Andrei Năstase. CC BY-SA 4.0 Andy.redbrick / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.Andrei Năstase is the new mayor of Chișinău. The candidate from Platform “Dignity and Truth” won 52.57% of the vote in Moldova’s capital, compared to his opponent, Ion Ceban, the candidate of the Party of Socialists, who won 47.43% of the vote.
As with all recent electoral campaigns in Moldova, the Chișinău mayoral race was a dirty electoral campaign. At one point, an audio recording of Andrei Năstase talking to his mother about her participation in a party event was leaked. But it was also a campaign marked by a lack of any “grand visions” of the city which could capture citizens’ imaginations and inspire them to dream and act.
But Năstase’s victory on Sunday is, in a way, less surprising than his progress into the second round two weeks ago. Before the first round of elections on 20 May, the polls and most of the political commentators put Năstase firmly in third place. Năstase, 42, was considered a potential but somewhat improbable contender for the second round. He doesn’t have a strong local profile in the city: he has no experience in dealing with urban problems, and his political party has not participated in any significant local urban battle (the city was almost totally absent from his party’s political agenda). Likewise, Năstase’s programme for the city was far from original and not much different from those of his opponents, and comprised the traditional mix of better urban governance, transparency and anti-corruption.
