Communist party announces pre-election mobilization and goes over to offensive

The opposition Moldovan Communist Party (MCP) has announced a “total pre-election mobilization” and the party’s taking the offensive.  

MCP Chairman, former President of Moldova MP Vladimir Voronin stated at an all-republic party conference last Saturday that the Communist Party “is ceasing its being in a state of strategic defense and is going over to the offensive”.    

The opposition leader strongly criticized the incumbent ruling parties that have united into the majority Alliance for European Integration. [These four parties have 53 mandates in the 101-seat Moldovan Parliament, and the Communists won 48 mandates. However, five members of the MCP faction quitted it recently and joined the “Moldova Unită” Party of Spiritual Development.]    

Voronin slashed the “traitors” and “time-servers”, who “joined our party not to work hard but to protect their private businesses”. However, he mentioned the names of only three former MCP parliamentarians – Vladimir Turcan, Victor Stepaniuc and Valentin Guznac, saying nothing about the 4th – television journalist MP Ludmila Belchenkova, and MP Anna Rusu who announced her departure from the party only on February 6. And, most surprisingly, Voronin did not mention Marian Lupu – the earliest and the important-most of all ‘traitors’, who left the Communist Party yet last June, joined the Democratic Party, was elected its chairman – all within about a month – and thus offered a serious rivalry to the Communists at the early parliamentary elections of July 29, when the Communists won 12 mandates fewer than at the April 5 elections.    

Voronin called upon party comrades to learn good lessons from the opposition period. He explained, “The first and chief lesson we must learn from the current situation is that the MCP, at a certain moment, lost its ability to be self-critical, lost its live ties with rank and file party members. The status of a ruling party bedimmed our party optics, made us too self-confident and, simultaneously, too tolerant to many our comrades”.  

A second lesson is that “democratic elections may lead not only to the loss of law, social protection, democracy, freedoms, and hopes for the future, but also to a loss of the country as such and of its independence”.  

“It is no secret to anybody now that the state power in Moldova has been grasped by genuine criminals armed with only one ideology – the ideology of selling out the country, its land and its people. And the point is not so much in the fact that banditry gangs, racketeers and robbers have come back into Moldovan cities and villages. No, everything is much deeper: this criminal brotherhood of recent smugglers they don’t care a bit about the Constitution. Having united into a wolf pack, they are using the right of force to step over all norms and existing regulations, and are doing things that seemed just incredible only half a year ago”, said Vladimir Voronin.  

The ex-president is convinced that the current rulers work for Moldova’s unification with Romania, so “they do not need either the Constitution, or the Civil Code, or the independent mass media – all this is available in Bucharest”.  

Voronin sharply criticized the Government’s intention to dismantle and remove barbed wire from the border with Romania.   

“On the year of the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, they are blaspheming, setting up commissions for anti-communism investigations. They know, they feel and are shaking of fear, realizing that exactly during this year the Communist Party will deliver its crucial blow on them at the soon-to-be early parliamentary elections”, warned the MCP leader.