(Adnkronos) – Presidential elections and a non-binding referendum on joining the European Union will be held on Sunday in Moldova ahead of the vote, far more at risk and decisive for the country’s future, for the legislative elections in 2025. The Moldovan community in Italy, the largest in a European country, will have the opportunity to vote in 66 locations. Challenging the incumbent President, the pro-Western Maia Sandu, the favorite in the polls, are ten other candidates, all with ties to Moscow, albeit to varying degrees, although since February 2022 no politician in Moldova has explicitly admitted to being pro-Russian.
Among the challengers most likely to reach the runoff with Sandu is Alexandr Stoianoglo, the former Attorney General, who was forced to resign for corruption shortly after Sandu’s arrival as President in 2020, although a subsequent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights found that his right to a fair trial had been violated. For the Socialist Party candidate, it is important to maintain positive relations with Moscow, but he too says he is not opposed to Moldova’s integration with the EU. He is expected to win 10-11 percent of the vote, compared to 30-40 percent for Sandu, according to the latest polls.
Sunday’s vote is important in the country traditionally divided between pro-Russians and pro-Europeans, also because it will give an indication of how much real influence Russia still has. 63 percent of Moldovans say they are in favor of greater integration with the European Union, but only 52 percent think that the majority of their fellow citizens are pro-European, a distortion that confirms the persistent power of the Russian narrative in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. While the outcome of the presidential election seems certain, the outcome of the referendum is more volatile.
After these years of Sandu’s presidency and following the invasion of Ukraine by Moscow’s forces, and the huge influx of Ukrainian refugees who also arrived in Moldova, Chisinau’s political and economic axis has shifted towards Europe. But Moscow has invested – up to the equivalent of 100 million euros, it is said – in propaganda, with much misinformation of a misogynistic nature against the country’s first female president and the other women in government, with vote-buying, the spread of fake news to influence the outcome, and even the sponsorship of possible actions such as the seizure of public buildings on the day the polls open.
Moscow’s goals are to derail Moldova’s EU integration process and to have greater influence after next year’s parliamentary elections, rather than the victory of its candidate in the presidential vote. In the long term, Moscow still hopes to complete its control of part of Ukraine and thus bring Moldova back under its sphere of influence.
A Moscow-linked network is said to have involved 130,000 voters, 10 percent of those who normally vote, to vote ‘no’ in the referendum and support candidates other than Sandu in the presidential election. The Kremlin denies this, but points out that many in Moldova want positive relations with Moscow, denouncing that they are being denied the right to choose their favorite newspapers and politicians.
Among the most active pro-Russian actors in Moldova, even from abroad, the only one to continue to openly support a pro-Moscow position, is the tycoon Ilan Shor, now living in Russia, against whom an arrest warrant has been issued in absentia in his country and a 15-year prison sentence for fraud, for stealing hundreds of millions of euros of public funds. He is said to have transferred the money, several million euros, needed to buy votes.
He was the one who posted hundreds of fake posts about Sandu on Facebook, viewed 155 million times, as discovered by the NGO “#ShePersisted”. And it was he, according to the complaint of police chief Viorel Cernauteanu, who plastered the streets of Chisinau with the poster ‘No EU’ in Russian and Romanian. Shor also promised $28 to anyone who signed up for the Telegram channel “Stop EU,” which was later suspended by the platform for violating local rules.
Running as an independent in Sunday’s election is Irina Vlah, the former governor of the southern autonomous region of Gagauzia, whose proximity to Moscow is not in doubt, if only because of her frequent missions to Russia since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Although Vlah, who has been pictured alongside Shor’s representatives on several occasions, now claims not to be opposed to an EU integration process, she is not expected to win more than six percent of the vote. The new governor of Gagauzia is Evghenia Gutul, supported by Shor as well as the Shor Party.
Also running on a platform in favor of relations with Moscow is the candidate of the Future of Moldova party, former Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev, head of the “Friends of Russia in Moldova” group and considered a protégé of Shor, who has taken control of the Renaissance Party that Tarlev founded in 2012. But the politician is not credited with more than 2 percent of the vote on Sunday. Other contenders include Renato Usatii, leader of “Our Party,” with 6.8 percent of the vote expected, former Prime Minister Ion Chicu, nominated by the Party for the Development and Consolidation of Moldova, at 3 percent, and journalist Natalia Morari, at 1 percent. All of them have had contacts with the Russian elite in the past. They are not expected to pose any problems in the presidential elections, but in the parliamentary elections they risk depriving Sandu’s ‘Action and Solidarity’ Party of the majority it needs to govern.
Sandu is running for a second term and has called a referendum in which she is asking her compatriots to vote ‘yes’ to the start of negotiations for accession to the European Union, in order to enshrine the ‘strategic objective’ of the European path in the constitution. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, on a visit to Chisinau last week, pledged 1.8 billion euros in financial support to Chisinau.
Moldova has a population of 2.8 million. The country no longer buys gas from Russia (to buy it on the Romanian market) after 30 years of total dependence. Russian gas now only flows into Transnistria, the region isolated since the early 1990s, with Russian ‘peacekeepers’ acting as a buffer force, but also, for two years now, many Ukrainian displaced persons changing the narrative (although the rest of the country continues to receive electricity from the Cuciurgan power plant in Transnistria, which is powered by gas that Moscow transfers free of charge to the breakaway region). Russia has stopped cultivating genuine support in Moldovan society, even in terms of commercial influence. Agricultural and wine products exported have reversed direction.
The real battle will therefore be the parliamentary elections: after the 2021 victory, Action and Solidarity will find it more difficult, according to the polls, to maintain a majority in Parliament. The appointment, therefore, rather than after the run-off vote, seems to have been postponed until 2025. A victory for the ‘no’ vote in the referendum, or its invalidity because at least 30 percent of those eligible to vote did not vote, would strengthen Moscow’s voice in the coming months.
