Moldovan communists remain without wanted Parliament majority even after vote recounting
The results of the repeated vote recounting in the Republic of Moldova bring no major modification to the percentage obtained by the communist left with 60 mandates, one below the needed number to have the wanted majority, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) announced.
The Parliament will start the 17th legislature with four political parties after the April 5 elections. The Communists Party won 49.48 percent of ballots, the Liberal Party 13.13 percent, the Liberal Democrat Party gained 12.43 percent and the Alliance Our Moldova 9.77 percent.
By the algorithm of mandate distributing, the Parliament will be made up 60 Communist seats, 15 for Liberals and another 15 for Liberal Democrats and 11 for the alliance.
Had the Communists Party obtained 61 seats in Parliament it could have imposed the wanted person to the presidential seat. The incumbent president Vladimir Voronin was elected in 2001 but cannot run for a new mandate. So far the communists failed to announce who is the candidate they will support for the top position.
All in all, the only change after the vote recounting is a 0.01 percent drop of ballots obtained by Liberals.
The other political parties and independent candidates failed to reach the electoral threshold of 6 percent needed to become a member of the Parliament. Five independent candidates and 12 political parties ran in the April 5 elections.
The vote recounting was required by the president as a concession to the opposition parties which contested the fairness of the vote. Yet, the secretary of the electoral commission, Iurie Ciocan, told Radio Free Europe that the communists needed an extra 240 votes to get the 61 desired mandates in Parliament.
The past weeks thousands of people protested in the Moldovan capital against the results of the elections they labeled as “fraud” and broke into the Parliament building. Authorities arrested hundreds of them and took radical measures against foreign journalists in Moldova, banning them from country. Moldovans complained the police were too aggressive and beat the arrested people.
Weeks before the elections took place hundreds of Romanians were stopped at the border with the neighbor country under different pretexts, the most absurd being the lack of papers to prove HIV negative. The Republic of Moldova has the highest number of HIV positive people in Europe.
Romania’s relationship with its neighbor whose majority population is Romanian has been tensed recently. In the past years, relationships have had a seesawing evolution, going from friendly drinks the two chief of states had, to allegations Romania wants back the Moldovan territory.