Separatist leader Igor Smirnov (left) casts his ballot at a polling station in Tiraspol, in the breakaway region of Transdniestr, Moldova, on 10 December 2006. Voters in Moldova's breakaway region of Transdnestr cast their ballots Sunday in a presidential poll, with incumbent pro-Moscow leader Igor Smirnov widely expected to clinch a new term. The region's 263 voting stations opened at 7:00 am (0500 GMT) to allow 394,000 registered voters in this sliver of ex-Soviet territory located between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova to choose between four candidates.
Photo: AFP
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Igor Smirnov Wins a Fourth Term in Office
// Transdniestr Presidential Election Results a Surprise for No One
Presidential elections took place yesterday in Moldova’s rebellious Transdniestr region, one of the four unrecognized regions in the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States. According to Kommersant correspondent Vladimir Popov, the process and results of the elections were reminiscent of the good old times, featuring a high turnout and a predetermined victory for one candidate: Igor Smirnov, the unrecognized republic’s leader for the past 15 years.
Sunday’s presidential elections were the fourth in the history of Transdniestr, a breakaway region of the former Soviet republic of Moldova that has fought for more than ten years to secede from Moldova and move closer to Russia. This election, like the other three, returned long-term leader Igor Smirnov to power after he had the foresight to remove term limits from the region’s constitution. Mr. Smirnov had basically already secured his victory by last summer in a series of visits to Moscow, after which Russia threw its support behind him as the “tried-and-true” candidate.
Before the elections, the only real alternative to Mr. Smirnov, Evgeny Shevchuk, the ambitious 40-year-old speaker of the local legislature, was called to urgently to Moscow. Upon returning, he announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy. He explained his actions thus: “If I had stood for office, an internal struggle would have arisen between two branches of the government. That would be an inflaming of tensions, a destabilization that many expected, especially in Moldova.”
Three other candidates formally competed against Mr. Smirnov, marking some progress in Transdniestr’s concept of democracy: when Mr. Smirnov first ran for president in 1991, he had no opponents; in 1996, he faced a single competitor; and in 2001, there were three candidates in the field.
One of the other candidates was opposition journalist Andrei Safonov, who served as Mr. Smirnov’s Minister of Information during his first term in office. Mr. Safonov was initially barred from appearing on the ballot in Sunday’s election because a third of the 15,000 signatures that he gathered to qualify to enter the race were purported to be counterfeit. Though he was eventually allowed to register for the elections, both he and his fellow opposition candidates – Petr Tomajly, an entrepreneur and Supreme Soviet deputy, and Nadezhda Bondarenko, the editor of the local Communist newspaper “Pravda of Transdniestr” – failed to garner any substantial support.
On the eve of the election, all four candidates shared their future plans with Kommersant. Mr. Smirnov stated grandly that “I will part with my post only when it becomes clear to me that Transdniestr is recognized as a state,” while his opponent Andrei Safonov said, “the current government is an authoritarian system of rule built by oligarchs. That system cannot move the development of Transdniestr forward. We cannot always be suspended in this situation, not quite peace and not quite war.”
Many in Transdniestr claim that the “nationalist threat” from Moldova is omnipresent. Despite the distrust that they claim for the country across the river, however, many in the breakaway republic are dissatisfied with the quality of life and limited options in Transdniestr and often hold two or even three passports – from Moldova, Ukraine, Russia – on which they travel in search of employment.
Transdniestr’s largest source of income is privatization. Out of 142 enterprises that were listed for sale, around 100 have already been purchased, but the estimated $150 million in government revenues received in return have scarcely impacted the republic’s economy. The region appears to support stores belonging to only two firms, “Green” and “Sherif.” Though “Green” backs Mr. Smirnov and “Sherif” supports his opponents, both chains sell identical basic goods: alcohol, cigarettes, and groceries. Small-scale local trade is almost nonexistent in Transdniestr, and Tiraspol boasts only three or four bars and restaurants, where the local elite wile away their time.
The self-proclaimed republic has gained some stability since the 1992 war with Moldova: low blocks of apartment buildings now line the banks of the Dniestr, where the front lines were 14 years ago. Still, Transdniestr’s bleak situation is underlined by the number of people who returned to the region briefly from abroad to vote for Igor Smirnov before escaping again to other countries of the CIS, where it is much more possible to make a living than at home.
Vladimir Popov
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 11, 2006
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