On November 15, 2020, Maia Sandu, with the massive support of the people in the country and the Diaspora, defeated Igor Dodon in the second round of presidential elections. It was a victory of solidarity, which is difficult to share today between Maia Sandu’s supporters and Igor Dodon’s opponents. Have the Moldovan politicians learned this valuable lesson?

Five months later, following several fierce clashes and confrontations, Dodon loses to Maia Sandu the fight for the early parliamentary elections. On April 28, following the decision of the Constitutional Court on the existence of the circumstances justifying the dissolution of the Parliament, Sandu signs the dissolution decree and announces the date for early elections: July 11, 2021. 

The third confrontation between the former and the current presidents will follow in the summer, this time at the level of the political parties they represent: the Action and Solidarity Party and the Socialist Party of Moldova. Obviously, they will not be the only electoral contestants (the list of candidate parties is growing from day to day), but they are the main actors who will have to contest the primacy in this election. Both rely on the support of a wider electoral segment (Action and Solidarity Party on the right and the Socialist Party on the left), and both want to achieve a future parliamentary majority. The Action and Solidarity Party hopes to get a stable majority in Parliament on its own, to be able to appoint a government without intermediaries and restore order, honoring the commitments they made in the presidential elections: the eradication of corruption, theft, political and social misery, injustice, state banditry, political greed, cowardice, and scrap-my-back-and-I’ll-scrap-yours relationship … “Early elections are the will of the citizens” and we must help them get rid of “corrupt and compromised politicians” (Maia Sandu).

Of all the problems that had to be solved regarding the early elections, so far there was one solution found and that is the date of the elections. The main and still unresolved question is whether we are ready to get rid of this communist-socialist left which, in fact, has nothing in common with either socialism or communism; they are sick speculators who have amassed fortunes exploiting the symbol of the sickle and hammer. If Lenin were to leave the Mausoleum these days, he would be appalled by Voronin and Dodon, along with all their suite of thieves and bargainers.

Who will get the lucky card in the summer, the left or the right-wing parties? It depends. The election campaign is just beginning. So far, only seven electoral contestants have submitted their lists to the Central Electoral Commission and it is still early to understand on which of the two flanks, right or left, there will be more candidates registered and, respectively, there will be a greater waste of votes. 

This time again the left turned out to be more organized than the right. The Pro-European and pro-union parties are divided into at least four camps: the Action and Solidarity Party separate from the Political Platform Dignity and Truth and the Party of National Unity separate from the Alliance for the Union of Romanians. The leftist parties, however, entered the elections with two separate blocs: the Communist Party of Moldova with the Socialist Party of Moldova and the electoral Bloc Renato Usatîi which, although publicly declaring itself as a center bloc, basically focuses on the same political desideratum as Dodon and Voronin in what concerns the Russian world, the breakaway Transnistrian region, the Gagauz region, and Ukraine.

Usatîi may be a good guy, but he is indoctrinated and his political plans regarding Moldova are similar to those of Voronin and Dodon, who think like Kozak, Lavrov, or Putin. 

The pro-European parties on the right risk repeating an earlier political model when two pro-European and unionist parties fight against each other and, in consequence, they bring to power left parties.

There isn’t a problem that the four right parties decided to go to the polls separately. The voters will have an alternative to choose the party they favor. This happy scenario, however, is good only if the turnout were over 90%, as in the elections or referendums organized by Russia in the breakaway Transnistrian region or other secessionist areas. In case the participation does not exceed 50 percent, the risks are high.  Who will be held accountable? 

Despite the fact that Voronin kept insulting Dodon for four years in a row, Dodon was able to get over all of Voronin’s invectives, no matter which direction the indication to make up came from. He did it not to allow the dispersal of votes on the left and to ensure their primacy by adding the 3.57 percent accumulated by the communists in the last elections. 

Why cannot the right parties do the same?

The left is actually doing what the right-wing parties should be doing, but they are not. Is the Action and Solidarity Party confident that the July 11 result can repeat that of November 15? These are two different election campaigns and cannot be treated in the same manner. I guess that the Action and Solidarity Party, the main actor on the right, hastened to present their electoral list and negotiated with other right parties too easily. Will they keep up on their own? 

Dodon and the Socialist Party (in fact, Moscow) want revenge for last year’s electoral failure and are on the offensive. They have lost the Presidency and do not want to lose the Parliament and the Government. They want to keep Maia Sandu in suspense and not to admit “the increasing interference of the USA and EU in the political processes in Moldova” (?!). The latest statements of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs are very eloquent in this regard.

As a result, Dodon has already realigned his electoral troops for July 11; he is waiting for the trumpet to sound, ready to launch the campaign in a joint electoral bloc with Voronin’s Communist Party. 

This scores 2:1 against Maia Sandu. There can also be 3:1, as for Usatîi Russia is closer than Sandu.