On November 20 a roundtable organized under the auspices of Eurasia Foundation took place Comrat. The meeting was dedicated to presentation of the new reports produced by the members of coalition for election monitoring in Gagauzia (ADEPT, API, CIJ, LADOM). The roundtable was attended by the representatives of: CEC Chisinau, CEC Comrat, OSCE Mission to Moldova, University of Comrat, Civic Coalition of Gagauzia, mass-media from Gagauzia. The most debated issues of the roundtable were: the use of administrative resources, the bias reflection of the contestants’ campaigns in the mass-media supported by public budgets, the compilation of the voters’ lists, the eventual limitation of the right to move during the elections day in Gagauzia etc.
New monitoring reports
The Association of the Independent Press (API) made public the mass-media monitoring report for the period (October 26 — November 10), dedicated to the reflection of the election campaign in Gagauz autonomy. According to the report in the first part of the mentioned period mass-media continued to support the incumbent Governor Gherghii Tabunscic. In the second part of the mentioned period the national TV and Radio stations stopped to positively reflect the incumbent’s activity while the regional ones kept doing it with the same frequency. At the same time, local and national mass-media continued to ignore the counterparts of the incumbent Governor. Gagauzian TV starts to broadcast civic and electoral education materials, while Radio Gagauzia started to offer air time to contestants for electoral advertising. Though TV and Radio from Gagauzia offer air time for electoral debated these are ignored by the incumbent Governor Gherghii Tabunscic and Comrat’s mayor Nocolai Dudoglo.
The League for Human Rights of Moldova (LADOM) made public its second report concerning the long term monitoring of the election campaign. The new report covers the period October 29 — November 15. Positive trends were remarked in the following areas: CEC of Gagauzia relationships with civil society organizations; formation of polling stations and the appointment of their staffs; compilation of the voters’ rolls. The negative trend persists in the following areas: transparency of the contestants financial sources for advertising; unmotivated interference of the law enforcement bodies in the electoral process; the usage of administrative resources by the candidates with access to such resources; the non-inclusion in the voters’ rolls of the citizens with right to vote who are abroad; the limited access to electoral information for the electoral observers etc.
