The Speaker of Parliament, the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic of Moldova didn’t violate the legislation when they attended electoral meetings, said the head of the Central Election Commission (CEC) Angela Caraman. According to her, the three officials are not obliged to temporarily leave office, for the period of the election campaign, if they are not election contenders. Also, the Speaker, the Premier and the President can take part in electoral meetings after work, IPN reports.
The CEC head assured that the three officials didn’t use the public posts for electoral purposes as they went to meetings with voters outside working hours.
“We must regard this thing as a campaigning method of electoral players. Even if we refer to the Prime Minister or the President, these are not obliged to temporarily withdraw from office. Measures should be taken when the administrative resources are misused and the Central Election Commission did so and warned the contenders who abused the administrative resources, namely the mayors who used the company car, who didn’t withdraw from the position for the period of the campaign. There was a case when the mayor went on leave for the period of the election campaign and he was penalized for this. Here, it goes to the use of the resources by those who are involved in the election campaign. Who cannot tell those who are not obliged to do this because they do not stand for election and take part in electoral events outside working hours how to campaign. We saw that some of the political players chose to campaign based on image transfer,” Angela Caraman stated in the program “Résumé” on RliveTV channel.
Moreover, she accused the mayor general of the municipality of Chisinau of having used the administrative resource and of turning the City Hall into a party branch, saying that this is worrisome.
“If we track the donors, we see that most of these work in the units of the Chisinau City Hall. We intervened where it was necessary; either it went to the Prime Minister or to the President. We warned that the resources cannot be used during working hours, especially in the case of candidates running in elections,” said the president of the Central Election Commission.
Angela Caraman noted that a sum of 154 million lei in state budget funds was spent on the two rounds of the general local elections held in November. This is less than it was estimated initially as the CEC saved money as a result of the centralization of acquisitions.
Angela Caraman: Premier and President are not obliged to withdraw from office during campaign
