Deep Dive: What Campaign Promises are the Parties Making?
Part 1: A birds eye view of the party's programs and promises
Today we’re going to take a look at what the main electoral contenders are promising to their voters. To get some inspiration for this article, I looked back at my 2021 piece that covered the same topic in the last elections. In it, I opened with a short description of what a party program is and I’ll just reshare that here to get us started:
In Moldovan politics, as in most democracies, parties and candidates produce a program of action, or party platform, describing what they want to do if elected. In parliamentary democracies like Moldova this is an outline of the party’s priorities and could serve to indicate how they plan to govern IF they were to win an absolute majority in Parliament. Since it is extremely rare in Moldova for a party to win an absolute majority, the party program is just the first of two important programs in an election. The second is the “Government Program” which is compiled and presented to parliament by the party or parties that form a Government, either alone or in coalition. If two parties form a coalition, they merge their programs based on which party takes which ministry and so forth. So it’s important to realize that while these are the promises of one party, they are rarely very binding as this is only one step in a long process of getting to power.
In theory, each party creates their party program in some democratic fashion where their members bring forward their priorities and lay out a vision. In practice, parties have wildly different approaches to their program and structure. PAS has typically used their program as a campaign tool - laying out actual promises to voters. This is more unusual than you would think as the Socialist and Communist parties have traditionally put out encyclopedia length policy documents with random manifestoes peppered throughout. Back when the Shor Party existed, he basically didn’t put out any program at all.
So to start, let’s dive into the how the parties approached the program and what they emphasize as their top-line policies. We’ll look at what their main argument is and how they pitch their program to voters. Then, in Part 2 of this series we’ll dive into some key policy areas and see what each party says.
For reference, I’m going to focus on the parties that I wrote about 2 weeks back as the top 4 that I’m watching in this election. If you want to go back and look at which parties are real contenders check out that article:
