The previous “Moldovan parliamentary elections”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_parliamentary_election,_April_2009 – held in April of this year – attracted quite a bit of attention in the “blogosphere”:http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2009/04/twitter_revolution_social_netw.html (including on “The Monkey Cage”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/04/the_twitter_revolution.html) because of the use of Twitter by protestors following the election. As it turns out, Moldovans “returned to the polls”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/world/europe/30moldova.html this Wednesday for another parliamentary election. I asked “Grigore Pop-Eleches”:www.princeton.edu/~gpop/ of Princeton University for his thoughts on the election, and he provided the following guest post. (Those interested in the implications of the election for the political science literature are encouraged to continuing reading to the last paragraph…)
On Wednesday, July 29th, Moldovan voters went to the polls for the second parliamentary elections in less than four months. The sequel to the April “Twitter Revolution” was widely greeted as a “loss for the Communist Party”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/world/europe/31moldova.html?scp=2&sq=moldova&st=cse, which lost its absolute parliamentary majority for the first time since its resounding victory in 2001 (when Moldova became the first East European country to return unreformed Communists to power via free elections). While the Communists indeed experienced a noticeable decline in vote share (from 49.5% in April to 44.75% in July), and an even greater proportional loss of parliamentary seats (from 60 to 48 in Moldova’s 101-member parliament), the results cannot be interpreted as a resounding victory for the anti-communist opposition and the aims of the Twitter Revolution. Thus, the combined seat share for the three main anti-communist parties – the Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova (PLDM), the Liberal Party (PL) and the Alliance “Our Moldova” (AMN) – actually shrank from 41 in April to 40 in the new parliament despite a slight increase in vote share between the two elections, which suggests that Moldovan voters did not simply reorient towards the pro-Western and pro-reform part of the political party spectrum.
Instead, the great winner of the July elections was the center-left Democratic Party of Moldova (PDM), which claimed 13 seats on a 12.6% vote share in Wednesday’s elections compared to a meager 3% of votes and no seats in April. The reason for this dramatic reversal of fortunes for the PDM was its new leader, Marian Lupu, who had served as Speaker of the Parliament on behalf of the Communist Party from 2005-2009 after a previous stint as Minister of the Economy from 2003-2005. Lupu had been re-elected to Parliament on the PCRM list in April but eventually decided to leave the party (amid rumors about a personal conflict with Vladimir Voronin, the outgoing Communist president) and after a few days of negotiations with several other parties, decided to accept the offer to become the new leader of PDM. While this move has certainly revived the moribund PDM, it is less clear whether Lupu was wise in associating with the PDM label. Thus, according to a survey Lucan Way and I ran before and after the April 2009 elections, Lupu was the most popular Moldovan politician (after the outgoing President Voronin), whereas both the PDM and its previous leader, Dumitru Diacov were towards the bottom of voter preferences. Lupu would have probably done better if he had created his own party instead of joining the PDM – such newly created personalist parties did very well in a number of elections including Bulgaria in 2001 and Latvia in 2002 – but he would have probably had too little time to register such a party in time for the July elections.
Either way, the PDM ran successfully as a centrist alternative to the bitter polarization between the Communists and the three center-right challengers, and in doing so probably attracted not only a number of former communist voters but also many of the fairly large bloc of undecided voters. (However, for definitive evidence we need to wait for the results of our final survey wave, which is supposed to go into the field within the next two weeks). Even more importantly, this positioning leaves the PDM as the only credible coalition partner for both camps and makes Lupu a de facto kingmaker despite the relatively small share of seats controlled by the PDM. So far, Lupu has indicated that he would not consider an alliance with the Communists but many on the Moldovan center-right fear that the PDM could once again turn into a Trojan horse and strike a deal with the PCRM. (In 2005 the PDM broke ranks with the opposition and supported Vladimir Voronin, the PCRM candidate in the 2005 presidential elections.)
Even if the Lupu and the leaders of the three “hard” anti-communist parties manage to set aside their personal rivalries to form a governing alliance in the coming weeks, the odds of longer-term success are pretty long. First, the Moldovan Constitution requires that the President be elected by Parliament with a minimum of 61 of 101 votes, and calls for early elections in the event that two successive rounds fail to produce such a super-majority. This clause was the reason for the current election repeat, since the Communists, who controlled 60 seats after the April elections failed to attract even a single opposition vote for their presidential nominee, and eventually had to call early elections. Unless the former opposition can nominate a compromise candidate who could attract at least eight Communist defectors, the new government could suffer the same fate because even a four-party coalition is several seats short of the required super-majority. Under such circumstances, Moldovans would probably have to go to the polls yet again next year and such an outcome would probably benefit the Communists, because the new governing coalition would have only a few months to deal with the country’s rapidly deteriorating economic situation.
Beyond its implications for the politics of Europe’s poorest country, the recent Moldovan elections give us a few suggestive insights into electoral behavior in fragile post-communist regimes. First, it is worth noting that at 58.8% turnout was roughly 1.5% higher than in April, even there were a number of reasons to expect lower turnout, including election fatigue, the government’s choice to call elections on a weekday (whereas all previous elections were held on the weekend), and possible fears connected to the widespread unrest and government repression after the April elections. Nevertheless, Moldovans turned out to vote in fairly large numbers, perhaps attesting to their recognition of the “high stakes of these elections”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jat7/Pacek_PopEleches_Tucker_Turnout.pdf for their country’s future. Another encouraging sign of voter maturity is the evidence of strategic voting with respect to the 5% electoral threshold: thus, the substantial vote losses of two small centrist parties (PSDM and UCM) and of the center-right PPCD, combined with the vote gains of the centrist PDM and the center-right PL and PLDM suggest that voters switched from parties that had failed to reach the threshold in the April elections towards other parties with similar orientations. (In a few cases, these switches were facilitated by the decisions of small parties to withdraw from the July elections in order to avoid splitting the center-right vote). Of course, the extremely high personalization of Moldovan politics, where the fortunes of most parties (with the notable exception of the Communists) rise and fall with the popularity of their leaders, suggests that Moldova is still very far away from stable programmatic party competition. But the responsibility for these shortcomings arguably lies primarily with political elites, who have yet to compete on the basis of coherent party platforms rather than their leaders’ personalities.