-business, pro-family, and patriotically hawkish on defence and foreign affairs. That misses out whole chunks of the political debate. Are civil liberties a “left” or “right” issue? Cynics would say that it depends who’s in jail: Nelson Mandela drew most (but not all) of his support from one crowd, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from another.

The extremes still hold. It remains a safe assumption that ultra-leftists will sport the tattered remains of communist iconography (hammers, sickles, stars, AK-47s and the like). They will have complicated but enthusiastic views about Marxism and will hate everything America stands for. At the other extreme, ultra-rightists usually nurse sympathies for the Third Reich, hate Jews and most foreigners and want to restore their nation’s past glories. Both lots of extremists are riddled with squabbles and attract loonies.



The problem comes as you get closer to the middle. The political arguments in post-communist countries are not easily reducible into the classic left-right split. What do you call a party such as Vladimir Putin’s United Russia? In one sense it is profoundly conservative, in that it reveres the Orthodox church, dislikes public protest and hits every patriotic button in sight. But it has spawned a monstrous, predatory state bureaucracy and also shows a sweeping contempt for the rule of law. That is reminiscent of previous Kremlin tenants, one of whom, the arch Bolshevik and priest-murderer Vladimir Lenin, remains unburied on Red Square. Contemporary Russian history books even sanitise the Stalin legacy.

Similarly, the Moldovan Communists support business (particularly bits that benefit them) and have dumped Marx. They are keen on a strong Moldovan national identity (arguably another “conservative” point), and they certainly don’t want redistribution of wealth.

The ex-communist countries seem to need a different political grid, perhaps with multiple axes, rather than just the single one running from left to right. One axis on this grid would show whether the party defends or wants to change the status quo. Most Estonian political groupings are status-quo parties, for example. The Moldovan parties that want reunion with Romania clearly are not.

A second would concern rejection or nostalgia about the communist past. At one extreme would be, say Poland’s Law and Justice party, which affects to regard everything in and about the People’s Republic as a complete and utter sham (though this does not, it seems, include the academic qualifications that its leading members gained under that regime). Against that are parties that think that not everything that happened before 1989 was worthless. Hungary’s Socialists are a moderate example of that, the ruling party in Belarus a more extreme one.

A third axis would show corruption at one end and public-spiritedness at the other. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian scholar at the Hertie School in Berlin, compares parties in the eastern part of the region to medieval armies that “support themselves by plunder” by capturing state resources.

With five notches on each axis that makes 125 possible combinations. One of them should fit the Moldovan Communists.

Moldova/Georgia

Protests in Moldova and Georgia

Street scenes
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition


Moldova’s crackdown, like Georgia’s standoff, leaves protesters fuming

IDEALISTIC youngsters demanding their country’s faster integration with Europe were a rarity even before the Moldovan authorities beat and jailed hundreds, and killed two, after a spree of protests against electoral fraud. But the limp European Union reaction to the crackdown will not encourage others to follow in their footsteps.

Few emerge with credit from the protests. Some participants rioted, storming and burning public buildings. The opposition parties loosely linked to the protesters are a lightweight lot with some questionable leaders. What unites them is anger over alleged ballot-rigging in the April 5th parliamentary election. The ruling Communists (in reality, a centre-right party) would probably have won even without bullying their rivals, skewing media coverage and inflating voter lists. With half the vote, they took 60 of the 101 seats in the unicameral parliament. This week, the government began an election recount.




Although the government consists mainly of competent technocrats, the crisis has shown that real power lies with President Vladimir Voronin, who is due to step down soon, and his cronies. The official reaction was striking, both in its brutality and in the contempt it showed for the EU, a large donor to Moldova, Europe’s poorest country. The authorities barred Western diplomats from visiting detainees. A limited UN-led investigation of 90 people in one jail found evidence of severe beatings and “inhuman” conditions. The corpse of Valeriu Boboc, a 23-year-old protester, was returned to his parents covered in bruises; the authorities say he was poisoned. A Moldovan journalist, Natalia Morar, is under house arrest. Amnesty International is championing her cause.

On April 15th Mr Voronin called unconvincingly for an amnesty for the protesters. In fact he blames foreigners, particularly Romania, which before the war included most of present-day Moldova. A vocal minority in Moldova wants reunification, partly for nationalist reasons and partly to speed up progress towards entry into the EU. The Romanian president, Traian Basescu, has ordered an acceleration in the issue of passports to Moldovans. The mutual hatred between him and Mr Voronin (who sees dual citizenship with Romania as treason) is intense. Moldova has brought in visas for Romanians, expelled the Romanian ambassador and stopped Romanian journalists entering the country. The (Latvian-born) director of the National Democratic Institute, an American outfit, faces deportation.

The EU is quietly trying to act as an intermediary, but some diplomats say its intervention could make things worse. Russia is dangling a deal over Moldova’s most industrialised region, Transdniestria, whose separatist regime it sponsors. This is meant to encourage Mr Voronin to lean east. Against this background, Moldova’s pro-Western camp finds the EU’s reaction to the attack on the protesters spineless.

The feeble international response to the behaviour of the Moldovan authorities contrasts with events in another ex-Soviet republic, Georgia. Opposition demonstrators there have been demanding the resignation of President Mikheil Saakashvili. Having blundered in a heavy-handed crackdown against similar protests in November 2007, the Georgians handled this week’s demonstrations with punctilious attention to outside opinion. That cuts little ice with the opposition, which believes that Mr Saakashvili is authoritarian, nepotistic and incompetent. The main evidence for this last charge is his disastrous war with Russia last summer. But by ex-Soviet standards, Georgia’s economy is strong and its political system free and open.

The Georgian opposition has several heavyweight ex-allies of Mr Saakashvili. They include a former speaker of parliament, Nino Burjanadze, a former foreign minister, Salome Zourabichvili, and a former ambassador to the United Nations, Irakli Alasania. Even if they squabble, that is a galaxy of talent compared with Moldova. Many of Georgia’s foreign well-wishers are fed up with the erratic behaviour of the president. But for now at least most Georgians prefer imperfect stability to revolutionary upheaval.

Moldova latest from Economist website

Protests in Moldova

Moldova burning

Apr 8th 2009
From Economist.com

Violent protests erupt against the government of Moldova

THE poorest country in Europe is used to being neglected by the rest of the world. But protests against vote rigging in elections held on Sunday April 5th brought Moldova some attention this week. In the past few days youthful demonstrators, who were organised via Twitter and other social-networking sites, stormed parliament and the presidential offices in the capital city, Chisinau. Some threw rocks, broke windows and started fires. As the police belatedly tried to restore order, scores were injured and one person died. Nearly 200 people had been arrested by Wednesday. Amid allegations of foreign mischief-making, Moldova expelled the Romanian ambassador.

The immediate issue is the election result, in which the ruling Communists won a majority in the single-chamber parliament. The election was declared fair by outside monitors, who assessed what happened on the day, but the composition of electoral registers looks dodgy, as does the overwhelming support that the Communists enjoyed from the main media.

The protesters are loosely tied to established opposition parties. They are cross about the election and even more annoyed by the outgoing president, Vladimir Voronin. Mr Voronin has stated that, although he would step down in accordance with the constitution’s term limit, he would stay in politics as a “Moldovan Deng Xiaoping”. That seemed to suggest no change from the economic and strategic failures of the past two decades, which have seen Moldova’s 4m population languish in a geopolitical limbo between Russia and the European Union. Most Moldovans favour Europe but the political elite, mainly Soviet-trained and Russian-speaking, has found it hard to break old ties and habits.

Mr Voronin has wobbled in both directions. Of late he has seemed to favour ties with Moscow, chiefly because a deal with the Kremlin seems to offer the only hope of solving the frozen conflict with the self-declared state of Transdniestria. This densely populated and industrialised sliver of land on the eastern bank of the Dniester river has maintained an unrecognised independence since a brief civil war that finished with Russian intervention in 1992. Western attempts to resolve that debilitating impasse have got nowhere, whereas Russia has kept up a stream of initiatives.

With decent leadership and goodwill on all sides, it would be possible to have friendly relations with both Russia and the EU. But Moldova’s leaders have ended up with the worst of both worlds, ignored by the EU and bamboozled by Russia.

The most divisive question is relations with Romania. The Moldovan Soviet republic, which gained independence in 1991, was carved out of pre-war Romania in 1940, as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin pact; Transdniestria, always in Russian hands, was bolted on. Nico Popescu, of the European Council of Foreign Relations, says that demands for closer ties with Romania have strengthened in recent years, as that country’s EU membership has contrasted ever more sharply with Moldova’s status as a “semi-failed state”. As well as EU flags, some protesters this week carried Romanian ones.

That has infuriated the Moldovan authorities. They find it much easier to fight the bogeyman of Romanian revanchism and chauvinism than defend their own dismal record in office. Andrei Popov, of the Foreign Policy Association, a Moldova-based think-tank, believes that the authorities may even be exaggerating the pro-Romanian element in the protests in order to discredit the opposition’s wider political demands.

There is little evidence that Romania has made a big effort to undermine Moldova. Romanian politicians, notably the president, Traian Basescu, have made grandiloquent and tactless statements. The mutual detestation between him and Mr Voronin is legendary. One practical Romanian policy has proved controversial: allowing Moldovans with roots in the pre-war Romanian state to apply for passports.

The political upheavals cry out for attention from the EU, which has failed to get to grips with Moldova’s ills. As with Ukraine’s orange revolution five years ago, it may take a heavyweight outsider to get talks going between entrenched but discredited authorities and an enthusiastic but incoherent opposition. If Europe cannot solve Moldova’s problems, it is hard to see much future for the trumpeted “Eastern Partnership” which is meant to reinvigorate EU policies towards the six ex-Soviet countries on its eastern borders.