By deciding to add a referendum on European Union (EU) membership to the vote, Sandu has wrong-footed opponents hoping to replace her with a Kremlin-friendly president.
Polls suggest she has a battle on her hands to win another four-year term, but they also show strong support for EU membership. The message is fairly clear — you can replace a head of state but you will have to live with a public statement that Moldovans wish to join Europe and reject the Kremlin’s goal of welding it to Eurasia. Indeed, the result would be embedded into the constitution.
While Western interest in and support for Moldova is often episodic, Russia’s unblinking eye remains fixed on its target.
Moldova, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on January 12, is being turned into “a springboard that will be used to ‘destroy’ Russia.”
This NATO plot is “doomed to failure,” she explained, because, “Russia has never posed a threat to the friendly Moldovan people, who see, understand and feel this.”
This will come as news to the majority of Moldovans, who view Putin negatively by a ratio of nearly two-to-one thanks to decades of occupation of the country’s east, energy blackmail, and heavy-handed propaganda.
President Sandu, a former World Bank economist and the country’s most pro-Western leader since independence, has made massive strides in blunting Russian influence: securing energy from Europe and clamping down on the Kremlin’s unending political warfare. Despite this, polls show Sandu barely ahead of her likeliest challenger — the staunchly pro-Russian former president Igor Dodon — in upcoming elections this fall. (Polls put her ahead of Dodon 30% to 24%, with many voters undecided.)
Meanwhile, her project to reorientate Moldova continues apace. In October, the energy minister made a momentous announcement: Moldova had begun buying the bulk of its gas from Europe, shifting the country away from Gazprom, which had been a powerful weapon for Russia to wield over the resource-poor country.
After Sandu’s Progress and Solidarity (PAS) party swept the board in the 2021 parliamentary elections, the Russian state energy firm tripled prices and demanded Chișinău foot the bill for Transnistria’s $700m debt to the company.
Inflation spiked at nearly 17% within three months and a short while later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Russian pundits openly mulling “reunification” with Transnistria. Moldova accepted the most refugees per person of any country in the world, while its economy reeled from the devastation next door, sending inflation to 35% by October 2022.
The economic hardship and dislocation took its toll on the Moldovan electorate. By November 2022, the optimism surrounding Sandu’s election had reversed. Most Moldovans told pollsters economic issues topped their concerns, far ahead of any international issues.
Russia sought to make good on the havoc it wrought, plotting a coup against Sandu in February last year. The convicted, fugitive politician Ilan Şor, who intelligence had implicated in the coup plot, funded massive protests against the government that spring before the Constitutional Court ruled that his party’s financial reliance on Russia, and clear designs on violent seizure of power, violated Moldovan law. It banned the party.
The economic turmoil and the appearance of harsh treatment of opponents have chipped away at the popularity of Sandu and PAS. In local elections last October, PAS did reasonably well, but with a diminished lead from the 2019 election and with opposition retaining or gaining mayoralties in Moldova’s largest cities.
If Moldovans are concerned above all about the economy, they need only compare their two neighbors to understand which direction to head. Since joining the EU, Romania’s GDP per person has doubled. Russia’s treatment of Ukraine, by contrast, has robbed the country of a third of its economy. Polling last month placed Moldovan support for joining the EU at 63%, shortly after the EU announced it would begin accession talks with Chisinau.
Even if Dodon wins this fall, he will find little political support to steer away the country from its European course.
With inflation back under control and trade reconfigured away from Russia, the most painful economic costs of disentanglement are over, and with it, Russia’s most powerful leverage. By winning majority support in a referendum for EU accession, Sandu could ensure her legacy far beyond this election.
Ben Dubow is a Nonresident Fellow at CEPA and the founder of Omelas, which tracks authoritarian influence online.
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.
War Without End
Russia’s Shadow Warfare
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
