"Бес-при-дел", originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, May 25, 2009.
The word scrawled on the concrete, which should actually be
spelled "беспредел," means "lawlessness" or "chaos" in Russian
An
earlier post of mine provided a few places to go for good analysis and updates on today's elections in Moldova. Additional sites to check are ADEPT's website,
alegeri.md (also
in English and
Russian) and the website of the
Moldovan Central Election Commission (showing a
fairly high turnout as of 3:45pm local time). Before I head out to the
Moldovan Embassy way out in Chiswick to provide moral support to my better half as she votes, I thought I would take a trip down memory lane through the campaign that was, to provide some basic background for those who have not been following it - while trying not to get too bogged down in the minutiae - as well as add a bit of detail about how the campaign has spilled over into the interwebs. I saw the lead-up to the repeat election campaign, as I was in Moldova from late May through June 21, but I had to follow the past five weeks online.
Sadly, only today did I re-discover
Morning in Moldova, a wonderful (and unusual) English-language blog about Moldova, which I had seen briefly in the frenzy of link-hopping I engaged in while
trying to keep up with the events that followed the April elections. The coverage at MiM is worth reading; I especially liked
this attempt to map out Moldova's political scene.
The repeat elections, of course, were made necessary by the inability of the parliament chosen in the April 5 elections to choose a president to succeed Vladimir Voronin, who is term-limited out and has become a creaky dinosaur holding his country - and perhaps even his own party - back.
Voronin managed the nifty trick of being both acting president and speaker of parliament (a post he will try to retain - a la Putin, or to use Voronin's own analogy, Deng Xiaoping - depending on how well his Communist Party, the PCRM, does today). The major reason there was no compromise in parliament was extreme societal polarization and outrage - and somewhat unexpected unity - on the part of the three opposition parties who made it into the legislature in the wake of demonstrations on April 7th which turned violent.
Who is ultimately to blame for the violence remains something of a mystery, although looking at qui prodest it should be noted that the burning of parliament and the presidential building arguably played into the hands of ruling Communists, at least in the short term, allowing them to characterize the opposition as would-be putschists who had attempted to overthrow the government. (An interesting timeline of foreign reactions to the post-election violence can be
found here.) April 7th turned out to be the birthdate of a lot of myths - both in Moldova and among journalists and social media evangelists who were quick to seize on the
overblown notion that the unrest in Chisinau could be characterized as a "Twitter Revolution" (
this post puts a similar meme in its place in the context of Iran).
In Moldova, much of the June-July campaign centered around narratives of the events of April 7th, and the key difference between the campaign that ended on April 5th and campaign one ending today turned out to be the defection from the PCRM of Marian Lupu, the former parliamentary speaker whose name had been on the lips of many Western Moldova-watchers in March and early April as the best possible option to succeed Voronin. Lupu's role is yet to be determined - some from the opposition think he is part of a Communist plot to draw centrist votes (one of Lupu's campaign slogans has been "The political war must be stopped") and that upon making it into parliament, assuming his party and the Communists have enough votes to elect the president, he will make a deal with the PCRM and the three opposition parties who made it in in April will remain marginalized (in fact, one of them, Serafim Urechean's AMN, may not make it into parliament at all this time around).
A major first salvo in the information battle which characterized Moldova's second election campaign was kicked off when the government aired a "documentary" titled "Attack on Moldova" (Atac Asupra Moldovei) on NIT. In the best traditions of Russian propaganda films of recent years, this one-sided narrative featured alleged recordings of phone conversations and hinted at shadowy threats from abroad as well as fingering internal enemies - namely, the leaders of the opposition parties as well as jailed (and later released) businessman Gabriel Stati. This masterpiece can be viewed on YouTube (naturally)
here. It led to at least one opposition party leader
threatening legal action. Moldovan analyst Oleg Cristal
projected in June that the film would be the "quintessence of this campaign," and he wasn't far off the mark. As Cristal
wrote in late June:
I understand that this film is currently being shown all over the country, and it aims to provoke a reaction that is both emotional (blood, fire, screaming, shooting, chanting, etc.) and sentimental (fear, personal and group security, hatred, patriotism, love of country, etc.): "we are being attacked by external enemies (Romania and transnational crime groups) and internal enemies (the liberal opposition)."... "Attack on Moldova" rallies society around a common threat: "We must defend our Fatherland," urges Voronin.
"Attack on Moldova" kicked off what one interesting commentary referred to as the "
Battle of the documentaries." The opposition decided to present its own versions of the events of April 7th and get its message out by screening its own "documentaries," both on YouTube and in some cases by screening them in the country's smaller towns where many voters do not have access to internet (or fast enough internet) to enable them to watch these online, or would not be inclined to do so. The main examples of these films were "
Black Box," "
Whither Moldova?", "
Who Loves Moldova?", and the party-sponsored "
The Truth About April 7th" (PL), "
Green Eyes" (PLDM - whose party color is green) and "
In Defense of Moldova" (AMN - see JurnalTV's report on this film, with highlights,
here). Later in the campaign, Romania's TVR1 aired yet another "documentary" (I use the scare quotes throughout because, while some of these films may be relatively more or less objective, none of them is really a documentary), "
The Trap," about the events of April 7th (some discussion of the film is
here).
This untitled opposition film may also be of interest.
One could hardly call the "Battle of the documentaries" a battle of equals - the ruling party by all accounts made full use of its "administrative resource," including its ability to broadcast and rebroadcast its propaganda films on nationwide television. The national news programs are also used to cast opposition politicians in the worst possible light. While I was in Chisinau, I saw several days of intense coverage of the city's stray-dog problem, all of it concluding that the city's mayor, liberal Dorin Chirtoaca, was at fault. I knew I was going native when I out-conspiracy-theoried even my post-Soviet friends and theorized that the PCRM had perhaps imported stray dogs from the rest of the country to give their mud-slinging increased credibility. Then the nightly news started to highlight alleged rat infestation in Chisinau, alleging that "the 'most European mayor in the city's history' has brought Chisinau to the verge of an epidemic."
Progressive Moldovans have found ways to compete with or combat the government's domination of broadcast TV, but most of these are internet-based and therefore problematic in terms of reaching rural voters. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning the nascent online TV channel
JurnalTV, as well as a streaming video site called
privesc.eu ("I watch," in Romanian), launched during the campaign, which has increased transparency by showing complete video of press conferences and public meetings of, for example, the
Electoral Commission (and is
currently streaming Moldova's main opposition-oriented TV station, ProTV), rather than the carefully edited versions which appear on state-run TV.
Another way of using the internet to deal with biased broadcast media is to take on the most egregious excesses directly - by publishing
monitoring reports highlighting the bias of state-run news programs or by
showing side by side how careful editing is used by the state-run programs to distort the messages of opposition politicians or foreign critics. In general - not surprisingly - the authorities have found it harder to control online media (though
not for lack of trying) than conventional media, but this is cold comfort to the opposition given the internet's relatively limited reach in Moldova.
Fighting Fist, originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, June 16, 2009.
You might assume the writing says "Fight with Communism," but in fact it says "Fight with Romanism"
YouTube provides a wealth of clips for those interested in how the campaign unfolded. While the major parties had video clips available on their websites, they all also had their video materials aggregated on YouTube:
PCRMPartidul Liberal (PL)
Dorin Chirtoaca (separate from PL)
AMN (under the username scottgeorges for some reason)
Lupu (showing inter alia what seem to be dozens of clips of his meetings with voters in various cities throughout Moldova)
PLDM couldn't get their party's acronym as a username because it had already been nailed down by a YouTube channel called "Peace! Love! Deathmetal!" I couldn't find a one-stop source for their ads, but luckily the good people at ADEPT have set up a
YouTube channel with campaign ads from all parties.
Online and traditional media which support the authorities also have made use of YouTube channels:
Moldnews, an online news portal which resembles Russian-funded efforts in Georgia
TV channel NITAs have opposition-minded individuals and media:
Change MoldovaUnimediaJurnalTVFor a somewhat more light-hearted YouTube clip, check out this
animated spoof showing Voronin and several others (Greceanii, Turcan, Lupu, Rosca) conspiring to burn down the parliament. In general, the atmosphere of "permanent campaign" seemed to lead to fatigue and some silliness. A well-respected group of young, opposition-minded (though some used to work in the current gov't) economists called Clubul Idea started a something of a
parody of the elections on
its website - people create their own parties and then have the chance to vote for them.
Lupu,
Chirtoaca and PLDM's
Vlad Filat are on Facebook (note that Lupu is the only one of those three who has not tricked out his profile with a customized URL); Urechean is not, which makes sense given his target demo. They have been using the internet fairly extensively in general and their Facebook feeds in particular, as has Voronin adviser / PCRM parliamentarian / "grey cardinal" Mark Tkachuk, whose feed has reliably contained some of the black PR that is being pumped out by the PCRM campaign. Tkachuk (also spelled Tcaciuc) went all VVP with an "
online news conference" on news portal Omega. Omega's unintentionally funny (to those familiar with Anglosphere netspeak) URL, OMG.md, stands for "Objective Media Group." They seem to be taking a page from Fox News' self-proclaimed "Fair & Balanced" stance, as this is an overtly pro-PCRM site.
Lupu joined Facebook fairly late in the game and received some scorn early on for making the noobie mistake of posting many, many videos as individual status updates, thus flooding the home pages of his "friends" and leading some people to exclude his feed from their home page. Sorry, I said I wouldn't get bogged down in the minutiae... To Lupu's credit, he did hold a meeting with Moldovan bloggers,
video of which of course made its way
online (PL leader
Mihai Ghimpu also had a well-documented "off-line" meeting with Moldovan bloggers, as did
Urechean). Lupu also, tellingly, has a
standalone website (i.e., not one associated with the party he is using as a vehicle for his campaign, PDM) and has put
a bunch of photos up on Flickr, including (somewhat oddly) items apparently intended to show that he is an international playa, e.g.
an invitation from the French President to attend Bastille Day celebrations.
Tricolor, originally uploaded by lyndonk2 - Chisinau, May 27, 2009.
Of course the pro-Romanian camp has its own cans of spray paint...
Another intriguing online innovation was the chance for voters in Chisinau to
check their status on the election rolls online. Those lists which were the focal point of the fraud allegations which followed the April 5th balloting. Not sure how much it helped - Filat claimed (to the press and in a Facebook status update, naturally) to have found two extra people registered in his apartment when he went to vote this morning.
And what of the reverberations from the "Twitter Revolution"? Well, a few days before July 29th, I saw
reports (initially on the Facebook feed of prolific Moldovan blogger and Twitterer extraordinaire
Mihai Moscovici, later
picked up by Unimedia) that fake Twitter accounts - nothing new, and apparently
even non-celebrities are at risk - purporting to belong to Vlad Filat and Dorin Chirtoaca were calling for supporters to come protest on July 30th.
I can't think of an appropriate conclusion to this post and already have one foot out the door. I may come back later this evening with some more links and perhaps a report on whatever the scene is at the Moldovan Embassy in London. While I am not overly optimistic about what may follow this evening's vote-counting (which, as we all know, is much more important than the actual voting), permit me to conclude with a more uplifting - and probably apolitical - bit of street art:
