Beyond the eastern border, Ukraine under the bombs. To the south-west, the new frontier of the EU defense with a drone factory financed by Bucharest. In the middle, at the most fragile point of NATO’s eastern side, the Moldova on Sunday will vote with the breath of the Kremlin on the neck and the vigilant gaze of Brussels. It is not only the composition of a 101 seats to be at stake, but the direction of the former Soviet Republic that oscillates between western integration and the return to the Russian orbit. To remember, at the end of August, were Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Donald Tusk: “There will be no safe Europe without an independent Moldova”, they marked together from Chisinau. But the polls tell a head -to -head on the wire: the European action and solidarity party (PAS) of President Maia Sandu and Prime Minister Dorin Recean, led by Igor Grosu, guided to 24.9%, just a handful of votes above the Philorussian patriotic blockade of the former president Igor Dodo, at 24.7%.
A friend’s government of Moscow would become a “springboard for hybrid attacks against the EU”, Sandu had warned next to the European leaders a few days before the Russian raids intensified in the European skies, defining the vote “the most important in history” of the country close between Ukraine and Romania. For her it is a challenge of political survival, for Brussels a trial bench: to demonstrate not only Kiev but The entire oriental front and, together, its enlargement policy, which from 23 June 2022 includes Chisinau among the candidate countries at the entrance. More and more tense where suspicions of interference are on the agenda.
The BBC has revealed a secret network financed by the Kremlin to spread propaganda, fake surveys and fake news, orchestrated by the oligarch on the hiding in Moscow Ilan Shor and by the NGO Evrazia, accused of anti-EU corruption in the referendum of 2024. But it is not only a war of narratives with Vladimir Putin who, in the complaints of Sandu, has hundreds of “hundreds of millions” to buy ” Votes and feeding disorders with trolls and artificial intelligence: even the same electoral commission, according to the accusations of the vice premier Doina Nistor, was hit by a cyberattacco at the hands of Moscow. The PAS, in the vision of the Ursula von der Leyen PPE committed to contesting the interference “unprecedented by the Kremlin”, “remains the only political force capable of guiding Moldova in the EU and is the trusted partner of Europe in this effort”.
But, with such close margins, the minor parties could be decisive. The alternative block – led by the mayor of Chisinau Ion Ceban and the former prosecutor Alexandru Stoianoglo – aims to the voters who are disappointed centrists: he is said to European but accuses the government of not guaranteeing infrastructure, wages and dignified pensions. For some analysts it is the spoilers who can weaken the PAS and leave spiragli d’av influence in Moscow. On the minor front there is also the populist our party of Renato Ustatii, former ally of Russian nationalists. The diaspora will once again be decisive: over a million Moldovan abroad, already decisive in the pro-EU referendum won for only 13 thousand votes. And to make the picture more uncertain is the unknown transnistria, with its 277 thousand voters under separatist control and a Russian disinformation that works at full speed.