In the end, the results were better than Moldova’s western allies had dared hope. In last Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the pro-EU party of Moldovan President Maia Sandu won a convincing victory, confirming the westward path of this former Soviet republic of 2.4 million people.
With nearly all votes counted, Sandu’s ruling Action and Solidarity Party (PAS) had secured 50.03 percent of the vote, compared with 24.26 percent for the pro-Russian Patriotic Bloc. The solid win came despite widespread reports of Russian meddling and a series of shocks that could have toppled any incumbent government.
Since the previous parliamentary elections in 2021, Russia’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine has led to the settling of 135,000 people in Moldova — the highest per capita number of Ukrainian refugees in the world — and an energy price shock that sent inflation spiraling to a 34 percent peak. Despite these headwinds, PAS saw its share of the vote drop by less than 3 percent compared with 2021.
For Sandu, a former World Bank official who was re-elected Moldova’s president last year, it is an emphatic victory. She wants Moldova to join the EU by 2030. With a secure parliamentary majority, rather than the divided coalition many pollsters had predicted, it should be easier to push through the demanding political and economic reforms required to join the union.
It was an equally important result for the EU, which has invested political capital in Moldova. The European Commission has pledged 1.9 billion euros (US$2.23 billion) in grants and cheap loans to Moldova to build infrastructure, such as roads, hospitals and internet cables to boost the economy and speed its arrival into the European single market. Last month, the leaders of Germany, France and Poland made a high-profile joint visit to Moldova on the anniversary of its independence to express solidarity.
However, sighs of relief are tempered by understanding that this is only one chapter in a long story.
“The fight is not over,” former Moldovan prime minister Natalia Gavrilita told a security conference in Warsaw on Monday. “Of course, we are very determined to carry out the reforms with all the challenges and capacity constraints and so on.”
Clara Volintiru, the head of the Bucharest office of the German Marshall Fund, said it was clear that electoral mobilization in favor of the pro-Moscow Patriotic Bloc had not been massive. However, that did not mean Russia’s “tactics of manipulation and interference” had failed, she cautioned, with Russian interference focused on the full electoral cycle, not just Sunday’s vote.
“The goal of the Russian interference is to amplify societal distrust, to diminish the confidence that the Moldovan public has not just in its government and president, but also in its European future,” she said.
In the run-up to the vote, Moldovan authorities accused Russia of spending hundreds of millions of euros in an attempt to tilt the results. Dozens of men were arrested, accused of traveling to Serbia for training in how to break through police cordons and resist security officers. Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation found that Orthodox priests in the highly religious country had been treated to all-expenses paid trips to Russia and received sums up to 1,200 euros — more than double the average monthly wage — for promoting anti-western narratives.
The Kremlin has denied meddling in Moldova’s elections.
Volintiru said Moldova was “a laboratory” where Russia was testing “a wide array of tools and tactics” that could be deployed in other European democracies. The analyst cited unpublished polling from the Moldovan government’s StratCom center she had knowledge of, which showed that 70 percent of the population felt an elevated level of anxiety.
“There is a widespread anxiety and fear across the population. And this is the end game of Russian interference, not just to promote one or another political option, but to make sure that the entire democratic process is challenged or there is doubt laying over it,” she said.
Against this backdrop, Moldova is pressing ahead with the ambitious goal of joining the EU by 2030. It is a high bar. During the past 18 years the EU has admitted only one country, Croatia, amid widespread mistrust of the enlargement process in western Europe, especially France, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Many politicians contend that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. French Minister Designate for European Affairs told the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday that after “a form of skepticism about enlargement in France … there has been a shift in the last few years,” as people realize that extending the bloc’s influence further to Ukraine, Moldova and western Balkans “is a geopolitical necessity that will export security and stability for Europe” and present an economic opportunity.
That does not mean the path is clear. Moldova’s EU membership talks are stalled, because Hungary’s Kremlin-friendly government refuses to open substantive negotiations with Ukraine. Ukraine’s and Moldova’s EU applications are informally linked, meaning one objection can stymie both.
European Council President Antonio Costa, who chairs EU summits, is trying to solve the problem by dropping the requirement for every step in the negotiating process to be approved by unanimity. Big milestones, such as opening and closing negotiations, would still require all members to agree, but other decisions — such as opening talks on EU policies — could proceed with a majority vote, the Guardian understands. In this way, Costa hopes to keep momentum for Moldova, Ukraine and western Balkan countries seeking to join the EU.
Volintru believes enlargement has become a question of political will, not simply a bureaucratic process.
“The geopolitical pressures are very high and I think Brussels understands very well the stakes that are involved,” she said.
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