Pro-Russian Wins Moldova Presidency

Moldova’s first post-Soviet president conceded defeat Monday in his race for reelection against a onetime Communist boss who favors reviving the nation’s depressed economy through closer ties with Russia.

Near-complete returns gave 54% of the vote in Sunday’s runoff to Petru Lucinschi, Moldova’s last Communist Party chief in Soviet times and now chairman of its Parliament, and 46% to President Mircea I. Snegur.

The outcome pleased Moscow, which is trying to draw the former Soviet republics into a closer alliance of independent states and has made no secret of its preference for the 56-year-old challenger.

Analysts in Moscow said Lucinschi’s victory could pave the way for the settlement of a secessionist rebellion by ethnic Russians in Moldova’s industrial Dniester region.

Snegur’s prompt pledge to hand over power was also a plus for democracy in the former Soviet bloc following recent elections marred by widespread irregularities favoring entrenched incumbents in Armenia and Belarus.

When given a choice, voters this fall have been rejecting neo-Communist candidates across Eastern Europe. But Moldova’s 4.4 million people, who live in one of the smallest former Soviet lands, saw little ideological difference between Snegur and Lucinschi.

Born the same year, both rose quickly as Communist Party apparatchiks. Snegur became president of Soviet Moldova and in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, recast himself as a moderate nationalist to win the office in an uncontested popular vote.

Lucinschi was the slick, progressive-minded Communist boss who helped Snegur defuse a 1989 riot by nationalists but fell from power two years later when Snegur banned the party. After a stint as ambassador to Russia, he came home in 1993 to stage a political comeback, winning election to Parliament as an independent social democrat.

As the leader of Parliament, he accepted most of Snegur’s free-market reforms--including the sell-off of state-owned industry and sharp cutbacks in deficit spending that have yielded one of the lowest inflation rates and most stable currencies in the region.

But as a candidate, Lucinschi attacked the government program as “savage capitalism” and opposed the privatization of farmland. Leftist parties united behind him.

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To many voters, the main difference between the two cautiously reformed Communists was that Snegur was the incumbent. In an economy that has shrunk by 60% since 1990, and where the average monthly wage of $33 buys less than half a basket of basic consumer goods, that hurt.

In the first round of balloting Nov. 17, the president, a populist with strong rural support in the wine-growing country, polled 39% of the vote to lead the pack. But his estranged prime minister, who finished third, led other also-rans in opposing him in the runoff.

Without renouncing his openness to Western aid, Lucinschi campaigned openly as Moscow’s man in Moldova. He played on fears in the Russian-speaking third of the population about Snegur’s call for closer ties with Romania, from whose territory and people Josef Stalin carved most of the Soviet republic in 1940.

“I have close personal contacts with the Russian leadership, and I intend to use them for the benefit of our country,” Lucinschi told reporters Monday in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital.