Eurasia Press & News
Moldovans were voting in parliamentary elections with the dominant Communists, who tread a fine line between promoting EU integration and friendly ties with Moscow, tipped to win.
The party, the first self-described Communist group to have won power in the former Soviet Union, is well ahead in opinion polls for the new parliament, which will choose a successor to outgoing President Vladimir Voronin.
Some 2.4 million voters are eligible to cast ballots at 2,020 polling stations until 1800 GMT to elect 101 members of parliament.
The country of 4.3 million people wedged between Ukraine and Romania is the poorest in Europe measured by per capita income and is heavily dependent on the remittances of its citizens working abroad, a quarter of its active population.
The Moldovan Communist Party (PCRM) is promising stability amid the global economic crisis but has also been criticised by observers for using its control of state airwaves to promote itself at the expense of the opposition.
Playing on the eight-year rule of Voronin, the country’s Communist president, one of the party’s slogan says “Vote for Stability.”
Another pledges “We Will Construct a European Moldova Together.”
According to pre-vote opinion polls, the PCRM has over 36.2 percent of the vote, well ahead of the opposition Liberal Democrats (8.3 percent), the Liberal Party (8.2 percent) and Our Moldova (5.4 percent).
The liberal opposition could be ready to form a coalition and along with the Communists could be the only faction to win the minimum six percent required to win parliamentary seats.
If the Communists do not win an outright majority of 52 seats, they will have to form a coalition with one of the smaller parties.
Voronin, a local Communist Party official under Soviet rule, has almost served out the maximum two terms allowed by the constitution and the new parliament will have to choose a new president between April 8 and June 8.
He has employed a so-called “multi-vector” foreign policy which has seen Moldova increase cooperation with the European Union while still maintaining strong ties with Moscow.
The richly fertile country, which remains predominantly agricultural, has few natural resources of its own and is entirely dependent on foreign exporters, especially Russia, for its energy supplies.
Moldova — part of Romania in the interwar-period before being annexed by the Soviet Union in World War II — won its independence in 1991 but the government still does not control the self-declared republic of Transdniestr.
This sliver of land between the Dniestr River and Ukraine broke free of Chisinau after a brief civil war in the early 1990s but its pro-Russian separatist government is not recognised internationally.
Some 3,000 domestic and foreign observers were deployed to monitor the vote, including more than 200 from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which expressed some concerns about the campaign.
