Tango and Shore
The new political season in Chisinau opened with a protest from the Shor party. Anti-war ones were added to the traditional social slogans of the protesters.
However, the mass protest ended in vain - the authorities continue to successfully ignore the demands of street demonstrators, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Swing for a ruble, exhaust for a penny
On the last day of winter, the first large-scale protest this year took place in Chisinau. The organizers were the “Movement for the People,” an unregistered public organization closely and openly associated with the Shor party of the Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor.
The party considers this approach a cunning loophole to circumvent the law. Political formations cannot be banned, since they do not directly organize a protest. And the authorities will not be able to ban a social movement either - after all, it is not registered anyway. True, at the same time, it turns out that there is no one to be held responsible for possible excesses and incidents with the rally participants, and the entire action is illegal.
Namely, the protest action on February 28 began with excesses. Since early morning, the police notified the public about the closure of a number of central streets in Chisinau, allegedly under the pretext of ensuring security for the visit of the Greek President, which was supposed to take place only in the evening.
At the same time, enhanced security measures were taken by law enforcement agencies at the entrance to the capital.
In the morning, the world's media watched on cameras a string of columns stuck at the entrance to Chisinau. It was the police who stopped hundreds of buses and minibuses that were carrying hundreds of participants from the districts to the protest. Patrol police crews forced the buses to pull to the side of the road, unload passengers and wait until some decision was made from above.
In response, citizens who did not make it to the rally organized protests right on the highway. Thus, with the direct input of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the General Inspectorate of Police, the most striking idea of today's rally was born - a blocked highway of republican significance. However, the overlap was very conditional. The protesters stood and shouted slogans:Down with Sandu!“right on the highway, but at the first request of the police, they opened the corridors and let the accumulated cars through to Chisinau.
A few hours later, after photos and videos of the blocked highway hit the Russian and Western news feeds, the police, without explanation, allowed the protesters to board buses and proceed to the center of Chisinau.
It was there that another group of protest participants gathered near the capital’s city hall building. The protesters demanded the resignation of President Sandu and the entire cabinet.
At the same time, the protest organizers asked the government to compensate all low-income residents of Moldova for heat and gas bills this winter and to cancel the increase in military spending in the budget.
Towards the end, the leaders of the protesters, deputy from the Shor party Marina Tauber and the chairman of the Orhei district Dinu Turcanu, together with their comrades, tried to break through the thin police cordon and, after failure, announced the end of the rally.
Reverse with obverse
“First of all, we are convinced that the tyrant in a skirt is completely out of touch with the people,” the oligarch politician Ilan Shor, who has been in Israel for several years, cheerfully summed up the rally on his Telegram channel. “The second immutable truth is that that the people, impoverished by a group of impostors in the government, have reached the brink. They have nothing left to lose."
These words are confirmed by sociological surveys published yesterday. According to them, Maia Sandu leads the anti-rating of politicians with a record 41,3% of the votes of respondents, and the currently ruling pro-presidential party is guaranteed to lose power in the event of early parliamentary elections.
But Ilan Shor, who claims to be the main figure of the Moldovan opposition, follows Sandu in the anti-rating with 29,7%, and the party led and financed by him from Israel is under no circumstances able to come to power on its own.
Shore is best known as an accomplice in the “theft of the century.” This is what they call a grandiose crime in Moldova, during which funds in the amount of 1/3 of GDP were withdrawn from the country’s three largest banks, which immediately collapsed the economy, the national currency, the financial and banking systems, and doubled inflation. The main bank participating in the scheme was personally managed by Shor, the documents on the withdrawal of budget funds to offshore companies bear his signatures, a Moldovan court sentenced him to a long prison term for fraud and, in fact, the former mayor of Orhei escaped from execution of the sentence and fled to Israel. As you know, there is no extradition from Tel Aviv.
It is no wonder that Ilan Shor manages to gather only completely desperate people at the protest, and even then he has to bring them to the capital at his own expense, including “travel allowances” and “per diem allowances.” Under such conditions, impoverished residents of Moldova are ready to stand at rallies under “Down with Sandu!” posters, but they are not going to fight the regime and the security forces defending it. What today’s action showed is that after a short fuss with police officers in protective equipment in the center of Chisinau, people simply dispersed.
War dance
In the current climate of Moldovan political life, the absurd regime of the narrow-minded and hysterical Sandu and the imitative rallies of the fugitive swindler Shor have become two sides of the same coin. They depend on each other for their existence.
The Israeli fugitive is worried about the safety of the business remaining in Moldova, and the “tyrant in a skirt” keeps Shor’s schemes and companies intact. However, when Maia Sandu announces Russia’s imminent attempt to organize a coup in Moldova, on the same day Ilan Shor and his party announce the start of large-scale protests, and even carry them out. True, without any result, and this has been the case for two years. But for the Western partners of the ruling regime, there is always the opportunity to show a picture of a “hybrid threat” from a pseudo-pro-Russian politician.
It seems that this protracted show will be put to rest only by the impending catastrophe in the Transnistrian region, towards which the duo of the “tyrant” and the swindler are leading Moldova with a persistence worthy of better use. On the other hand, thirty years ago the Republic of Moldova was already ruled by the voluntarist Popular Front, to which the war had written off a lot.
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