Democracy Mauled in Moldova, With EU Approval

“When you heard the ‘Russian interference trope’ from the off and you look at Wikipedia and they accuse parties of ‘Russophilia’, there is zero hope of a fair election.” My former colleague and good friend messaged me on September 28th, when Moldovans went to the polls. Living in Moscow, he went to the Moldovan Embassy early to cast his ballot. A moderate socialist, he was concerned that the poorest country in Europe could be thrown into total disarray should Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s political grouping keep control.

“She and her goons have cracked down on ethnic groups, not a surprise. If the PAS [Party of Action and Solidarity] win, we’re going to see war again.”

He was referring to the civil war of 1992, which involved Transnistria, who’d declared independence from the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1990, and Moldova, who left the USSR a year later. The conflict has left a strip of land that is unrecognised as a sovereign state, save from acknowledgement by two other post-soviet breakaways - Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Ilya’s mother hails from Transnistria and until he left Chisinau for Moscow in 2011, he regularly visited his relatives on holidays. He fears for the place now after the election results, as does Mihaila, a lawyer from my former company.

 Blocking And Commanding Voters

For 2021’s parliamentary election 41 polling stations had been opened in Transnistria, this time only 12 were permitted. The situation was made worse when at least half the polling stations were evacuated for hours at a time due to bomb scares. Only 23,500 ballots were sent to the region, 12.017 were counted with 51.02% going for the opposition block. Mihaila lives in Tiraspol, the region’s main city, and works with Sheriff Football Club. She was a volunteer chairperson of the local election commission.

 “Two hours into voting, police arrive and apologise. ‘You need to leave’ and we left. The bomb squad come, nothing, we go back in. Voting resumes. I place a request to Chinsinau to extend voting by an hour, just one. No, they say.”

 I asked, was her request legal?

 “You know me twenty years, so yes. But the Central Election Commission (CEC) did everything to prevent votes. We know more than fifteen thousand votes were cast, but they record only twelve. We should have had over eighteen but for the blocks.”

 She told of another station where the electricity was turned off and closed 4 hours early. Worse, she said, was the treatment of voters who live on the border with Moldova and for every previous election were allowed to travel 2km across the frontier to exercise their democratic right. This year they were stopped by border guards and refused entry.

 “Hundreds were affected and it disenfranchised them as they were registered in those areas in Moldova to vote for over a decade and couldn’t vote back here. I have to present my report in Chisinau at the end of this month [October], I want to scream it was so unfair. Even Russia reported Chisinau to the United Nations!”

The reason? Russia has a reported 300,000 to 500,000 Moldovan citizens registered within its borders. A contact in Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs told me that while the number varies and the majority are dual citizens, well over 200,000 adults are officially resident in the country. Most, they said, reside in or around Moscow. For this election only 2 polling stations were available for voters in the largest country in the world - both of them at the Moldovan Embassy in Moscow.

 “The CEC claim they cannot guarantee safety for officials in other Russian cities, but they can open seventy-five in Italy. Maybe their officials prefer pasta to potatoes, who knows,” Mihaila quipped.

 Meanwhile, I spoke with teachers at state schools in the capital who were told to be “careful” with their choices. One man, who teaches at a top lycee, said their director called a staff meeting and said that everyone “must vote”. The teacher told that contacts at other state schools had been instructed to take photos of their trip to the ballot box, or else “there would be issues.” While he was unable to present any such evidence, that is not an unusual turn in Eastern Europe. I heard the exact same thing said in Knin, Croatia, during the general election in 2003. I’ve heard the same rumours in Russia, in Belarus and Poland. Yet, despite being director of a state college, I never once received such an order, let alone gave one.

 Voting outside of Moldova among the diaspora proved to be even more interesting than the shenanigans in Transnistria or Russia.

Ballot Stuffing and Bully Boys

 “What can I say, a miracle? If Jesus could feed the multitudes with a few loaves and fish fingers, Maia tripled our number of voters and most of them were invisible,” a diplomat serving in the Moldovan Embassy in Minsk told me.

 I’ve played Thursday ‘Corporate League’ football with this man since last year in the Belarusian capital and he’s certainly no Putin puppet. A fervent fan of Liverpool Football Club, he asked me to meet at a local Irish pub on my business trip to the city last week.

 “Belarus is ranked, by the UNDP, as having no more than a thousand votes cast in an [Moldovan] election. We had four hundred and twenty-seven eligible voters, but more than fifteen hundred votes were cast. And we all [embassy staff] were laughing, as apart from us or delegates here, we had maybe three-fifty, four hundred voters. Tops. But the CEC guys report three times that and they find more than one thousand PAS voters. I call BS.”

 In Italy, questions were raised by local journalists over the number of actual voters who took part.

 “From seven in the morning I was on site until ten, when you get the morning rush. A trickle. Some security guy came up to me, asked what was I doing, I showed him my press card and he called the police. The cops said it was legal,” a reporter with l’Unita told me.

 The communist-leaning outlet dispatched a dozen observers to assess turnout and also to conduct interviews with voters. Italy remains one of the most popular destinations for the Moldovan diaspora and many, the reporter told me, complained that they didn’t believe their votes were being counted.

 One of her colleagues, in Milan, was physically intimidated by a man believed to be a CEC official. He was recording an interview with a couple who had just cast ballots when the person with a name badge approached and called him a “Putinist whore.” Before he could react, the man slapped the phone he was using to record the interview with from his hand. As he bent down to retrieve his device, the person kicked it away.

 “None of our people escaped them. They were agitated that we were asking questions,” she explained.

 Of the 277,964 votes cast by Moldovan diaspora, 78.61% went for PAS. In only 3 of the 41 electoral regions did the bloc receive over 60% (65%, 63%, 61%), which Mihaila believes is highly suspicious.

 “Nowhere, only in PAS strongholds of Ialoveni and Strasheni did BEP (Patriotic Electoral Bloc) get under ten percent of votes, but diaspora giving only five percent? It’s unheard of. So many in the CEC are asking questions, even Sandu’s own people.”

 The journalist from l’Unita also found it strange. Three in ten of those interviewed in Italy said they backed the BEP. Yet the conversation has been solely about Russian interference and the prevention of parties who favour balancing ties with their neighbours as preferable to cutting off their nose to spite their face. But why the self-harm?

 Maia’s On a Mission

 Maia Sandu does not speak Moldovan, despite being Prime Minister for 1 term, Minister for Education and enjoying her second term as President. She was behind the 2023 move to pushing a law that recognised Romanian, her native tongue, as the country’s official language. This despite under 25% of citizens speaking it. Maia has also proudly stated that she supports the unification of Moldova and Romania, the neighbour country to the west.

 When locals I met in Chisinau spoke about her a couple of years ago, they used the “US-educated” term to leave me in no uncertain terms who she works for. In Eastern Europe, US-educated means run from Langley, Virginia. “UK-educated” means they’re friends with Boris Johnson. “Moscow-friendly”, with a wink, lets you know they are friendly with people in Lubyanka. Maia is not friendly with Moscow.

 To cut through the noise, I asked a professor of economics I trust in Chisinau’s IMI-NOVA International Management Institute, who works closely with its rector, Valentin Railean. IMI-NOVA is a public-private joint venture with local and French universities, as well as international companies. They and their staff are solidly EU-facing.

 “EU membership and all that comes with it. The issue is we’re tied to that basket case [Ukraine] and nobody wants that, not even the president.”

 What about her motives?

 “She’s very much the model of what they want, with the alternative lifestyle, for here, and desperate to be patted by Brussels. But she’s failed upwards and now can’t escape this destiny. The fear, we and our students discuss, is NATO. There is already the encroachment from Ukraine [on the Dniester River] and the threat from Ukraine on Transnistria. We join NATO or, worse, become a Romanian province, and suddenly we have war.”

 While the professor has valid points, NATO will not accept a nation at war or divided into their ranks. So while Transnistria remains an issue, there is no Moldova in NATO. Romania, likewise, will not accept Moldova as a new province due to the same question. And the EU, for all the bluster, will also be reluctant to welcome the continent’s most underdeveloped nation to the fold while part is still holding out. This is where the professor expresses grave concern.

 “Personally, Zelensky [Ukraine’s leader] could invade Transnistria to force Russia to defend the territory. We saw what happened in Syria, Russia could let it go. If the region is hit from two sides, without Russian support, it is Moldova fully again. Then there is the EU, there is NATO, there are pats on the heads from Brussels.”

 And then, as Ilya said, is war.