Moldova under Lucinschi

Demokratizatsiya, Winter 2002 by Quinlan, Paul D

Politics and Economics after Ciubuc

On 25 January 1999 President Clinton, on receiving the new Moldovan ambassador to the United States, Ceslav Ciobanu, described Moldova "as a model" of democracy in Eastern Europe. A week later, on 1 February, Ciubuc suddenly announced his resignation as prime minister and Moldova again found itself in the throes of another crisis. In a press conference Ciubuc said that the main reason he tendered his resignation was because of the "impossibility" to "overcome the crisis in this country" under the present "algorithmic" government. 17 The next day Snegur proposed incumbent deputy prime minister Nicolae Andronic for the office of prime minister. But he could not even gain the approval of the second largest party in his Democratic Convention, the CDPF under Iurie Rosca, and in the process brought to the surface the bitter infighting that had been festering within the alliance coalition. 18 On 5 February Lucinschi nominated Chisinau mayor Serafim Urecheanu as prime minister designate, but Urecheanu fared no better than Andronic. After spending almost two weeks trying to form a cabinet of experts to replace the much-criticized algorithmic scheme of power sharing among the coalition parties, along with openly supporting Lucinschi's proposals for constitutional reforms to strengthen the power of the president, Urecheanu was forced to withdraw his candidacy for lack of support.

With Urecheanu out of the way, Mircea Snegur again proposed Andronic as prime minister, only to be again sidetracked by the CDPF as its leader, Iurie Rosca, proposed Ion Sturza, the thirty-eight-year-old reform-minded deputy prime minister and economic minister in the second Ciubuc cabinet. Furious, Snegur struck back by announcing that he would support Sturza only if Rosca stepped down as deputy speaker. 19 Considering the bad blood between Lucinschi and Snegur, probably no one was surprised that Lucinschi now named Sturza prime minister designate. Unfortunately, the opera bouffe was not yet over. Shortly before Sturza was to be voted on by Parliament, Rosca announced that the CDPF would vote for him only if they were given two additional seats in the new cabinet, which the other alliance leaders rejected. Consequently, when Parliament voted on 3 March, Sturza received fifty-one of the maximum 101 votes, one vote shy of the fifty-two votes previously declared necessary by the Constitutional Court. All nine CDPF delegates abstained and thirty-seven Communist delegates voted in opposition. After Lucinschi renominated Sturza, on 12 March a second vote was taken; this time Sturza received the necessary fifty-two votes. The crucial vote was that of local civil war hero Ilie Ilascu, a parliamentary deputy who has been sitting in the Tiraspol penitentiary since 1992, who somehow smuggled out a letter voting for Sturza. How this was done--if it actually was done and was not a forgery--still remains a mystery.

The six-week political crisis could not have come at a worse time, as the economy plunged deeper into a severe recession. As a result of the political crisis, the CDPF broke from the Democratic Convention, leaving the latter with only seventeen parliamentary deputies. The fragile alliance coalition government now had only a razor-thin majority in Parliament; it was hardly in a position to continue much-needed reforms in Moldova. And during the crisis the IMF and World Bank put their Extended Fund Facility and Structural Adjustment Loan funding on hold again. Lucinschi's determination to change the country's constitutional makeup from a semipresidential to a presidential republic, reducing Parliament to a consultative role, significantly aggravated the situation. As mentioned, only two years before, during the presidential election of 1996, Lucinschi sharply criticized Snegur for a similar idea!