CHISINAU, Aug 3 (Reuters) - A high court in Moldova ruled on Tuesday against ex-President Vladimir Voronin standing for a third term in office, dealing a blow to opposition communists who are seeking to reassert a hold on power.
The small ex-Soviet republic, one of Europe’s poorest states, has been governed by a pro-Western coalition called the Alliance for European Integration since July 2009.
But the communists have sought to use a year-long political impasse, which has blocked the election of a state president and paralysed reform, to try to organise a comeback.
The Alliance leadership has outmanoeuvred the communists by organising a referendum for Sept. 5 to decide whether the state president should be elected by a popular vote — a step that should help the coalition to consolidate its grip on power.
Bereft of a credible new candidate for president, the communists had been looking to Voronin, a veteran politician who served two terms as president, to run again.
But the Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that another term was out of the question for Voronin, who quit in September 2009. The constitution bars anyone from being president for three consecutive terms.
Parliamentary official Ion Plesca, who took the Voronin issue to the court, said it had ruled there had been only interim leaders over the past year and that Voronin, if he stood, would effectively be seeking a third successive term.
"There is no other good candidate from the communist party, we can state that quite categorically," Plesca told journalists.
Up to now the president has been elected by parliament, and the powerful communist parliamentary faction twice blocked the Alliance’s candidate, centre-left politician Marian Lupu.
DRAIN ON ENERGY
The long deadlock is draining political energy needed to enact reform in the tiny republic, locked between Ukraine and EU member Romania, where average pay is less than $300 a month.
It suffers from widespread corruption, its judiciary, police and state security are politicised and its media tends to toe the line of those in power.
Diplomats say the country urgently needs reform for it to be taken seriously as a possible European Union member one day.
Moldova tries to balance closer integration with the EU with maintaining good ties with its former Soviet master Russia — a major trading partner and provider of loans and energy supplies.
Relations with Moscow, however, are strained after acting president Mihai Ghimpu, a fierce anti-communist, proclaimed June 28 as "Soviet Occupation Day" — a critical reference to the Soviet Union’s role in the regional carve-up of eastern and central Europe around the time of World War Two.
Moscow says it has since barred tens of thousands of bottles of Moldovan wine from sale in Russia.
Opinion polls have regularly shown that people heavily favour direct, popular elections for president rather than a parliamentary vote and the September referendum seems certain to result in a Yes vote for a change to the voting system.
Assuming this, analysts expect parallel elections for both president and a new parliament to be held on Nov. 14.
The four-party Alliance might not this time field a single candidate, however. Prime Minister Vlad Filat, of the Liberal Democratic party, said on Tuesday he saw himself as a good candidate, while the politically-experienced Lupu, whose Democratic party is on the left in the Alliance, is also expected to run.
