The electoral process initiated in spring to choose a new mayor of Chisinau municipality should be ended. In accordance with the law, this electoral exercise should yield a winner, executive director of the Association for Participatory Democracy ADEPT Igor Botan stated in the tall show “Politics of Natalia Morari” on TV8 channel, IPN reports.
Igor Botan said this electoral process should be ended and other elections should be held until the citizens of Chisinau have a mayor. In two weeks of an eventual decision by the Supreme Court of Justice, if the invalidation decision is upheld, the elections should be rerun. The first round of mayoral elections could be rerun, including with the participation of Silvia Radu, but by excluding candidates Ion Ceban and Andrei Nastase. “This exercise should yield an elected mayor,” stated the ADEPT director.
According to him, the campaigning reason for not validating the election was invoked to prevent particular public disorder on the election day, not to prevent the influencing of voters’ options. “The Election Code provides that the electoral posters on billboards can remain, the information posted on the Internet can remain. So, the approach adopted by the court of law that invalidated the election was incorrect,” stated Igor Botan. He noted that in a series of European countries, the constitutional courts decided that the limitation of the right to vote on the election day is unconstitutional.
Pavel Postica, programs director at Promo-LEX Association, said the court’s decision not to validate the election can hardly be named a court judgement. It only contains all the elements that should be contained by a court decision, but the argued side is not convincing. The Election Code specifies three types of liability: juridical, contraventional and penal. The electoral agitation on the election day is a violation that carries a fine of at most 1,500 lei. The annulment of the elections is an electoral punishment of another type and this can be applied in only four cases, namely: involvement of foreign citizens in the election campaign; financing of the campaign with foreign funds; exceeding of the set cap and non-suspension of a person holding a responsible post.
The leader of the Party “Action and Solidarity” Maia Sandu noted the government tests the limits of society’s patience. “The government and the oligarchs prepare us for the parliamentary elections and want to see how far can they go. If we allow them now to steal our vote and to change the citizens’ decision, it will evidently be more difficult later to defend out vote in the parliamentary elections,” stated Maia Sandu. She also said that the representatives of the government didn’t expect such an outcome in the mayoral elections and thus invented this invalidation solution.
The mayor-elect of Chisinau Andrei Nastase, who heads the Party “Platform Dignity and Truth”, said that if the validation of his election as mayor is delayed too much, the validation will have to take place on the street. The government tests the strength of the citizens and their attitude to justice. “The people are very angry. They accepted banks, companies, TV channels to be robbed, but they went and voted and now see their vote being stolen so massively and impudently,” he stated, adding that the court’s decision to not validate the election is ridiculous.
In the evening of June 19, the Centru branch of the Court of Chisinau decided to not validate the new mayoral elections held in Chisinau, which were won by Andrei Nastase.
