Pro-EU Moldovan President Wins Reelection

Maia Sandu was inaugurated as President of Moldova in 2020 (Wikimedia Commons).

Maia Sandu declared victory in Moldova’s 2024 presidential election on November 3. She is poised to serve her second term in office and per Reuters appears to have won roughly 55 percent percent of the vote in a runoff election held on November 3. This Moldovan election cycle marred by controversy, with both Sandu and her opponent, Alexandr Stoianoglo of the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM), unreservedly accusing each other’s parties of corruption. 

Claims of an illegitimate Moldovan election parallel the recent Georgian parliamentary elections, throughout which opposition parties accused the  ruling Georgian Dream Party of committing rampant electoral fraud to stay in power. The Atlantic Council argues the Georgian Dream party (GD) tends to take a much more pro-Russian stance than its counterpart, the Unity National Movement, an alliance of several pro-Western parties. Thus, GD is suspected to have received major support from the Russian government and intelligence agencies to win the election. Distrust of the legitimacy of the GD’s victory is so widespread that Georgia’s president, Salome Zubarshvili, has called the October election a “Russian special operation,” linking it to Russia’s military attempt to depose the current pro-Western Ukrainian government, which the Russian government and media refer to as a special military operation. 

However, unlike the Georgian elections, the pro-Russian party did not win the Moldovan presidential election. Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity leans heavily towards the West and the EU. Euronews notes that PAS  recently put forward and helped pass a referendum on the Moldovan constitution, which clearly defines EU membership as a national goal. 

The  first round of the election was inconclusive, with  neither candidate able to get above 50 percent of the vote and only 51.74 percent voter turnout. However, the runoff election saw voter turnout increase by roughly three percent according to Moldova’s Central Election Commission largely due to more votes coming in from Moldovan citizens living abroad, who support Moldova joining the EU by an extremely large margin.

Al Jazeera reports that the Party of Action and Solidarity has accused Russian intelligence of “organizing ineligible voting, bribery, and security threats” to try to swing the election to Stoiangolo. Recently, Moldovan law enforcement discovered that Ilan Shor, an exiled Moldovan oligarch living in Russia, had devised a vote-buying scheme to deliver Stoianoglo votes, according to CNN. Democratic nations around the world have been highly critical of the alleged Russian attempts to change the course of the election, with the Guardian reporting that Germany’s foreign minister furiously described it as an attack at the “heart of European democracy.”

Ironically, Georgia’s Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, who is a member of the Georgia Dream Party, has criticized the Moldovan elections, claiming that there were “gross flaws in the election process.” His comments reflect the current division in the post-Soviet political landscape, where East European and Central Asian nations continue to grapple with Russian influence on their respective democracies.