https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/false-choice
False Choice?
Lily Lynch
03 October 2025 Politics

Three and half years ago, the EU suddenly remembered that Moldova exists. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine meant that overnight, Moldova had become a frontline state. The small country of 2.4 million shares a 759-mile border with Ukraine, and since February 2022 nearly two million have fled across it. Even more concerning was Transnistria, a breakaway region on Moldova’s eastern flank nestled between the Dniester River and the Ukrainian border. The unrecognized statelet seceded from Moldova after the collapse of the Soviet Union and remains under de facto Russian control: it hosts an estimated 1,500 Russian troops and half of the population have a Russian passport. With the conflict raging next door, it was feared that the region could become the next flashpoint in Europe’s hot war.

Geopolitics and a wartime state of exception defined last weekend’s parliamentary election. A few days before the vote, Zelenskyy told the UN General Assembly that ‘Europe cannot afford to lose Moldova’. President Maia Sandu declared the election the ‘most consequential’ in her country’s history. EU leaders also emphasized its unprecedented significance. At the end of August, on Moldova’s Independence Day, Macron, Tusk and Merz held an outdoor rally with Sandu in Chișinău. ‘Each and every day Russia attempts to destabilize all of our European countries’, the German chancellor told a sea of young Moldovans. ‘We need Europe to be united in these challenging times’. Tusk and Macron offered up Reaganite platitudes about freedom and prosperity delivered in Romanian, Moldova’s national language. Moldova is new to such attention from Europe’s leading lights. The country is constitutionally neutral so cannot join NATO, but in June 2022, the EU hastily granted it EU candidate status, aiming to send a message of European unity in the face of Russian aggression. Sunday’s parliamentary election was presented to Moldovans and the world at large as nothing less than a battle between the forces of good and evil – a civilizational ultimatum, where the choice was between moving forward into a luminous European future, or backward into Oriental despotism and darkness.

The forces of light were victorious, assisted by a little divine intervention from the state. The winner was the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS), a liberal centrist outfit that has been in power since 2021. PAS was founded by Sandu, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former World Bank economist. Sandu exudes technocratic competence and has become something of a darling of the Atlanticist establishment. Her party received more than 50% of the vote and will take 55 of the 101 seats in parliament, down from 63. Despite the loss of seats, PAS exceeded expectations: no poll or analysis had predicted that they would win an absolute majority. As the Moldovan sociologist Vitalie Sprînceană pointed out, PAS came to power promising hope and change: anti-corruption, meritocracy and the rule of law. This time, however, Sandu’s party ditched such idealism in favour of a fear-based campaign. Its candidates proclaimed that if they didn’t win, a host of very bad things might happen: relatives living in the EU would no longer be able to visit, freedom of movement could end, EU funds might be cancelled and diaspora voting banned.

The ruling party’s main competitor was the Patriotic Electoral Bloc (BEP), a coalition of four Russia-friendly left-conservative parties, led by veteran politician Igor Dodon, a former president who has served in several governments since the early 2000s. Dodon outwardly supports a neutral foreign policy, but his opponents say this official posture conceals a pro-Russia orientation. BEP received less than 25% of the vote, which will translate into 26 seats. On Monday Dodon denied that PAS had won the election at all, telling Russian media that the government, diaspora and European leaders had conspired to ensure PAS remained in power. In early August, the Central Electoral Commission blocked four parties from participating in the election over alleged procedural irregularities. Two days before the vote, the commission barred two more parties, alleging they had received illicit financing from Russia. The Moldovan authorities also conducted 250 raids and arrested 74 people in the days leading up to the election. Officials claimed that those detained had been involved in a Russia-sponsored plot to destabilize the country. The plan was apparently transnational: a few days before the election, Serbia’s Ministry of the Interior announced that it had arrested two Serbian citizens for providing ‘combat and tactical training’ to between 150 and 170 pro-Russian Moldovans and Romanians, purportedly so they could better resist police during riots held on election day. The precise nature of the training and plot was not made clear, leaving the public to speculate.

Then, on election day, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov went viral on social media accusing French intelligence of election meddling in Moldova. He claimed that he had been offered leniency after his arrest if he agreed to block Telegram accounts they had identified as pro-Russian. Meanwhile, the pro-Russian side also complained that the Sandu government had only supplied two diaspora polling stations in the whole of Russia for hundreds of thousands of Moldovan voters. By contrast, there were 75 polling stations in Italy. Dodon also claimed that some 250,000 in Transnistria – a region that tends to support pro-Russian parties – had been prevented from voting. Ahead of the vote, the opposition warned of a repeat of Romania’s cancellation of Calin Georgescu’s first-round election victory last December; but in the end, such muscular intervention wasn’t necessary.

PAS and its supporters evidently viewed extraordinary measures necessary for saving Moldova’s fragile democracy from a dangerous, revanchist neighbour. They portrayed the pro-Moscow parties as the ones engaged in electoral interference. Claims of Russian meddling included vote buying and orchestrating riots: Israel-born oligarch Ilan Shor, who is under EU sanctions and living in Russia, allegedly had plans to activate a covert network in Moldova that would protest the election in the event PAS won (only small protests materialized). There were also media reports of bomb threats at several diaspora polling stations in the West. The opposition employed its own scaremongering rhetoric ahead of the election. Sandu was depicted as a puppet of Western powers intent on selling the country out to foreigners; Dodon referred to the PAS government as a ‘yellow dictatorship’ – a reference to the party’s branding. He also issued dark warnings of a ‘Ukrainian scenario’ if they won, implying Moldova could become the next front in the war between Russia and NATO (the ‘Ukrainian scenario’, invoked by political actors across Eastern Europe, can also imply Western colonization).

There were pockets of the country where this message resonated. In the autonomous region of Gagauzia, just 3% of voters chose the ruling party. The Gagauz are Turkic by ethnicity and Orthodox Christian by religion; they are also overwhelmingly pro-Russian and speak Russian in everyday life. In this election, 82% supported the BEP. The stark differences in orientation were evident in last year’s referendum on EU membership, when 95% of people in Gagauzia voted against joining the union. Predictably, PAS also had a weaker showing in Transnistria, where the party received just under 30%, while BEP secured just over 50%.

The dominance of geopolitics in the election meant the suppression of urgent domestic matters. Moldova is suffering a catastrophic exodus: since gaining independence in 1991, it has lost approximately 40% of its people. Among those who choose to stay, life is hard. Every third child lives in poverty. Women’s unemployment is the highest in Eastern Europe. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldova has either been the poorest country in Europe or the second poorest. Perhaps this is why the geopoliticization of politics is an increasingly global phenomenon: in the absence of answers to major problems on the home front, grand narratives of civilizational struggle remain a reliable strategy for mobilizing an abandoned electorate. Brussels also helps set the tone: the EU is rarely interested in countries like Moldova unless it is competing with Moscow for influence.

Geopoliticization has other consequences. Beyond their branding and divergent foreign policy orientations, there is in fact little that distinguishes the competing parties. As Sprînceană describes, they espouse a model of governance which has been perhaps the dominant paradigm in the region: ‘politically authoritarian, capitalist and neoliberal in economics, and nationalist in ideology’. The day after the vote, Ursula von der Leyen addressed Moldovans: ‘You made your choice clear: Europe. Democracy. Freedom.’ But the Sturm und Drang of civilizational conflict conceals a dearth of real political choices on Europe’s eastern flank. The ‘most consequential’ election in Moldova’s history was in this sense far less dramatic than advertised.