Chisinau City Hall. Public Domain Mirek237 / Wikipedia. This Sunday, local elections are scheduled to take place in Chișinău and Bălți — the capital and second largest city of Moldova respectively. These elections were announced after the mayors of these two cities, Dorin Chirtoacă (Chișinău) and Renato Usatîi (Bălți), resigned from their posts.
Renato Usatîi, elected as mayor of Bălți in 2015, resigned in February 2018 after living for over a year in Moscow, hiding from Moldovan law enforcement. Moldovan prosecutors claim that Usatîi was involved in a criminal plot that intended to assassinate Russian banker German Gorbuntsov in London in 2012. In response to these allegations, Usatîi fled to Moscow in 2014 and attempted to rule the city from the Russian capital for more than a year. As the tensions between him and Vladimir Plahotniuc (an oligarch believed to control most of the Moldovan government) grew, Usatîi found it difficult to govern the city from afar. Last fall he announced his intention to conduct a local referendum in Bălți in order to confirm his popularity, but the authorities in Moldova dismissed the initiative due to procedural violations. Then, in February this year, Usatîi unexpectedly announced his resignation, citing political and police pressure on city councillors from his political party. He expressed hopes that after the elections Bălți would have a “normal mayor and normal rule”.
In Chișinău, Dorin Chirtoacă’s path to resignation was more convoluted. In February-March 2017, Moldova’s Liberal Party, which Chirtoacă has been vice president of since 2005, was formally still an important component and enthusiast supporter of the ruling coalition. Then, after the Liberal Party refused to support the modification of Moldova’s electoral system (from a proportional to a mixed system), the trouble began. First, Chirtoacă was arrested on claims that he was involved in a dubious scheme that extorted money from the city’s parking system. Later he was released, but the court ruled that he should be temporarily suspended from his position and placed under house arrest during the investigation.
