The Agrarian Party of Moldova (, PAM), formerly the Democratic Agrarian Party of Moldova (Partidul Democrat Agrar din Moldova, PDAM), is a Moldovan political party that was prominent from 1991 to 1998. Governing for most of this period, the party represented a large centrist multi-ethnic bloc led by former collective farm chairmen and village mayors. These reformed Communists were motivated more by patronage than ideology and committed to maintaining their positions of power in the privatised agricultural and agro-industrial sector. To its right stood the pan-Romanians of the Popular Front, and to its left, the Socialists and later the Communists.
History
The Agrarian Party traces its origins to a parliamentary club numbering 60 deputies and called Viaţa Satului ("The Life of the Village"), set up in April 1990. The party was formally created in November 1991, three months after Moldova's independence from the Soviet Union; Dumitru Moţpan was its first president. At the time, the sitting Moldovan Parliament was the one elected in 1990, when non-Communist parties were still banned, and deputies freely entered and exited nascent parties in a chaotic environment. In this way, the PDAM, with its clear policy orientation, institutional power base and good organisation, quickly gained the most seats and became the effective governing party, standing at the centre of the national unity government formed in mid-1992 following the end of hostilities in the War of Transnistria. Composed largely of the former Communist agricultural and agro-industrial elite, the party championed Moldovan sovereignty, opposing attempts to join Romania and Russia. For a time, its most radical members rejected the Front's description of Moldovans' ethnicity and language as Romanian, maintaining the Soviet view of an ethnic distinction between Romanians and Moldovans. By 1994, this ideology, sometimes called Moldovenism, had become a central tenet of the party's platform. It was notably promoted in a speech by the party's most prominent spokesman at the time, President Mircea Snegur, marking a shift from his earlier more pro-Romanian stance.
The speech undoubtedly helped propel the Agrarian Democrats to victory in the February 1994 election, the country's first since independence. The Front's weakening since 1990 had already shown the unpopularity of pan-Romanian notions, and Snegur's rhetoric was against union with Romania and in favour of independence and territorial integrity. At the election, the Front finished in last place of the parties elected and the PDAM's 43.2% of the vote translated into an absolute majority in parliament (56 of 104 seats). Further confirming the popularity of government policy, at a referendum the following month, 95.4% voted that Moldova should remain an "independent and unitary state", while at the 1995 local elections, the party scored 47% of the vote.
Following the 1994 election, the Agrarians reversed a number of Frontist reforms enacted a few years earlier. Parliament voted to drop "Deşteaptă-te, române!", used in Romania as well, as the national anthem. The Constitution of Moldova, adopted by Parliament in July 1994, describes that state language as the "Moldovan language" and makes no reference to its relationship with Romanian, as did the 1989 language laws. Language tests mandated for state employees by those laws were suspended, and the State Department of Languages, which had previously conducted "raids" on institutions to ensure employees knew the official language, virtually shut down. These measures ended language as a major political issue and made Moldova de facto bilingual. The party also supported autonomy for the Gagauz, which soon manifested itself in the creation of Gagauzia. Furthermore, it backed closer relations with Russia and the former Soviet republics, calling for participation in the CIS' economic structures but not its political or military ones (Moldova joined the CIS in 1994), and advocating permanent neutrality and the banning of foreign troops from the country (then as now stationed in Transnistria). The PDAM wished for a slow transition to capitalism, continuing market reforms but with generous subsidies and credits for agriculture.