Romanian member of the European Parliament, Marian Jean Marinescu, participating as observer in the Moldova elections, declared in an interview for HotNews.ro that there are strong suspicions regarding the number of electors who participated in the scrutiny on Sunday. "The number announced by the Central Office was 2,540,000 people, some 150,000 more than those who participated last year at the local elections. The figure is important because the scrutiny would have been annulled in case the turnout was under 50%", said Marinescu.

According to the official, there was nothing to announce the recent development of events, the scrutiny on Sunday being extremely calm. The main problem that led to protests, Marinescu believes, is the big difference between the exit polls on Sunday night, which indicated 44% of the votes for the Communists, and the final results - 50%, which allows the party to nominate the president.

"I repeatedly asked which is the total population with a right to vote in Moldova. I haven't got an answer", said the official. "To have a population of 1,200,000 people under 18 years old, for a population of 3,600,000 seems a lot to me, and even more when we consider that official data indicates a population decrease. How can the population decrease when there are so many children?".

"Adding up, the turnout looks to be around 75%. They voted using anything they could - expired identification documents, Soviet passports, the so-called "9th form" released to people who have no documents or refuse the ID card arguing that the ID code has 13 digits. One can speculate, under these circumstances, on the number of votes", said Marinescu.