I interviewed a parliamentary deputy of the Socialist Party yesterday, it was a relief because I was starting to think it would never happen. Persistence works I guess. I’m meeting the Communist Party spokesperson today. I’ve put a lot of effort into reading about these elections and have already started writing an article, I really hope someone runs with it.

As part of this I bought a Moldovan SIM card on pre-paid plan. It turns out you can’t actually call people on a roaming tariff here, not on giffgaff anyway.

The Socialist Party worries me. Yesterday I wrote that Moldova looks a lot like Italy, and I wonder whether that also holds true for the politics. The Italian ‘Road to Socialism’ was paved with reforms, strategic concessions, alliances of different social groups. They won power in elections, and lost it in elections too.

In Moldova, eight years of communists in government ensured adequate funding for basic welfare (education, health, housing), kept the retirement age at 62. The government even launched a (cautious) privatisation programme. The history doesn’t suggest anything partticularly turbulent, yet they were still forcibly ejected from power in 2009 by a right-wing street movement which appealed to democratic order.

However, regime-change efforts aside, the PCRM remains pretty popular, and still has a loyal support base.

The socialists come in as a party which takes advantage of that positive attitude, while mixing in a large dose of nationalism and ‘traditional values’. Maybe that’s appropriate here, but it still bothers me.

Since I had some time before the interview I visited the national art museum. It’s a bit of a mess, I got in through a side door and was shown through two galleries before being told that the rest of the museum is just down the road.

The 19th century paintings were nothing new, portraits of aristocrats sitting bolt upright with eyes glazed over. Slightly chubby ladies holding babies, eating fruit, and wearing impractically small amounts of clothing. The 20th Century paintings were the standard social realist tropes I recognise: women teaching other women to read, workers on the collective farm. There was one painting of two priests smoking, which was labelled as controversial, but I’m not convinced that it should be. There’s nothing in the bible saying priests can’t have a cigarette or two.

At the end of the gallery were soviet modernist paintings: photos pasted into paintings, simplified figures, exaggerated colours, repetition of patterns. Cool, avant-garde, but again even the mould-breaking art was conventional enough to recognise.

I slept badly, someone in the bed next to mine in the hostel left for a flight at 4am and made loads of noise. Same problem last night, heat and noise kept me awake.