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Dumitru Braghis was prime minister of Moldova and is currently the leader of the Moldova Noastra faction in parliament, the third largest faction of deputies. Moldova Noastra recently entered into an electoral alliance with two other centrist parties to form the Moldova Democrata bloc. This interview was conducted in Chisinau on August 31, 2004, by Demokratizatsiya founder Fredo Arias-King.
Demokratizatsiya: How do you see the general atmosphere here in Moldova, a few months before the general elections? Do you think the Communist Party will keep its super majority, will it decrease to a simple majority, or do you think they may even lose the majority?
Braghis: Well, it depends on many things. It's too early to say whether they will lose or whether they will have the majority in parliament. What is clear for me is that, in the last year, I think that they have started to lose their popularity; they have begun to lose some of the results that they had achieved in the previous years. More and more people are beginning to understand that not all that had been announced before reflects the real situation. And because of this, the position of the Communist Party is not what it was ten or fifteen months ago.
Demokratizatsiya: Even in that short period of time you have noticed a decline?
Braghis: But at the same time, it does not mean that this will have a negative impact on the elections. The popularity of their leader [Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin] is still too high, and this may cause a lot of problems for us, I mean for the democratic parties, because of many reasons. First of all, they have total control over the media. And this is perhaps the main problem, because we do not have access to the media, to the national media. And the second question is that we cannot say that we have an independent judiciary system.
Demokratizatsiya: Everybody is complaining about that.
Braghis: When you have problems and you need to go to the courts and the courts are independent, then you cannot complain. But when the court is controlled by the Communist Party, then it's clear that it's almost impossible. I think that these two questions-the independence of the media...