The electoral campaign has started in Moldova ahead of parliamentary polls that will be held on 28 November.
The election will see the country's governing four-party Alliance for European Integration (AEI) face off against the opposition Moldovan Communist Party, who were ousted from power amid protests last year.There are signs that Moscow might succeed in splitting the alliance, helping the communists regain power.
The AEI has functioned in a hodgepodge manner since coming to power 18 months ago. The lack of co-ordination and coherence intensified after a referendum on 5 September, in which the alliance lost its gamble on the population choosing that the president of the country be elected through direct vote, rather than being picked by parliament.
The referendum ended in failure, with a turnout below the 33 percent threshold required for the vote to be valid. Whichever party holds a majority in the next parliament will now nominate the future president, even though an overwhelming majority of those who had taken part in the referendum had voted in favour of the change, i.e. for popular vote.
The four parties in the AEI - the Liberal Party led by interim president Mihai Ghimpu, the centre-right Liberal Democratic Party of prime minister Vlad Filat, Marian Lupu's Democratic Party and Our Moldova Alliance led by Serafim Urechean - have conflicting agendas. It is widely speculated that Moscow is targeting the last three, as well as dealing with the opposition communists led by former president Vladimir Voronin.
Mr Lupu, the head of the Democratic Party, is considered to be the main man through whom Russia continues to influence Moldovan politics. He was a leader in the Molovan Communist Party until he broke with Mr Voronin last year. On 15 September, Mr Lupu signed an agreement of political partnership in Moscow between his Democratic Party and United Russia, the party of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and president Dmitri Medvedev. Mr Lupu did this without informing his colleagues and partners in the AEI.
As the electoral campaign gains momentum, tricks are being played by all sides. Both Mr Voronin's communists and Marian Lupu's Democratic Party have already used fake donors to account for part of the funds used in the campaign. In the last few days, Moldovan papers have been full of stories of simple voters - often poor peasants - who were puzzled to discover that they had been listed as donors of large sums of money to one party or the other.
Analysts are largely pessimistic about the AEI's chances of victory, or even of its survival. Some observers do not rule out a last-minute alliance between Mr Lupu's Democratic Party and Mr Voronin's Communists. It is widely believed that it was only Mr Voronin's personal dislike of Mr Lupu, a former defector from the Communist Party and rival in getting Moscow's ear, that prevented this so far, and that discrete intervention by the Kremlin could bring about a speedy reconciliation.
A victory of pro-Moscow political forces would, paradoxically, mean that they will reap the fruits of diplomatic success sowed during the last year by the Alliance. Moldova is receiving increasing sums of European financial support and negotiations have started for an easing of the visa regime with the EU.
On 19 October, at the Franco-German-Russian summit in Deauville, France, President Medvedev made new proposals for a solution of the decades-old conflict between Moldova's central government in Chisinau and its Moscow-backed breakaway region of Transdniestria.
The plan, details of which are still unclear, would enhance EU participation in the mediation and could even bring in Moldova's neighbour and sister-country Romania, something Moscow and previous Moldovan regimes have refused to accept until now. (WAZ.EUobserver)
