Parties-Phantoms, Parties - State Institutions, Parties - State Enterprises

20 parties have registered in the current election campaign. Many people say it is a too big number for such a small country as Moldova. At the same time, much more parties could take part in the election campaign.

Activists launch Moldova’s first ‘Space Camp’ © Susan Coughtrie

The Elections: False Hopes

Headlines

• "Moldova Azi" information portal is changing its format and editorial content, Centrul pentru Jurnalism Independent, 8 August 2011, 15:19
• Moldovan students queue up to apply for scholarships in Romania, Info-Prim Neo, 4 August 2011, 13:44
• Ukrainian scholarships not very popular in Moldova, Info-Prim Neo, 2 August 2011, 14:58
• Kent Larson: USAID will always support process of Moldova democratization, INFOTAG, 1 August 2011, 13:42
• Parliament sets up new commission - for checking civil servants' property and incomes, INFOTAG, 29 July 2011, 9:00
• Scandal in Moldovan parliament over deputies' relatives, INFOTAG, 29 July 2011, 9:00

Larger text

Elections have long become the key element in the efforts of the West to spread democracy in the world. The West keeps viewing elections as a component test to measure democratic development in a particular country. And this opinion has not changed despite the disappointing results of significant investments in liberalization of former Soviet republics. As now all of them, except for Baltic States, are severely affected by corruption and authoritarianism.

The West will have another opportunity to test the effectiveness of such an approach soon, as important elections in national Parliaments are going to take place this spring in Moldova and possibly in Ukraine.

 Liberal Failure

This election-based approach might have been appropriate after the collapse of the USSR, when it was of paramount importance not to let communists come back to power and to contribute to pluralism development. At the beginning, they hoped that such measures would strengthen the real political competition in an environment where it was impermissible for a single political force to get the power monopoly. In spite of that, already in the late 90s of the last century a famous politician, Harvard graduate Fareed Zakaria, later the editor of Newsweek International, pointed to violations of the rights and freedoms of citizens, as well as legal limitations of power on the part of the democratically elected governments of transitional states.

 Although it seemed that the alarming tendency had been prevented in some of the former Soviet republics. The wave of "colored revolutions" that started in Georgia in 2003 and continued in Ukraine in 2004 and in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 looked like a ray of hope. In those cases, massive street protests complete with the pressure from the West as a result of contested elections lead to the end of authoritarian power. But the exaltation of democratic achievements did not last long. The new regimes gradually started behaving just like their predecessors, or could not always bring positive change.

No wonder. Such a result has been rather predictable, since any unlimited power is predisposed to establishment of hegemony. Given lack of institutional restraints, counterbalance, supremacy of law, free press and strong civil society, there are no other mechanisms to restrain the newly elected leaders from abuse of power. After all, it is the above-mentioned elements that make the essence of and lay the basis for the democratic process, while elections are only the highest expression of the latter.

Playing by Flexible Rules

When such basis is unstable and doubtful, the resulted elections turn out to be the same. Appreciating the level of democracy in the post-Soviet space just through the prism of elections will put the West in a jam. And this mainly due to the fact that the election observing organizations have not yet developed an efficient methodology that could detect those subtle tricks played by the authorities to influence the results of elections.

If compared with the first years after the collapse of the USSR, the governments of post-Soviet countries have learnt to manipulate the election process artfully. They use several approaches in that sense, including the principle of sovereignty, the rivalry between the West and East, as well as gaps and imperfections of international election observation methodology.

The whip of sovereignty has been successfully applied against the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which is the most authoritative and trustworthy election observation organization in the region. After the "orange revolution" in Ukraine, Moscow used the pretext of national sovereignty to request lesser involvement and initiative on the part of ODIHR. Russia used the argument that a division of an organization carrying out its activity based on the principle of political consensus cannot have the observation role over the member-states of the organization. In 2005, Russia blocked the OSCE budget for several months putting forward limitation of the ODIHR's activity as the condition for de-blocking. In December of the same year, during the OSCE Ministerial Council in Ljubljana, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, came down hard on the Office with criticism. He declared that "the autonomy of ODIHR has grown into lack of control, and normal governments could not put up with it." One of the key demands of Russia was to forbid the ODIHR election observation mission to issue widely covered by press preliminary reports on the fairness of elections immediately after the closing of polling stations.

After Russia had repeatedly accused the Office of attempts to change the regime in post-Soviet countries, ODIHR seemed to decide "to step back in the shadow" out of harm's way. As a result, their preliminary reports on the elections in Moldova and Kazakhstan in 2007 and after the voting in Armenia and Azerbaijan this year were drawn up based on the sandwich principle. The report first gave a positive description of the visible organizational part of elections using standard or sophisticated phrases like "significant progress", "good organization", "peacefully", and "the authorities have made an effort". Further, there followed description of serious violations of the essence of elections that were still put mildly using euphemisms like "certain standards have not been achieved" and "they have failed to comply with the principles of democratic elections fully", although such diplomatic jargon was not quite suitable for the context of such technical expert documents as ODIHR reports. But this is the very result of the efforts of Russia to discompose the election observation practice of the OSCE, imposing self-censorship on the Office.

 
The growing tension between the West and Russia that is becoming more and more aggressive expands the possibility of post-Soviet states to make use of the geo-political map. Quite recently, the European Union has agreed to start negotiations of new partnership with Moldova on the condition that Chisinau government carries out free and fair elections next spring. In spite of that, the war in the Caucasus might have made the EU to take a milder attitude towards Moldova, the country embraced by the Transnistrian conflict fed by Russia. Kalman Mizsei, EU Special Representative for Moldova, has declared with reference to the geopolitical importance of Moldova for the European Union that negotiations of the new partnership with Chisinau may start even before the elections.

There are quite clear signals indicating that this step is perceived by the ruling Party of Communists of Moldova as kind of an indulgence and approval of their policy. The president of the country and at the same time the leader of Moldovan communists, Vladimir Voronin, went further and confessed in a TV interview that he had chosen a successor already. The confidence of the president rests on the experience of Kazakhstan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, where geopolitical considerations have made the West take a milder attitude despite election manipulation in those countries.

Outdated Methods

But even if the European Union decides to be scrupulous with regard to the quality of the forthcoming elections, there is another big problem. The methodology of election observation developed ten years ago and used by the ODIHR to evaluate elections is aimed at determining their compliance with the requirements of the Copenhagen Document dated 1990. According to this document, democratic elections have to be universal, equal, fair, secret, free, transparent, and accountable. But the existing approach leaves a number of loopholes - defects that are artfully made use of by the "political technologies" developed recently in the post-Soviet countries. According to Andrew Wilson, Senior Policy Fellow at the ECFR, election observers pay more attention to procedural violations and are less capable of detecting abuses of the political process. However, namely such manipulations of the political process can radically change the results of elections.

Indeed, now election experts have started admitting that there are certain unsettled difficulties in the process of qualitative analysis of the effect made on the results of elections by such violations as pressure on the electorate and the opposition, use of administrative resources, and dominating control of the ruling party over the media. Having no possibility to present these manipulations in backed-up figures, observers cannot officially declare that such violations have a determining influence on the results of elections, for instance, when administrative resources are used to exploit Soviet mass political culture characteristic of the post-Soviet space. In spite of that, researchers insist that ruling parties have predominantly 5 to 30 per cent of votes yet prior to the beginning of the voting procedure that they win only by using this administrative resource that has been confirmed by elections in before-orange Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Russia.

For instance, at the last presidential elections in Russia they reported the facts of employers related to state structures obligating their voting employees to use their mobile phones to take pictures of their ballot papers to prove that they had made the "right" choice. There were materials claiming that such practice took place at the elections of the Mayor of Kyiv in 2008. At the local elections in Moldova in 2007 and at the parliament elections in Georgia in 2008, according to the existing reports, the electorate and the opposition were threatened that they would loose their jobs or even physically assaulted if they did not agree to vote for or join the ruling party.

At the same time, the ruling parties of those countries like boasting of their thorough organization of elections, by which they destruct the attention of observers from electoral violations and manipulations. They also put forward the principle of sovereignty to keep the laws on election allowing vicious actions on the part of ruling parties, which violate the international obligations of the country. In the situation when even several per cent of votes can be decisive in the elections, it is absolutely clear that there is a need for a new election observation methodology that would be able to evaluate and eliminate the influence of new manipulation tendencies on voting results.

Benefiting from Apathy

There is no wonder that the level of pessimism among population has grown and shows doubt in the effectiveness of the exercise of the voting right. During the last elections in Azerbaijan, serious oppositional parties did not even take part in the election campaign. In the situation, when the issue of pre-term elections in Ukraine is still partially on the agenda, online debates show high level of pessimism among Ukrainian electorate. "It does not matter whom you vote for, there is going to be no change anyway" was the opinion expressed on the news portal proUA.com.

Recent polls have shown that over 52% of Moldovan citizens consider that they are not able to influence important decisions in their country. It seems that such a mood can lead to serious consequences, if a great number of protesting electorate decides not to show up at the polling stations on the voting day. Nevertheless, this is exactly the behavior that political technologies employed to manage and manipulate elections are aiming at.

The ruling party of Moldova is bragging that it has the support of the West and the arising legitimacy in order to conceal their electoral swindles. One cannot deny that such legitimacy is a very powerful instrument. And since the majority of the population in such countries as Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia see the West as a favorable and moral actor, the authorities do not have a possibility to use this instrument as a screen any more. Then, electoral violations can lead to mass protests of the population. At the same time, as long as the West is concerned with the form and not the contents of elections, the authorities in the post-Soviet states will keep staging election dramas, where international observers will play the role of "ordinary" spectators.