(Analysis) Will defections harm the Party of Communists?

This weekend, the fifth Party of Communists (PC) M.P. announced that she would be leaving the party and moving to the Moldova Unita [United Moldova] Party. Svetlana Rusu is thusly joining four other M.P.s who left last year because they were unhappy with the PC's decision to boycott the presidential elections and to push for an early legislative poll.

Will these defections affect the Party of Communists, however?

History shows that defections by leading Communist figures have produced a mixed record in the past. On the one hand, former Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev, who was cabinet head during most of the 2000s and, while in office, had high polling numbers, has been notoriously unable to have any success at the polls with any of the parties he either headed or joined after he had a falling out with the PC.

On the other hand, Marian Lupu seems to have boosted the Democratic Party's popularity after he defected from the Communists in April 2009. Many analysts now say that Mr. Lupu's party will gain even more seats during early legislative elections.

It is unclear how Vladimir Turcan, the leading and most well-known recent Communist defector, will do. He was recently elected as head of Moldova Unita and intends to make his new party a strong left-wing competitor, most of whose electorate will have to come from the Communists and the Democrats. But Mr. Turcan has never stood out as an impressive politician and has always lived in the shadow of PC head and former President Vladimir Voronin. Whether he managed to develop his own political identity remains to be seen.

Some analysts have said that anything that fragments the former ruling party is good for democracy since it weakens what had essentially become an authoritarian monolith headed by former President Vladimir Voronin. But Moldova Noastra is not visibly different in terms of its policy preferences from the PC: both parties are pro-Russian, skeptical of ties with the West, and reject any references to Romanian being Moldova's state language and the main ethnicity in the country (they say this ethnicity and language are Moldovan). Both stress Moldova's statehood and are adamantly against NATO integration.

As a result, we may be witnessing the decentralization of the PC's message instead of its disintegration. The two processes are completely different. The former would suggest that the PC has formed a number of politicians that continue to basically push the party's message, with some tweaks here and there, separately from the party. The latter would indicate the weakening of the Communists.

Moreover, a PC with 43 seats is still a strong party. For a political group shaken by accusations of staging the April mass unrest, of at least being aware of the police forces torturing hundreds of young people after April 7, by the loss of Marian Lupu (one of the most popular politicians in the country, especially with centrist voters), and by Vladimir Turcan's departure, the party's resilience has been impressive thus far. Polls show that the PC continues to remain popular with many Moldovans and that it will be a strong competitor during the early legislative elections. The Communists also seem to have consolidated their popularity among the Russian-speaking minority in Moldova. It is unclear if the Democrats and Moldova Unita will manage to make in-roads into this portion of the electorate.

In short, the PC's seeming fragmentation is much more of a trickle than a deluge, at least so far. And trickles are much easier to stop. The Communists could very well pull that off.