It was a very narrow victory. After relentless campaigning against Russian interference on an extraordinary scale, Maia Sandu secured her second term as Moldovan President and with it a mandate to continue with Moldova’s integration in the EU.
This is not the end of the story, not even close to the end.
In recent decades, Moldova has been treated as somewhat of an underachiever among Western-facing countries in the Eastern Partnership, with Georgia and later Ukraine hailed as frontrunners of democratic reforms in the 2000s and the 2010s respectively.
While Ukrainian civil society was shaping the country’s path to Europe by putting up a spirited fight during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests and later by undertaking a series of ambitious reform campaigns, Moldova was still battling powerful, Russia-leaning oligarchs.
When Sandu won first in the 2020 presidential elections and then in the 2021 parliamentary vote, the bid to defeat home-grown Russian-organized corruption was her battle cry.
By this point, the economy and public administration were not in good shape. Weakened by emigration by more than a million of the 3.6 million population (citizens can freely claim a Romanian passport that makes them eligible to work in the EU), the country was also heavily dependent on the Russian gas and the Russian market for its agricultural goods.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 alerted the EU to the need to secure its eastern flank, Moldova received help to wean itself of the Russian energy dependence. But the deficit of qualified citizens is still felt by its public administration, as it gears up for more reforms as part of EU accession negotiations.
Sandu’s to-do list for her second presidential term includes completing a reform of public administration, continuing a rebuilding of the judiciary and getting the country through as many chapters of the EU accession’s requirements as can be managed.
These seemingly mundane tasks are also the most challenging. The vetting of judges, for example, which is a process also underway in Ukraine, aims to free the justice system from office holders who are heavily compromised by conflicts of interest or reputational issues. It is progressing only slowly, and the conflicts it produces in the country’s elites sometimes grow into avalanches that bury political careers.
Moldova’s public administration reform is showing “some progress”, in the words of the European Commission’s enlargement report, but there is a long way to go, and the main challenge is to find enough qualified people to push the reforms from within the civil service, where salaries are notoriously low.
The accession talks with the EU that began this year are not easy either. At the moment, their progress is heavily predicated on two negotiation chapters — Chapter 23, Judiciary and fundamental rights, and Chapter 24, Justice, freedom and security.
In the first, success depends on the vetting of the judges, and the second is largely predicated on setting up an effective system to fight organized crime. Both are crucial to foster Western investment and future EU funding to ensure they are not stolen by predatory criminals and corrupt officials. And both are far from easy, as has been made clear in member states like Hungary, the EU’s most corrupt.
To safeguard Moldova’s European future, Sandu has to achieve significant progress in these jobs, while continuing to fend off the relentless hybrid attacks by Russia and its proxies. The creation of a Center for Strategic Communication and Disinformation Countering, led by ex-Minister of Interior Ana Revenco, is a welcome step, but more will have to be done. Moldova’s neutrality means it cannot rely on NATO structures to counter hybrid threats, and the EU’s response systems are developing slowly and cannot lend much muscle at the moment.
The EU can, and will provide money. In October, it pledged $1.9bn for Moldovan growth from 2025-2027, its biggest-ever package and a substantial sum for a poor country.
This will include the building of road, bridges, hospitals, links to the European electric grid and small business financing. The project recognizes the key need to reach and improve life for disaffected rural communities where Russian disinformation and bribery thrive. This is EU soft power at its best. By aiding improvements for ordinary people, it demonstrates a stark alternative to life under the Kremlin.
Yet Sandu’s best hope is Moldova’s committed civil society, which is for the most part serious about the country’s European choice and has more than once lent impetus to reforms. Trust should be cultivated not only with the narrow circle of organizations that are close to the President’s administration, but with a much wider network of committed and competent citizens who are ready to work to bring about the change in governance.
The best thing the EU can do at the moment is to make sure that its funding for Moldova’s transformation is aligned with policy priorities outlined in the Enlargement report, and to empower civil society to provide a constructive and critical voice.
Marija Golubeva is a Distinguished Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) She was a Member of the Latvian Parliament (2018-2022) and was Minister of the Interior from 2021-2022. A public policy expert, she has worked for ICF, a consultancy company in Brussels, and as an independent consultant for European institutions in the Western Balkans and Central Asia.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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