IN THIS ISSUE

* Post-election Moldova in institutional limbo in the wake of elections
* ... while presidential election close after the Moldovan riots
* Putin signs South Stream deal in Sochi
* Ankara court rules that Gul stands trial for fraud
** New in the Jamestown blog on Russia and Eurasia (http://www.jamestown.org/blog): A Conversation with Pavel Felgenhauer

Moldova on the Brink of Constitutional Crisis

Vladimir Socor

With its underdeveloped multi-party system and state institutions, dysfunctional law-enforcement and internal security apparatus, budget revenues drying up amid an international financial crisis, and the unresolved Transnistria conflict simmering on the back burner, Moldova now faces the risk of a constitutional crisis.

The nominal Communist Party, election winner on April 5 for the third consecutive time, holds 60 seats in the new parliament. Three nominally liberal parties - Liberal, Liberal-Democrat, and Our Moldova - hold the other 41 seats. Two days after the elections, anti-authority youth mobs (including, but not limited to sympathizers of the opposition parties) devastated the presidential and parliament buildings and set them on fire. That assault, the brutal police response that followed, and inflammatory rhetoric continuing on all sides have produced a post-election deadlock.

The three opposition parties are challenging the validity of the election results and taking only a minimal part in the new parliament's work thus far. Parliament cannot fully constitute itself and function as long as the opposition withholds cooperation. Constitutionally, Moldova is a parliamentary republic, its president elected by the legislature. President Vladimir Voronin has completed his second, final term of office and may only continue until June 7 as acting president. The old government must continue as caretaker, pending the election of a new head of state by that deadline, failing which the parliament is dissolved and new elections must be held (Moldpres, Basapres, May 18, 19).

Rhetorically at least, the opposition is demanding new parliamentary elections. These would prolong the legislative vacuum and executive-branch limbo into August or September, amid a rapidly deteriorating economic situation and tension-filled atmosphere in Chisinau.

In the post-election period, a monitored recount of 100 percent of the ballots cast country-wide has fully confirmed the election results; a 95 percent check of voter registration lists by the opposition (admittedly short of staff and expertise) has failed to yield any evidence of fraud; and the constitutional court (whose decisions are final and not subject to appeal) has validated the election results. The opposition parties nevertheless, insist that the election returns were fraudulent.

That contention clashes with the European observation mission's largely positive assessment of Moldova's elections. The challenge resembles that in Georgia, where opposition parties also reject Western observers' evaluation of last year's elections and demand new elections to be held. Thus the whole election observation mechanism, developed in the ex-Soviet realm by the OSCE and EU, is threatened from two opposite directions: by the autocratic Kremlin, which has made it impossible for Western election observers to operate in Russia, and by Georgian and Moldovan oppositionists, who openly defy Western observers' assessments of elections.

Moldova's opposition parties threaten to deprive the new parliament of the necessary quorum for electing the new head of state. Behind the public bluster, however, the opposition parties are in fact divided or hesitant on this issue.

The 60-strong parliamentary majority needs just one more vote for its candidate to be elected. Under the Moldovan constitution, the head of state is elected by parliament in secret balloting with at least 61 votes in favor. If parliament fails to elect a head of state after four rounds of balloting, the acting president dissolves the parliament and calls new elections (Basapres, Moldpres, May 18, 19).

Thus, the opposition can force the holding of new parliamentary elections simply by blocking the presidential election in the chamber. Alternatively, opposition parties or elements within them can vote for the majority party's presidential nominee as part of a political trade-off on this issue and continue opposing government policies afterward. On this and other major issues, decision-making power ultimately rests with the chairmen and vice-chairmen of the opposition parties.

Of the three opposition parties, the Liberals (a pro-Romania irredentist party) seem determined to block the presidential election and force new parliamentary elections. Party chairman Mihai Ghimpu and vice-chairman Dorin Chirtoaca, an uncle-and-nephew duo, are known as rigid and militant personalities, with Chirtoaca now also beholden to a social base of student and teenage protest groups deployable in Chisinau.

Among Liberal-Democrats (a moderately pro-Romanian, oligarch-supported party), chairman Vlad Filat has the track record of a deal-making politician, including his controversial vote for Voronin in the 2005 presidential election. Such a move seems very difficult to replicate in the current atmosphere, however. The party's vice-chairman, Alexandru Tanase, is acting in a spirit of relentless confrontation and seems to restrict Filat's leeway.

The third opposition party, Our Moldova (led by mid-level nomenklatura survivors from the final Soviet years) is cautiously signaling that it could provide a few crucial votes to elect the head of state and avoid new parliamentary elections. Party chairman Serafim Urecheanu and vice-chairman Veaceslav Untila had led futile efforts in 2005 to block Voronin's election and force new parliamentary elections. This time, however, Our Moldova is far from confident that it would return to parliament if new elections are held.

Moldovan Parliament Struggling to Elect Head of State

Vladimir Socor

Moldova's newly elected legislature convened for its first full-fledged sitting on May 12 and elected the outgoing head of state, Vladimir Voronin, as Chairman of Parliament. Having completed two presidential terms (2001-2009), and barred by the constitution from seeking a third, Voronin continues as acting head of state pending the election of his successor and as leader of the nominal Communist Party for the foreseeable future.

The vote in parliament reflected the acute polarization of political forces within and outside the chamber. None but the 60 communist deputies voted for Voronin and two Vice-Chairmen from the same party (Moldpres, Basapres, May 12). The first Vice-chairman, Vladimir Turcan, is a Transnistria native and retired interior ministry general -sharing the same background as Voronin on both counts. The second Vice-Chairman, Grigore Petrenco (nominally an ethnic Ukrainian) is a young polyglot Euro-leftist connected with marginal left-wing groups within European inter-parliamentary bodies.

The opposition's 41 nominally liberal deputies (16 Liberals, another 16 Liberal-Democrats, and 9 from Our Moldova) do not recognize the legitimacy of the April 5 election results, demand new elections, and participate only minimally in the parliament's work thus far. The three opposition parties have turned down the majority party's offer of a vice-chairmanship of parliament and five (out of 12) committee chairmanships, including: foreign policy and Euro integration, defense and state security, and the human rights committee. All these posts remain vacant, and at the opposition's disposal.

The legislature will attempt to elect a new head of state on May 20 and has until June 7 to do so, in a maximum four rounds of balloting, requiring at least two candidates in each round. The parliamentary majority's 60 votes fall one vote short of the constitutionally required minimum of three fifths -that is, 61 votes- to elect the head of state in the 101-seat chamber.

The three opposition parties refuse to participate in this election in any form. This behavior is consistent with the opposition's declared goal to frustrate the presidential election, force the parliament's dissolution and new elections (see article above). Speculation abounds, however, regarding political deals with opposition deputies or outright vote-buying to garner the minimum necessary of 61, or the more decent 62 or 63 votes.

The majority party's presidential candidates are the incumbent Prime Minister, Zenaida Greceanai, and a neurosurgery professor as a pro-forma contestant. Neither of them is a communist party member. Greceanai (née Bujor), born in 1956 in Siberia to a family of Moldovan deportees, is a respected finance and budget expert, long-serving finance minister in 2002-2008, and prime minister from March of last year to date. Based on the stable communist parliamentary majority, the Moldovan government includes only two members of that party among the cabinet's 19 members.

Voronin controls the parliamentary majority with two firm hands as parliamentary chairman and party leader. On May 13 Voronin announced his decision to propose Marian Lupu for the post of prime minister. The majority party has sufficient votes in the chamber to approve the nomination (Moldpres, Basapres, May 13).

Lupu was chairman of the 2005-2009 parliament and prior to that, Economics Minister during the recovery years 2003-2005. Uniquely among Moldova's active politicians he is fluent in English and French as well as speaking the standard literary Romanian. Lupu, born in 1966, entered Parliament in 2005 on the Communist Party's slate as a non-party member and was immediately elevated by Voronin's team to the parliament's chairmanship, as part of efforts to Europeanize the face of Moldovan politics. The Communist parliamentary majority required Lupu to become a party member in return for electing him as chairman. Many in the party do not regard him as one of their own. By the same token Lupu enjoys the respect of otherwise reflexively anti-communist circles in local civil society.

Greceanai, Lupu, and Petrenco have an ally in Voronin's top adviser, Marc Tcaciuc, who is now transitioning with Voronin from the presidency to a parliamentary front seat. He remains close to Voronin both in parliament and in the party leadership bodies, which Tcaciuc has sought with mixed results to reform and rejuvenate. Of the nominations approved and announced in the last few days, only Turcan belongs to a different team. This includes some of the law-enforcement chiefs with unreformed views and isolationist tendencies as well as the incumbent Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Stratan, who harbors presidential ambitions of his own.

Putin Raises the Stakes in his Black Sea Gas Gamble

Pavel K. Baev

On May 16 while Moscow was captivated by the spectacle of the "Eurovision" song contest, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin escaped to Sochi to devote himself to gas politics. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was his first guest, followed by the ceremony marking the signing of deals between Gazprom and its counterparts from Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia on constructing the South Stream gas pipeline. He then met with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Putin usually excels at this high-level networking, but this time tensions existed even with his close ally Berlusconi.

Gazprom and ENI cannot finalize the South Stream deal as the Italians, perhaps assuming that the Russian side is becoming desperate, are demanding a greater share of gas for their own trading in South-Eastern Europe (www.gazeta.ru, May 15). Turkey expects serious concessions for granting permission to build South Stream across its exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, and wants to add another trunk to the Blue Stream pipeline in order to become an exporter to Europe and not just a transit state (www.lenta.ru, May 18). The tactical goals of Russian maneuvering are clear - to eclipse the Nabucco pipeline project, which has been advanced by the rather incoherent efforts of the European Commission and to deny it any Caspian sources of gas - but the strategic rationale still remains shaky (Kommersant-Vlast, May 18).

Gazprom cannot count on expanding its exports to the EU, which is firmly set on stabilizing its energy consumption and introducing alternative sources. Consequently, there will be no inflow of new profits to cover the construction costs of the South Stream project. These costs are estimated at 19-24 billion Euros, while Gazprom's CEO Aleksei Miller suggest a far smaller figure of $8.6 billion, presumably referring to the underwater section crossing the Black Sea (Vremya Novostei, May 18). The main surprise, however, was the joint Gazprom-ENI decision to double the capacity of the pipeline from 31 to 63 billion cubic meters (RBC Daily, Kommersant, May 18). In essence, this means that Ukraine stands to lose about half of its transit of Russian gas, and Moscow has clearly indicated that it will not join the EU-Ukraine agreement on modernizing its gas infrastructure (RIA-Novosti, May 18).

This ambitious plan for diversifying the channels of exporting gas to Europe and consolidating control over the potential sources of gas, particularly in the Caspian area, requires investments that appear unrealistic in times of tight credit. Gazprom's balance sheet now appears so depleted - mostly due to the 40 percent drop in export to Europe in the first quarter - that the decision to cut its dividends by more than seven times came as no surprise (RBC Daily, May 19). The company can certainly rely on the state to finance its "strategic" projects, but by the time of disbursing the funds for South Stream's construction in 2011, the reserves accumulated by the Central Bank might be exhausted.

This perspective looks more likely, since every week brings more worrisome news about the scale of the economic recession in Russia, now deepening beyond the lower end of the reluctantly revised official forecasts. The latest GDP figures show a decline of 9.5 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period in 2008 (the previous estimate was 5-6 percent) but it also marks a 23.2 percent decline compared with the previous quarter (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, May 18). Despite the gradual rise in oil prices, industry registers the greatest contraction, reaching 16.9 percent in April against the same month in 2008 (Kommersant, May 19). This freefall astonishes many experts, who use the relative stability on the stock market to exacerbate tensions between several economic teams within the government -where only the Minister of Economic Development Elvira Nabiullina, is prepared to contemplate the prospect of an 8 percent decline in GDP in 2009 and zero growth next year (www.newsru.com, May 19).

The main focus of the anti-crisis policy is still set on softening the social costs of the industrial catastrophe, and sheltering from bankruptcy the hopelessly inefficient state corporations. As a result, the crisis is not fulfilling its purpose of clearing the economic deadwood, and provides few stimuli for innovative business activity. It is the energy sector that is expected to resume its natural role of rent-provider and thus set Russia back on track to petro-prosperity. Meanwhile, Western consideration of alternative sources and "green" technologies is perceived as wishful thinking or an anti-Russian conspiracy. Hence, the priority is given to energy projects, which makes little economic sense in the current depressed market.

For Putin, this is irrelevant, as he is firmly asserting his central role in decision-making on gas matters and going into every detail in talks with Berlusconi, Erdogan, or with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Kommersant, May 20). Medvedev is left with a ceremonial role and finds consolation in designing grand initiatives, like a new conceptual approach to energy security that is supposed to replace the Energy Charter -unlikely to feature in the discussions at the Russia-EU summit in Khabarovsk on May 20. Last week, Putin casually delivered a particularly stinging warning that both members of the "tandem leadership" will make decisions about their political future by assessing the results of their joint work, but that he knew Medvedev is a "very decent man" who will always do the right thing (RIA-Novosti, May 19).

More than anything else, this attitude reveals that the two co-rulers and their intertwined courts are out of touch with the reality of the unfolding crisis: they both want to avoid facing the political implications of the gloomy macro-economic statistics. Everything in the political system of Putinism was in perfect harmony - huge oil revenues with internal stability, and a corrupt bureaucracy with an assertive foreign policy - and now nothing works, and a dose of "liberalism" administered from the Kremlin is no cure. The recent spectacular explosion of a gas pipeline in Moscow was just one malfunctioning of the old Soviet infrastructure, which might prove an apt metaphor for the regime.

Turkish Judiciary Opposing the AKP Government

Emrullah Uslu

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has long been at loggerheads with the secularist establishment, including army generals, judges and academics. Since 2007 the judiciary has led the opposition against the AKP. The constitutional court attempted to shut down the AKP and ban the prime minister from politics. However, due to domestic and international pressure on the court, it ruled that the AKP had become the focal point for anti-secularist activities to transform the foundation of the Turkish state (www.haber7.com, July 30, 2008).

Since then, the Judges and Prosecutors Association (YARSAV), which is the first association formed by active duty judges and prosecutors in 2006, has criticized the AKP government. On almost every occasion that the chairman of YARSAV has held press conferences he has harshly criticized the government. YARSAV made its first public appearance after a closure case was filed against the ruling AKP. The evidence presented by the supreme court of appeals chief prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, was largely provided by YARSAV (Sunday's Zaman, March 15, 2009). Due to its critical stance in the run-up to the closure case, Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin made a harsh statement against the group, suggesting that YARSAV should change its name to YARSAP -the Judges and Prosecutors Party (Today's Zaman, January 13).

When the AKP government revealed its plans to amend some articles in the constitution to conform with EU norms (Sabah, March 14) the heads of various courts fiercely resisted. On May 7, the head of the supreme court, Hasan Gerceker, stated that the planned amendments must not impair the secular foundation of the Turkish state (Hurriyet, May 7). The president of the council of state, judge Mustafa Birden, suggested that the "Turkish parliament has limited power to amend the constitution. Thus, the parliament cannot use its power to amend the articles that embody the spirit of the constitution. These amendments, which may erode the secular nature of the constitution will never be accepted" (Zaman, May 11).

The deputy prime minister, Cemil Cicek, said that the AKP had no intention of harming the spirit of the constitution, yet he stated that "the constitution is the biggest barrier for Turkey's membership of the EU" (Yeni Safak, May 15 ).

As the latest example of judicial opposition to the AKP, the heavy penalty court in Ankara ruled that President Abdullah Gul must stand trial for fraud. Gul's office rejected the court's ruling, saying that the constitution only permitted the president to stand trial for treason. The fraud case itself dates back to the late 1990's, when the Islamist Welfare Party, a predecessor to the AKP, was accused of misappropriating treasury funds. Former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan was found guilty five years ago in the same fraud case. Gul pardoned him last year (New York Times, May 18).

However, Gul's presidential immunity from prosecution is ambiguous. He was a parliamentarian at the time the case was first considered, affording automatic immunity. Yet the constitution does not specifically grant this right to the office of president (Hurriyet, May 18).

In the court ruling Gul was labeled as a "suspect" in the fraud case. The decision came as a surprise, since it contradicted the prosecutor's no-trial recommendation, and briefly triggered sales of Turkish bonds (Reuters, May 18).

It is unlikely that the court ruling will damage Gul. However, the move might further fuel animosity between the Islamist-rooted government and the secularist establishment. The AKP accused the court of being revisionist in terms of its previous rulings, and stated that Gul enjoyed the same immunity as parliamentarians (Aksam, May 20). The speaker of the parliament Koksal Toptan, an AKP parliamentarian himself, also stated that the president cannot be prosecuted (Anadolu Ajansi, May 18). The secularist opposition is attempting to use this opportunity to discredit the government. Indeed, the opposition Republican People's Party issued a statement arguing that Gul has no immunity. Thus, in their opinion, he must stand trial for his alleged involvement in fraud (Anadolu Ajansi, May 18).

While the AKP questions the right of the court to prosecute the president, the former chairman of the constitution commission, AKP parliamentarian Burhan Kuzu, suggested that Gul will be acquitted (Hurriyet, May 18). The irony is that since the court system as a whole is being politicized, even if Gul decided to voluntarily stand trial, no-one can be certain that it will rule on the basis of the evidence and avoid a politically motivated judgment. It appears that it will require major reforms and some time to develop a democratic culture for Turkish judges to avoid acting politically on behalf of the secularist establishment.

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