Pro-West Leader Wins High-Stakes Vote in Former Soviet Republic

The president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, won re-election on Sunday against a rival candidate she had denounced as “Moscow’s man.”

The pro-Western president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, won re-election on Sunday in a high-stakes runoff vote in the former Soviet republic against a rival candidate she had denounced as “Moscow’s man.”

The vote — held a week after a contested election in Georgia, another former Soviet territory, handed victory to the Moscow-leaning governing party — has been closely watched by the United States, the European Union and Russia as a critical test of Moldova’s direction.

With more than 98 percent of ballots counted, official results gave Ms. Sandu 54.9 percent of the vote, an unassailable lead on her Moscow-friendly rival, who had 45.3 percent.

In a televised address early Monday, she thanked Moldovans living abroad, whose vote tipped the result in her favor, but said the election was a victory for the whole country. “Today you saved Moldova,” she said. “In our choice for a dignified future, no one lost.”

In an apparent reference to Russia, Ms. Sandu assailed “hostile forces from outside the country and criminal groups” for mounting a campaign to sway the result, which she said, citing “dirty money and illegal vote buying,” had been an “attack unprecedented in the whole of Europe’s history.”

European leaders celebrated the election as a victory against what Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, described as “Russia’s aggressive and massive interference.” He expressed hope “that this trend will continue in the coming days and months in other countries as well.”

Sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, a member of NATO and the European Union, Moldova has two main languages — Romanian and Russian — and has seesawed between East and West since it gained independence in 1991 as it struggled with endemic corruption.

Moldova’s population, reduced since independence by a steady exodus of young people seeking work abroad, has shrunk by more than 35 percent to under three million. But, despite its small size, the country has become a focus of big power rivalry.

Sunday’s loser, according to near final results, was Alexandr Stoianoglo, a former prosecutor general who is under criminal investigation for corruption.

Mr. Stoianoglo was supported in his failed bid for the presidency by Moldova’s socialist party, a political force long aligned with Russia, and, according to Moldovan officials and investigative journalists, by a vote-buying operation financed and directed from Moscow by a fugitive Moldovan tycoon and convicted fraudster.

Sunday’s runoff followed a first-round vote two weeks earlier in which Ms. Sandu finished far ahead of Mr. Stoianoglo, who came in second, and nine other candidates, several of whom pledged to halt Moldova’s efforts to join the European Union and instead to align the country with Russia. Most of the losers in the first round endorsed Mr. Stoianoglo for the runoff. The turnout on Sunday was more than 54 percent.

Ms. Sandu’s victory delivered a major lift to the West’s hopes of loosening Moscow’s grip on former Soviet territories, which, with the exception of Ukraine and the three Baltic States, have largely been kept within Russia’s sphere of influence by military, economic and cultural pressure.

A sliver of Moldovan territory along the Dniester River east of the capital, Chisinau, declared itself an independent, Russian-speaking state after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left Romanian speakers largely in control of Moldova. The territory has been occupied since 1992 by the Russian military.

Hoping to fix Moldova on a clear path to the West, Ms. Sandu pushed for holding a referendum on Oct. 20 on whether to enshrine the “irreversibility” of Moldova’s “European course” in the Constitution. The referendum passed, but by such a tiny margin — less than 1 percent — that the exercise dulled the sheen of Ms. Sandu’s victory on the same day as the first round of the presidential election.

It also upended the European Union’s expectations that a robust majority of Moldovans would vote to lock in their country’s alignment with the West. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, still declared the razor-thin majority in the referendum proof that Moldova “wants a European future,” despite “Russia’s hybrid tactics.”

A former World Bank official who first came to power four years ago promising to root out corruption and Russian influence, Ms. Sandu has been strongly supported by the United States and the European Union, both of which have given Moldova tens of millions of dollars in economic support.

Western support intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine, which, like Moldova, is divided along ethnic, socio-economic and linguistic lines, and faced decades of pressure from Moscow not to side with the West by trying to join NATO or the European Union.

Mr. Stoianoglo has denied favoring Russia over the West, insisting that he supported Ukraine in its war against Russia and wanted only to prevent Moldova, whose Constitution commits it to neutrality, from being dragged directly into the conflict.

During a pre-election debate last week, Ms. Sandu challenged Mr. Stoianoglo over claims that he supported Ukraine. “Do you believe what you are saying?” Ms. Sandu asked him. “In Kyiv, they know you’re Moscow’s man.”

Georgia’s governing party, Georgian Dream, also denied favoring Russia before a pivotal parliamentary election on Oct. 26, which opposition parties claim was stolen. International election monitors reported incidents of vote buying and other irregularities but have not directly challenged the outcome.

In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European Commission in June 2022 recommended that Moldova and Ukraine be granted “candidate status,” in the European Union, the first formal step in a process that normally lasts longer than a decade. It gave Georgia the same status last year but, alarmed by last weekend’s disputed election and the recent enactment of a “foreign agent” law and anti-L. G.B.T. Q.+ legislation, the commission said this past week that the membership process had been “de facto halted.”

In interviews Sunday, voters in Moldova who cast their ballots for Ms. Sandu in Chisinau mostly said they supported her efforts to get Moldova into the European Union. Her opponents stressed more immediate economic issues.

Dumitru Stantier, 89, whose daughter and granddaughter moved to Germany, said he voted for Mr. Stoianoglo because Ms. Sandu and her governing party, which controls the government, talk constantly about Europe but have done nothing to raise his pension of around $218 a month.

“Can I live on this with today’s prices? Do they even think about it? Do they give any help?” he said. “Bandits!”

Russia has for years reviled Ms. Sandu as a Western puppet intent on surrendering Moldova’s sovereignty and traditional values, claiming that her push to join the European Union would lead to children being brainwashed into becoming gay or transgender.

The same cultural issues, amplified by Russian media and the Orthodox Church, also played a role in Georgia’s election, which the country’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili — elected separately from and at odds with the government — denounced as a “Russian operation.”

In Moldova, Ms. Sandu and her supporters accused Moscow of mounting an intensive campaign of disinformation and vote buying aimed at swaying Sunday’s result.

Journalists from Ziarul de Garda, an investigative newspaper in Chisinau, infiltrated a political network in Moldova financed and directed by Ilan Shor, the fugitive tycoon, and reported that it had paid voters to cast ballots against Ms. Sandu.

Mr. Shor has denied doing anything illegal, casting himself as a victim because he faces jail if he returns to his home country for his role in the ransacking of Moldova’s banking system. Several political parties in Moldova that he funded have all been banned for violating financing rules and other legal violations.

Like the election last weekend in Georgia, Moldova’s vote marked a pivotal moment in a decades-long struggle between Russia and the West over the geopolitical alignment of former Soviet lands.

That struggle escalated sharply after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, triggering alarm in Moldova and Georgia that they could be next.

Opponents of Ms. Sandu played on these fears during the campaign, warning that her embrace of the West risked provoking Moscow. Moldova has not provided weapons to Ukraine but has joined Western sanctions on Russia.

Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting from Chisinau, Moldova.

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