Moldova Government and Politics

State and politics

Reference: Moldova Flag Meaning

GOVERNMENT

According to AllCityCodes.com, the first constitution of sovereign Moldova was adopted in 1994, two and a half years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Also see AbbreviationFinder for abbreviation of MD and its meanings of Moldova. Parliament has a chamber of 101 members elected in four years. The president is also elected by universal suffrage for a term of four years and can be re-elected at most once.

In 2000, the scheme was changed so that the president was elected by a qualified majority in Parliament. However, since the Communists lost their majority position in the Legislative Assembly in 2009, the MPs failed to agree on any candidate for the presidential post. Following a series of provisional solutions, the Constitutional Court in 2016 overturned the parliamentary decision of 2000, on the grounds that a law that cannot be enforced violates the Constitution. Therefore, since the end of 2016, the presidents are re-elected by universal suffrage.

Since the early 1990s, the government has no control over the Transnistrian region. However, it is possible with some restrictions to travel across the border, and Moldova grants accommodation in Transnistria foreign passport, voting rights and benefits such as health care. Since 2005, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has, until now, been unsuccessful, leading negotiations aimed at creating a union between Transnistria and the rest of Moldova.

Policy

In the first parliamentary elections in 1994, more than half of the electorate cast their vote on the new farmer’s party because many owned or worked in agriculture and food businesses. About a quarter voted Socialist and the rest voted Liberals or Christian Democrats.

A catastrophic economic development led to a radical overhaul of the political map in the following elections. The largest opposition party became the new Communist Party. This was largely due to the fact that party leader Vladimir Voronin (born 1941) made himself popular as the Republic’s interior minister during the last turbulent years of Soviet rule when he unwittingly resorted to violence. By the time the country ran for election for the third time in 2001, corruption in most other parties had become so evident that Voronin’s Communist Party won a landslide victory.

However, support for communists declined in the following years. One of many reasons was that Vladimir Voronin’s son Oleg Voronin (born 1962) was one of the businessmen who greatly increased his wealth during his father’s time in power. Another was Vladimir Plahotniuc (born in 1966) who, after becoming a billionaire, came to emerge as the country’s most influential politician.

The April 2009 parliamentary elections, when the communists were still receiving half of the vote, triggered violent street protests in which four protesters lost their lives. After the newly elected parliament failed to agree on a candidate for the presidential post, another parliamentary election was held in July which led to a change of government.

The new coalition government, which established itself as the “European Alliance Alliance”, was dominated by two parties. One was the Liberal Democratic Party under the leadership of billionaire Vlad Filat (born 1969), who in the late 1990s was the Director-General of the former state property authority. The second was the Democratic Party, whose chairman Marian Lupu (born 1966) was previously one of the Communist Party’s strongest profiles. Filat became prime minister and shortly thereafter, Vladimir Plahotniuc was appointed deputy chairman of the Democratic Party and first vice president.

Filat and Plahotniuc used their items in a battle for each other’s economic revival, which in 2012 led to a government crisis that paralyzed the country for almost a year. Both resigned from their posts in the state but continued to control their parties. As the high-level corruption thus once again came into the spotlight, the “European integration alliance” also lost its popularity. Admittedly, it managed to retain government power after the 2014 parliamentary elections, but only after a couple of administrative interventions in the government’s favor; among other things, a fictional communist party that copied the logo of the real communist party managed to put up, even though a court banned plagiarism. The fake party won five percent of the votes that would probably have gone to the Communists.

In the spring of 2015, information on a bank fraud was published which, according to voter surveys, definitively swept away support for the “European integration alliance”. For three years up to 2014, the equivalent of one billion US dollars or twelve percent of Moldova’s GDP had been transferred to three banks, where the financier Ilan Shor (1987) with close relations with Vladimir Plahotniuc held a key position. The money was diverted to foreign accounts. In June 2016, Vlad Filat was sentenced to nine years in prison for corruption in connection with the embezzlement. Shor was released on his own footing and was elected mayor, but has occasionally been given the job during house arrest while the investigation is ongoing.

Against this backdrop, the three leading parties of the 2010 century, the Communists, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party, abstained from nominating candidates for the presidential election, which was conducted in two rounds in October and November 2016.

In the decisive round, Igor Dodon, leader of a party that broke out of the Communist Party, won 52 percent of the vote. His counterpart, Maia Sandu (born 1972), formerly belonged to the Liberal Democratic Party but received support from civil society after demanding the resignation of both the Governor and the Prosecutor General. In the parliamentary vacuum that has emerged, Vladimir Plahotniuc has remained an important player and was received at official level in the United States in 2016 at the same time as he, via agent, held talks with official representatives of the Russian Federation.

International cooperation

Moldova was one of the founders of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in December 1991, but is not part of the CIS-based Collective Security Agreement.

In June 2014, the country signed an association agreement with the EU, which also abolished the visa requirement for Moldovan citizens in the same year. Moldova has been cooperating with NATO since 2006 in the framework of an Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP). Moldova is also one of the initiators of GUAM (1997).

Judiciary

Despite independence gained, Moldova continues to make use of laws from the Soviet era in the absence of other alternatives. However, radical legal reforms in the market economy direction are being implemented. The death penalty was abolished in 1995.

Heads of State