Moldova's ruling Communist Party won the parliament elections on April 5 2009, securing just enough seats needed to elect its nominee as President of the country, preliminary results showed on April 6.

The Communists won 50 per cent of the vote and were projected to get 61 seats in the 101-seat unicameral legislature, the central electoral commission said after 98.1 per cent of the vote has been tallied. Turnout was 59.5 per cent, the election authority said.

That is also the number of MPs needed for the elections of the country's next president, which is voted by parliament. Incumbent Vladimir Voronin, the leader of the Communist Party, cannot stand for re-election after serving the constitutional limit of two terms.

During that time he was widely seen as the main decisional factor in government, even though the prime minister has more executive powers, according to the constitution. Voronin has said he does not plan to retire from public life and would remain actively involved in government, prompting speculation that he would follow the example of former Russian president Vladimir Putin, now the Russian prime minister.

Once the strongest supporter of closer ties with Russia, Voronin has adopted a more pro-European Union stance over the years. He is also an unrelenting advocate of a strong state presence in the economy and opposes free-market policies.

During his eight years as president, Moldova's economy posted growth of more than seven per cent four times and never below three per cent, according to official statistics. The bulk of the growth, however, came from agricultural exports and remittances from Moldovan workers abroad. Even though no official statistics are kept, unofficial estimates place the number of Moldovan expatriates, mainly in the EU but also Russia, at more than half a million people.

Opposition parties campaigned with programmes that emphasised more government support for small and medium-sized businesses, but their minimum wage and pension targets, as well as proposed high spending on education and healthcare, appeared ambitious and difficult to achieve in one of Europe's poorest countries, even without global economic downturn that is forecast to severely cut into the inflow of remittances.

Three centre and centre-right parties cleared the six per cent parliamentary threshold - the Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrat Party and the Our Moldova bloc. The trio is projected to win 15, 14 and 11 seats in parliament, respectively.

The nationalist and pro-Romanian Christian Democrat Popular Party has gathered only three per cent and will not be represented in parliament for the first time since Moldova declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Analysts have said that the party's tacit cooperation with some of the Communist policies, despite its loud public opposition, has disappointed most voters looking for an alternative to the status quo.

The Centrist Union, which advocated closer ties with Russia, won 2.8 per cent of the votes, unable to turn the high public approval ranking of former prime minister Vasile Tarlev, who quit the Communist Party in March 2008, into success at the polls.