I have now gone through two EU referendums in my life – Brexit and Moldova’s 20 October vote on whether to include EU integration in its constitution. As an EU national in the UK, I was not able to cast my ballot in 2016. I remember the expectation most people had that Brexit would not win. I received the news while travelling in Spain and staying with a British national settled there, who could not vote in the referendum either. Some London-born friends told me they felt as though they could no longer recognise their country, which had been split in two. With that British experience on my mind, I had a sense of deja vu as I watched the results unfold in my native Moldova on Sunday night.
As opinion polls before the vote, which excluded Moldova’s large, pro-European diaspora, suggested, there was between 54% and 65% support for the EU. The only fear for pro-European Moldovans was that the turnout would be too small to have the referendum validated. When it became clear that 51% of voters had showed up – more than in other recent elections – everyone in my bubble felt optimistic, posting pictures of their “I voted” blue stickers given out at polling stations. I was in an echo-chamber.
When the first results started to come in that night, the anti-EU vote seemed to dominate. It did so for hours. Following the count at a birthday party, my friends and I watched our phone screens in disbelief. One of them kept repeating: the first results come from smaller villages – it will get better as the votes from the capital city, Chișinău, and the diaspora get counted. I recalled the difference between London and other parts of the UK. Just like Wales voted for Brexit although it benefited from some of the biggest EU regional funds, so did the districts of Cahul and Ungheni in Moldova, which received €50m for development. In London, it was only the borough of Havering, and particularly Romford, that voted to leave the EU; in Chișinău, the district of Botanica, traditionally inhabited by Russian rather than Romanian speakers, was the only one to do the same. That’s where I voted.
As I came out of the polling station, I heard an old woman ask a younger one what the question in the referendum was. “What, she wants to change the constitution the way she pleases?” she said, referring to the incumbent, Maia Sandu, who came first in the presidential election held on the same day, with 42% of the vote. Many accused Sandu of calling the referendum in order to increase votes for her own election and distract from the slow pace of the anti-corruption reforms she promised to deliver. Some pro-Europeans boycotted it. In the end, the pro-European “yes” vote passed by a whisker, with 50.46% of the nearly 1.5m ballots cast.
On 3 November, a second round will see Sandu run against the former prosecutor general Alexandr Stoianoglo, who scored 26%, way above the 9-11% predicted in polls. In the run-up to the votes, officials in Moldova accused the pro-Russian, fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor – convicted of fraud in Moldova, he is now resident in Russia – of running a destabilising campaign from Moscow. Shor denies any wrongdoing.
At 1am the morning after the vote, Sandu made a press statement in which she blamed “criminal groups, working together with foreign forces” that had allegedly aimed to buy 300,000 votes – about 20% of the total number of Moldovans who cast their votes. Although the number was more than double that the police and anti-corruption prosecution mentioned two weeks ago, the declaration did not come as a surprise. It had been well-reported that huge amounts of cash were coming into the country via Chișinău airport, with authorities accusing Shor of running an operation to buy political influence. On Telegram, Shor openly “offered to pay voters the equivalent of $29 if they registered for his [No or abstain] campaign” and pledged to “pay Moldovans for publishing anti-EU posts on Facebook and Telegram”. While the authorities detained some of the people involved, they did not foil the entire scheme before the elections. National and international observers, the EU and the US, all condemned what they described as Russia’s interference.
Of course, there are also internal causes that explain the tight EU vote in Moldova, just like there were with Brexit. They range from the Russification that Moldova went through during its 40-year occupation by the Soviet Union, the dominance of Russian media until 2022 and its only partial ban since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to frustration with the government and the slow pace of reforms. These are vulnerabilities that Russian propaganda is good at taking advantage of, but they will need to be addressed if Moldova is to continue its European path. Until then, the country needs international support in fighting malign foreign influence, before its second round of presidential elections in two weeks and parliamentary elections next summer.
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