Moldova voted Sunday in a parliamentary election that aims to end a prolonged power vacuum in Europe's poorest country as it seeks to establish EU membership and sustainable growth.

The vote pits two familiar rivals: a weak ruling coalition of liberal forces and a community party that is just strong enough to block the selection of a President who will pull the struggling country further from its Soviet past.

The resulting standoff has seen Moldovans go to the polls on four occasions in less than two years — three times to pick a new parliament and once to alter the constitution to have the president elected through direct suffrage.

But that effort to break the crisis failed as frustrated voters simply stayed at home. and turnout could again be a problem Sunday as the nation tries to break free from a political crisis that has dampened public morale.

"There is not a single Moldova party that can come to power and rule on its own," Prime Minister Vlad Filat conceded this week.

"We will have to sit down at the negotiating table after the election and decide on a brand new democratic coalition," the liberal leader said.

The brittle alliance of liberal parties succeeded the pro-Moscow Communists in July 2009. But the country has remained without a full-time president for more than a year and polls show this vote could also prove inconclusive.

Yet this drift can hardly be afforded by a nation where per capita Gross National Income (GNI) is estimated at 1,590 dollars and which remains both isolated from the European Union and on bad terms with Russia.

The vote is being watched closely in the Kremlin keen to avoid losing influence on the EU frontier.

Much of the Moscow media is painting the election as a battle between pro-Russian allies and reckless parties that are trying to push the country into an untrustworthy alliance with the West.

It has also highlighted the political problems that the former Soviet republic encountered since it chose closer relations with its western neighbour Romania.

Moldova was in fact a part of Romania between 1918 and World War II — when it was annexed into the Soviet Union by Stalin.

It remains a Romanian-speaking country with strong cultural ties to Russia and the mix has proven dangerous in the past.

Two people died in April 2009 when protesters successfully demanded a recall of what they saw as a rigged communist party election win.

The uprising was led by the youth and became known as the twitter revolution — a protest that was kept alive by through instant phone messages and chat rooms on the Internet.

That youthful optimism transformed itself into a slim win by the liberals in July 2009. But the communist party managed to block its choice of president and the capital has been wracked by political crisis ever since.

Its problems meanwhile keep piling up.

The country has struggled to recover from the global financial implosion of 2009 and the government still does not control transdniestr — a region where pro-Russian authorities have created a self-declared but unrecognised republic that remains in an effective Soviet time warp.

Local authorities will not let transdniestr residents take part in these elections but the Chisinau leadership has set up polling stations along a river that separates the enclave from the rest of the country.

Moldovans resident abroad could also play an important role in the vote. The former communist authorities made little effort to set up voting stations abroad knowing that expatriate votes would largely count against them.

This time, however, a total of 75 polling stations will be opened in foreign countries.