Moldova votes on its future on Sunday but Moscow tries to ‘buy’ its influence

The presidential elections and the non-binding referendum on membership of the European Union will be held on Sunday in Moldova in view of the vote, much 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 outgoing President, the pro-Western Maia Sandu, favored in the polls, are ten other candidates, all with ties to Moscow albeit to varying degrees, even if since February 2022 no political exponent in Moldova more explicitly admits pro-Russian positions.

Among the challengers most likely to reach the run-off round with Sandu is Alexandr Stoianoglo, former Attorney General, forced to resign for corruption shortly after Sandu’s arrival as President in 2020, although following a ruling from the European Court of human rights sanctioned the violation of his right to a fair trial. For the candidate of the Socialist Party it is important to maintain positive relations with Moscow but he does not say he is against Moldova’s integration with the EU either. He should get 10-11 percent of the vote, against the 30-40 percent expected for Sandu, the most recent polls indicate.

Sunday’s vote is important in the country traditionally divided between pro-Russian and pro-European groups also because it will allow us to understand how much real influence Russia still has. 63 percent of Moldovans say they are in favor of greater integration into 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 . If the outcome of the presidential elections seems certain, that of the referendum is more volatile.

After these years of Sandu’s presidency and after the invasion of Ukraine by Moscow’s forces, and the enormous flow of Ukrainian refugees also arriving 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 a lot of misogynistic disinformation against the first female President of the country and the other women in government, with vote buying, spreading false news to influence the outcome and also the sponsorship of possible actions such as the seizure of public buildings on the day the polls open.

Moscow’s objectives are to derail Moldova’s integration process into the EU and to have greater influence after next year’s legislative elections, rather than the victory of one of its candidates in the presidential vote. In the long term, Moscow still hopes to complete control over part of Ukraine and therefore to regain Moldova under its sphere of influence.

A network linked to Moscow would have involved 130 thousand voters, ten percent of those who normally go to vote, to vote ‘no’ in the referendum and support other candidates other than Sandu in the presidential elections. The Kremlin denies but specifies that many in Moldova want positive relations with Moscow, denouncing that they are denied the right to choose their favorite newspapers and politicians.

Among the most active pro-Russian actors in Moldova also from abroad, the only one who continues to openly support a position favorable to Moscow, there is the tycoon Ilan Shor, now resident in Russia, against whom in his country An arrest warrant and a 15-year prison sentence were issued in absentia for fraud, for stealing hundreds of millions of euros of public funds. He would have been the one to transfer the money, several million euros, necessary to buy votes.

It was he who had hundreds of ‘fakes’ against Sandu published on Facebook in posts viewed 155 million times, as the NGO “#ShePersisted” discovered. And it was he who, according to the complaint by police chief Viorel Cernauteanu, had the streets of Chisinau plastered with the ‘No EU’ poster in Russian and Romanian. Shor also promised $28 to anyone who signs up to the “Stop EU” Telegram channel which was later suspended from the platform for violating local rules.

In Sunday’s elections, Irina Vlah, the former governor of the southern autonomous region of Gagauzia, is running as an independent, and there is no doubt about her closeness to Moscow, if only for her frequent missions to Russia even since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Although now Vlah, portrayed alongside Shor’s representatives on several occasions, maintains that she is not unfavorable to a process of integration into the EU. However, it should not get more than six percent of the votes. The new governor of Gagauzia is Evghenia Gutul, supported by Shor as well as the Vittoria party.

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 took control of the Party, also presents himself with a platform favorable to relations with Moscow of the Rebirth that Tarlev had founded in 2012. But the politician is not credited with more than 2 percent of the votes on Sunday. Among the others in the running, the leader of “Our Party”, Renato Usatii, with 6.8 percent of the votes expected, the former Prime Minister Ion Chicu, nominated by the Party for the Development and Consolidation of Moldova, with 3 percent one hundred and the journalist Natalia Morari, at one. All have had contacts in the past with the Russian elite. In the presidential elections they should pose no problems, but in the legislative elections they risk depriving Sandu’s ‘Action and Solidarity’ party of the majority needed to govern.

Sandu is back for a second mandate and has promoted the referendum in which he asks for the “yes” of his compatriots to the start of negotiations for accession to the European Union, to write the ‘strategic objective’ of the European path into the constitution. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, visiting Chisinau last week, pledged €1.8 billion in financial support to Chisinau.

2.8 million people live in Moldova. The country no longer buys gas from Russia (to purchase it on the Romanian market) after 30 years of total dependence. Russian gas now flows only in Transnistria, the region isolated since the early 1990s, with Russian ‘blue helmets’ acting as an interposition force but also, for two years, many displaced Ukrainians to change the narrative (even if 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 pro-independence region). Russia has stopped cultivating genuine support in Moldovan society, including on the business influence front. Exported agricultural and wine products reversed direction.

The real battle will therefore be that of the legislative elections: after the 2021 victory, Action and Solidarity will have more difficulty, according to the polls, in maintaining the majority in Parliament. The appointment therefore, rather than after the run-off vote, seems to have been postponed to 2025. The victory of the no vote in the referendum, or its invalidity because at least 30 percent of those entitled to vote did not vote, would give strength to Moscow’s voice in the next months.