December 14 (SeeNews) - Moldova's Constitutional Court said it confirmed the results of last month's presidential elections, which gave the victory to Socialist Party (PSRM) leader Igor Dodon.
The court has rejected a challenge filed by Maia Sandu, leader of pro-European Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), shortly after the elections on November 13.
Sandu claimed that not enough polling stations were opened abroad and not enough ballots were available at some of the stations but the Constitutional Court decided that the alleged situation did not affect the outcome of the vote, the court said in a press release posted on its website late on Tuesday.
The president's inauguration will be held next week.
"Finally, exactly one month after the election the Constitutional Court of Moldova acknowledged the results of the nationwide vote. I have no doubt that this protraction was organized intentionally by my opponents in order to enable the authorities to pass a number of anti-popular decisions that I will not let them pass. These are a dubious appointment of a new prosecutor general, the opening of a NATO office in Moldova, the approval of a pension reform bill," Dodon told a news conference on Tuesday, according to a video recording of the event posted on Dodon's personal website.
According to the final results of the second round of the election, Dodon won 834,081 votes, or 52.11%, while Sandu got 766,593 votes or 47.89%.
Since his election Dodon has stepped down as party chairman, as the law does not allow the head of state to be a political party leader.
Dodon, born in 1975 in the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, is a university professor in economics. He has said that as president of Moldova, he plans to turn the country into a federation and to cancel the recently signed free trade agreement with the EU. Also, Dodon plans to end the conflict in Moldova's Russian-backed breakaway region of Transnistria and unify the region with Moldova.
In the first round of Moldova's presidential elections held on October 30 neither of the candidates gathered 51% of the votes needed to win outright. In the first round, Dodon received 47.98% of the votes, while Maia Sandu got 38.71%.
Moldova held its first direct presidential elections in 16 years after in March the Constitutional Court ruled that the president will be elected by popular vote. Since 2000, Moldova's president had been elected for a four-year term by a majority of 60% of the MPs in the 101-seat parliament.
The tiny landlocked ex-Soviet state of some 3 million people has strong historical and political ties with its western neighbour Romania, with more than 75% of the population speaking Romanian. However, some 10% of the population living predominantly in the internationally unrecognised separatist republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova in the 1990s, speak Russian and identify themselves as Russians.
($= 0.9426 euro)