Moldova: another EU-managed election

Sunday's election in Moldova followed a script similar to what occurred in Romania, with the spectre of “Russian interference” invoked to justify sweeping EU-NATO involvement in the electoral process

Many people have been asking me for my take on Sunday’s parliamentary election in Moldova, so here it is. Warning: it’s a longish read.

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Sunday’s parliamentary election in Moldova delivered a decisive victory for president Maia Sandu and her pro-EU Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), which won 50.2 percent of the vote, compared with 24.2 percent for the pro-Russian Patriotic Electoral Bloc (BEP).

The contest was framed as one of the most pivotal in Moldova’s modern history — a stark choice between alignment with the West or a return to Moscow’s orbit, between democracy and prosperity on one hand and autocracy and repression on the other.

Sandu herself described the ballot as the “most consequential” vote since independence, a decision that would determine whether Moldova would consolidate as a stable democracy or fall back under Russian influence. She argued that joining the EU would shield the country “from the greatest threat we face: Russia”.

Just days before the election, Sandu went on national television with her bluntest warning yet: Moldova’s sovereignty, she declared, faced “grave and immediate danger”. That same day, police detained seventy-four people and conducted nearly 250 raids, alleging that the suspects were acting in coordination with Moscow to provoke unrest ahead of the vote. Sandu denounced them as “domestic accomplices” of the Kremlin and urged citizens to resist manipulation.

On election day, she struck an even more dramatic tone: “Our dear home is in danger. Tomorrow might be too late”.

EU leaders and much of the European press amplified this framing, casting the election as a battle of “good versus evil”. Against this backdrop, Sandu’s victory has been widely presented as a triumph of democracy against outside interference. “The pro-Europeans won despite all this interference”, boasted Siegfried Mureșan, the Romanian MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s delegation to Moldova.

Hardly a free and fair election

A closer look, however, shows that Moldova’s elections were far from a victory for democracy. For months, the government had been warning of a Russian plot to manipulate the outcome through a disinformation campaign — a claim eagerly amplified by European politicians and media outlets. That narrative was then used to justify a sweeping crackdown on opposition voices.

Just days before the vote, the Central Election Commission (CEC) barred two pro-Russian parties — Heart of Moldova and Greater Moldova — from competing, citing allegations of illicit financing, voter bribery and undeclared foreign funds. Both parties had campaigned on strengthening ties with Moscow and directly challenged the pro-Western government. The CEC also struck all Heart of Moldova candidates from the Patriotic Electoral Bloc, PAS’s main rival, giving it just 24 hours to reconfigure its candidate lists.

Irina Vlah, president of Heart of Moldova and former governor of Gagauzia — an autonomous region where Sandu enjoys little support — denounced the move as “lawfare” aimed at silencing political opponents. The bans followed a series of hastily adopted laws rushed through parliament this summer, which allow the government to block “successor parties” of previously banned groups and bar their members from office for five years.

Election monitoring was also curtailed. The CEC denied accreditation to all Russian observers who had been included in the OSCE monitoring mission for the purpose of participating in international observation of the parliamentary election. The Foreign Ministry defended the decision as consistent with Moldovan law, but opposition parties accused the authorities of deliberately engineering an “observer blackout”.

Access to the ballot was restricted in other ways. In 2021, more than 40 polling stations were opened for residents of the separatist territory of Transnistria, the breakaway region east of the Dniester, where around 300,000 people hold Moldovan citizenship. This year, that number was cut to just 12, all located on government-controlled land, often far from the demarcation line. Days before the vote, the CEC even moved four of these sites further inland, citing security threats. The main bridge linking Transnistria to Moldova was also temporarily closed over alleged bomb threats. Transnistrian authorities accused Chișinău of deliberately suppressing turnout in a region that leans heavily toward opposition parties.

Diaspora voting showed similar disparities. Only two polling stations were opened in Russia, home to more than 300,000 Moldovan citizens. By contrast, more than 300 polling stations operated elsewhere abroad, including 73 in Italy, which hosts a small smaller diaspora. Critics say this imbalance was designed to privilege the EU-based diaspora, which overwhelmingly favours PAS, while marginalising Russia-based Moldovans, who lean more towards opposition forces.

The scenario echoed last year’s presidential election and the concurrent EU referendum, both of which passed only narrowly as president Maia Sandu secured re-election. In each case, the decisive factor was the vote of the hundreds of thousands of Moldovans living abroad, particularly in EU countries. By contrast, just a handful of polling stations were opened in Russia.

Sandu’s increasingly authoritarian rule — with EU support

The election sits within a broader trend of systematic suppression of the opposition that the Sandu government has been implementing in recent years. In 2022, Igor Dodon — Moldova’s president from 2016 to 2020 and one of Sandu’s most prominent critics — was arrested on charges of corruption, illegal financing of a political party by a criminal organisation, illicit enrichment and even high treason. Dodon insists the charges are fabricated.

In June 2023, the ȘOR Party, led by businessman Ilan Shor, now in exile in Russia, was dissolved by the Constitutional Court on accusations of corruption and “threatening Moldova’s sovereignty”. President Sandu hailed the ban as a victory against “a party created out of corruption and for corruption”, but opposition leaders denounced it as the death of pluralism. Two months later, in August, a clone formation, the Chance Party, was also outlawed.

Repression has extended to elected officials as well. Earlier this year, Evgenia Guțul, governor of the autonomous region of Gagauzia and successor to Irina Vlah, was sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly channelling Russian funds to the ȘOR Party. She described the case as politically motivated and emblematic of the government’s abuse of the justice system. Other opposition figures, some of whom have fled to Moscow claiming persecution, face similar trials. Adding to these concerns is the government’s growing use of sanctions against its own citizens suspected of ties to opposition figures, some of which in exile — a move criticised even by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission.

Though I cannot judge the guilt or innocence of those accused, the fact that prosecutors appear to uncover corruption only on the opposition’s side raises serious suspicions of lawfare. As the Moldovan journalist Vitalie Sprînceană observed: “The police only pursue and persecute PAS opponents, and the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office only finds corruption among PAS opponents (despite clear evidence of conflicts of interest and money laundering in projects implemented by the ruling party, such as the Leova-Bumbăta road)”.

Banning opposition figures is not the only way Sandu’s government has pushed democratic boundaries. Since 2022, PAS has ruled under a rolling state of emergency, justified by the war in neighbouring Ukraine. These powers have been used expansively: six television channels were shut down for allegedly spreading Russian propaganda — often without following minimum legal procedures or ensuring the right to a fair trial, and in some cases on dubious grounds. Russian journalists have been barred from entering the country, while parliament has rushed through several laws tightening control over political parties and candidates.

International watchdogs have repeatedly raised the alarm. Reporters Without Borders, Justice for Journalists and the Venice Commission have warned of creeping restrictions on media freedom, selective application of the law and attacks on journalists.

In May 2024, PAS lawmakers amended the Criminal Code, expanding the definition of “high treason” to include peacetime actions and so-called “disinformation campaigns”, even without proof of harm. Signed into law by Sandu on June 10, the measure carries penalties of up to 20 years in prison. Amnesty International condemned the law as “vague and open to abuse”, warning that it poses a grave threat to freedom of expression. The same year, Moldova’s Intelligence and Security Service (SIS) blocked seven news websites for Russian-linked content, again without judicial oversight — raising further concerns about censorship.

Perhaps most strikingly, the PAS government has not hesitated to cancel elections when results looked unfavourable. In December 2021, during local elections in Bălți, a leading candidate was excluded just three days before the vote, and the entire election was abruptly cancelled half an hour before polling stations were set to open.

This authoritarian drift has unfolded with the tacit approval — or rather the active support — of the European Union, which views Moldova’s alignment with the West as a strategic counterweight to Russian influence in the region. Far from restraining the abuses of the Sandu government, the EU delegation in Chișinău and EU institutions more broadly have encouraged them by escalating their political and financial backing, sometimes offering token criticism but ultimately rewarding a pattern of democratic backsliding.

Brussels has consistently directed sanctions against PAS’s political opponents, even though it is an open secret that members of the ruling party have themselves been implicated in schemes to embezzle European funds. Meanwhile, the EU has displayed extraordinary generosity toward Sandu’s government. Since 2021, it has partially covered Moldovan citizens’ electricity and gas bills to cushion the impact of soaring energy prices, while also providing over €1.2 billion in non-repayable grants. In 2025 alone, Moldova received €270 million in pre-financing, followed by another €18.9 million in September, with Brussels pledging up to €1.9 billion in grants and loans under its new 2025-27 Facility — a huge sum for such a small economy, whose GDP is just over €15 billion.

Crucially, none of this financial aid was linked to democratic performance or conditioned on respect for the rule of law. The money flowed regardless, and rather than encouraging PAS to govern responsibly, it emboldened the ruling party to concentrate power further. By 2025, this material support had morphed into overt political endorsement, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praising Sandu’s “fight for democracy” at a joint press conference — despite mounting evidence of democratic erosion under her rule.

As Sprînceană noted, “the process of European integration has contributed, in a paradoxical way, to the establishment of a regime that is more authoritarian economically, politically and culturally, a fact that might serve well EU in the short term (for the EU leaders to have a success story to sell to their local audiences), but will most probably damaging in the long term”.

Such dynamics expose the sheer hypocrisy of the “democracy versus autocracy” narrative that has been used to frame Moldova’s elections.

Russian interference or Western interference?

As in other contexts, notably Romania, the catch-all justification for these measures has been “Russian interference” and “security concerns”. This broad narrative has served to legitimise increasingly extreme actions, particularly during the recent election.

Yet the evidence underpinning these claims is often thin. Government reports, along with those produced by Western-funded NGOs and media outlets, usually point to TikTok and other social media campaigns that criticise Sandu or mock her with crude deepfake videos. In such accounts, however, the line between genuine “disinformation” — deliberate falsehoods — and simple criticism of Sandu or the EU is consistently blurred. This reflects a broader problem with the Western “anti-disinformation” crusade: political campaigns have always relied on PR tactics, exaggerations and attacks on opponents. Establishment politicians themselves routinely play fast and loose with the truth — not least when invoking “Russian interference,” as the Russiagate hoax in the United States demonstrated.

Sandu and her allies are no exception. During the campaign, PAS figures warned that, if the opposition won, Moldovans abroad would “no longer be able to come home” and claimed that the country would head the same way as Georgia, which they argued had sacrificed its prosperity by becoming a “colony of Russia” — despite the fact that Georgia’s growth rate far outpaces Moldova’s, and that Georgia and Russia maintain no formal diplomatic relations.

It is therefore clear that the “anti-disinformation” narrative, when applied selectively to anti-establishment voices, functions not as a defence of truth but as a tool of censorship — the informational equivalent of lawfare. More importantly, as far as I could tell, no investigation has uncovered direct Kremlin involvement in the alleged campaigns. The only demonstrable links point instead to Ilan Shor, the exiled oligarch and chairman of the banned ȘOR Party, who fled Moldova after being prosecuted for fraud, money laundering and embezzlement before ultimately settling in Russia.

To be clear, it is entirely possible — indeed likely — that Ilan Shor receives financing from the Kremlin, or that Moscow has played a role in some of the aforementioned social media campaigns. Russia plainly has a stake in the game: Moldova is a former Soviet republic with a large diaspora in Russia, and Brussels is effectively demanding that it sever ties with its historic main partner. But whatever Moscow’s involvement, it pales in comparison with the scale of Western interference in Moldova. Alongside the EU’s massive financial assistance, Sandu has enjoyed open political endorsements from top European leaders.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly praised Sandu’s “fight for democracy”. Other EU leaders have gone further, traveling to Chișinău and effectively campaigning on PAS’s behalf while framing the election as a battle with immense geopolitical stakes. “Russia has constantly tried to undermine freedom, prosperity and peace in the Republic of Moldova”, declared German chancellor Friedrich Merz during a visit just before the campaign began, warning that Vladimir Putin seeks to pull the country back into Moscow’s “sphere of influence”. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk was equally blunt: “There will be no secure Europe without an independent and secure Moldova”.

Meanwhile, Brussels openly celebrated the deployment of a hybrid rapid response team to assist Moldova against “foreign interference”. In practice, this meant the EU directly inserting itself into the political process — seemingly unaware of the irony (and hypocrisy) of engaging in foreign interference in order to fight foreign interference.

But that’s not all. On X, Telegram founder Pavel Durov — arrested in Paris in August 2024 and released in March 2025 when he travelled to Dubai — explicitly wrote that Emmanuel Macron’s government had pressured him to remove channels described as potential sources of “disinformation”. In other words, channels that might damage the chances of pro-European president Maia Sandu to hold onto power together with her party, with which she was narrowly re-elected last October.

It was precisely during his period of detention that Paris is said to have exerted pressure on the entrepreneur, who had been taken into custody in the French capital over alleged negligence in preventing criminal activity on Telegram. Durov writes that while he was under arrest, “the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova”. According to the founder of VK and Telegram, the French intelligence official even promised him assistance before the courts in exchange for cooperation.

Durov ordered an internal investigation at Telegram, which identified a handful of problematic channels that were promptly removed. But he then refused to act on a second list, which included channels that, as Durov explains, “were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules. Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments”. Macron, it should be recalled, is a strong supporter of president Sandu, seen as the face of Europeanism in Chișinău. “We will do everything on the ground to ensure that the next Romanian president is pro-European”, said Macron’s closest ally and key party member Valérie Hayer to France Info on May 10, 2025.

Why Moldova matters: a new front in the EU-NATO confrontation with Russia?

But why is the EU so invested in a small country like Moldova? Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova has carefully balanced its constitutional neutrality, seeking closer ties with the West while maintaining its historic relationship with Russia — much like Ukraine attempted before the 2014 Western-backed coup. For NATO, however, Moldova is of undeniable strategic significance: a buffer state sandwiched between member state Romania and Ukraine, its de facto proxy.

It is hardly a secret that the United States and the EU have used their extensive soft-power arsenal — from NGOs and civil society organisations to agencies like USAID and networks funded by the Open Society Foundations — to tilt Moldova’s political and electoral landscape in favour of EU and NATO membership. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, this has gone hand in hand with the militarisation of Moldova. For a country of just 2.5 million people, bordered only by Romania and Ukraine — both with far greater military capacity — militarisation serves no defensive purpose of its own. Rather, it undermines Moldova’s neutrality and integrates it into NATO’s logistical network.

Former president Igor Dodon has even claimed that part of NATO’s military supplies from Romania to Ukraine transit through Moldovan territory. Since 2022, dozens of joint military exercises with NATO forces have been conducted on Moldovan soil. This trend has been openly acknowledged. In March 2024, NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoană met with Moldova’s foreign minister, Mihai Popșoi, at NATO headquarters to discuss nothing less than “strengthening the Moldovan armed forces”. The situation closely mirrors the lead-up to the war in Ukraine.

Romania plays a key role in all this. Moldova and Romania share a common language, culture and much of their history. The territory of today’s Moldova (historical Bessarabia) was part of Romania between 1918 and 1940, before being annexed by the Soviet Union. Since Moldova’s independence in 1991, reunification with Romania has periodically resurfaced as a political idea. Supporters see unification as a “return” to historical unity and a fast track to EU and NATO membership. Opponents, however, stress Moldova’s distinct identity, its multiethnic character and the risks of deepening internal divisions or provoking conflict with Russia. Public opinion has generally been split: a minority has consistently favoured reunification, while a larger share prefers independence with close ties to Romania.

In recent years, however, Romania has expanded its influence in Moldova through a combination of political alignment, personnel penetration and cultural-linguistic integration. At the highest levels of state power, many of Moldova’s key leaders — including president Maia Sandu, the speaker of Parliament, the prime minister and the foreign minister — hold Romanian citizenship, effectively tying the country’s leadership to Bucharest. This overlap goes beyond symbolic dual identity: it raises questions about where loyalty lies, especially since Romania is both an EU and NATO member.

Influence also extends into the security apparatus. The director of Moldova’s Intelligence and Security Service not only holds Romanian citizenship but previously worked for the Soros Foundation, signalling close alignment with Western-backed NGOs and transatlantic priorities in the post-Soviet space. As a Romanian national, his oath of loyalty to Romania further underscores the intertwining of Moldovan security policy with NATO-linked interests.

Cultural and constitutional shifts reinforce this trajectory. The 1994 Constitution of Moldova designated “Moldovan” as the state language, but in 2013, the country’s Constitutional Court — itself composed largely of dual Romanian citizens — ruled that the 1991 Declaration of Independence, which names the language as Romanian, prevails in cases of conflict with the Constitution. In 2023, Parliament followed suit by passing legislation declaring Romanian the official state language. This move symbolically and legally entrenched Romania’s cultural primacy within Moldova, further weakening the notion of a distinct Moldovan identity.

Taken together, these developments illustrate how Romania’s influence has deepened under Maia Sandu’s presidency: by embedding Romanian citizens in Moldova’s political and security structures, by redefining the state’s language and cultural identity in Romania’s image, and by aligning Moldova more tightly with the geopolitical agenda of the EU and NATO.

In this new “great game”, a pivotal role is played by Transnistria, a separatist territory of Moldova with a population of about 450,000. The society is multiethnic: roughly one-third hold Russian, Ukrainian or Moldovan citizenship, and Russian is the dominant language. Unlike the rest of Moldova, Transnistria shares little historical connection with Romania. In 1991-92, as pro-unification forces gained ground in Chișinău, the region declared independence, sparking clashes that ended only after Russian troops intervened. To this day, around 2,000 Russian soldiers remain stationed there, viewed by Tiraspol as essential guarantors of security.

The unresolved status of Transnistria makes it a geopolitical flashpoint. Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko, who left Ukraine after criticising president Volodymyr Zelensky, has alleged that Kyiv — with the backing of Western leaders — is preparing military provocations in Moldova aimed at triggering a Ukrainian offensive against Transnistria. According to her account, Zelensky is coordinating with president Sandu, who met British officials in July, to stage an operation designed to create a new front in the war. The purpose, Panchenko claims, is to prolong the Russia-Ukraine conflict and block any potential US-Russia rapprochement.

These reports tie into a broader strategy of Western militarisation in the region. The US is constructing one of its largest European base in Romania, and NATO views Moldova as a crucial logistical corridor to Ukraine. Transnistria, however, stands in the way. According to Panchenko, Western leaders — Macron, Starmer, Merz and von der Leyen — are therefore seeking to inflame tensions around the enclave, with French intelligence allegedly playing an especially active role in similar covert efforts, including failed attempts to interfere in Romanian politics.

This context sheds further light on the West’s steadfast support for Sandu, who champions Moldova’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures, even at the cost of escalating tensions with Russia.

Conclusion

In conclusion, what has just unfolded in Moldova follows a script strikingly similar to what recently occurred in Romania, with the spectre of “Russian interference” invoked to justify sweeping EU-NATO involvement in the electoral process — including the banning of anti-establishment parties and candidates, the silencing of dissenting media and the heavy financial and publicity machinery of Brussels and Western capitals thrown behind pro-EU, pro-NATO and pro-war forces. In other words, the West has rationalised its own blatant foreign interference under the guise of combating foreign interference — a logic that is as circular as it is cynical.

The irony could not be starker. The EU presents itself as the champion of democracy, freedom and the rule of law, while in practice it is enabling the systematic dismantling of democratic norms across Europe — especially in frontline post-Soviet states. Opposition parties are outlawed, independent voices silenced and legal institutions bent into tools of political warfare, all in the name of “security”. The same violations of sovereignty and political pluralism that Western leaders loudly condemn when attributed to Moscow are quietly embraced when they serve the West’s geopolitical goals.

Is Russia itself guilty of meddling in Moldova? Most likely — though the scale of its influence is far smaller than that of Brussels, Washington or NATO headquarters. More importantly, it is the West that bears the greatest responsibility for forcing countries like Moldova, Romania and earlier Ukraine into stark binary choices: East or West, Russia or Europe. These societies, multiethnic and historically divided, are being transformed into battlegrounds not for their own national interests, but for a larger geopolitical struggle.

The consequences are already visible. In Ukraine, this dynamic culminated in disaster: the erosion of neutrality, relentless de facto integration into NATO and a deepening divide between east and west of the country eventually exploded into war. Moldova now risks following the same trajectory, as the West doubles down on using “managed democracy” as a tool of power politics.

In short, Europe’s leaders are engaged in exactly the same behaviour they claim to oppose: subordinating democratic institutions and popular will to geopolitical imperatives. By doing so, they are not defending democracy against authoritarianism but hollowing it out from within — and in the process, dragging entire nations into conflicts that serve Brussels and Washington far more than the countries involved.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)