Good news from Moldova

I don’t usually do follow-up posts, but this one’s a big deal, and worth celebrating. The process of writing up the Moldova post the other day was leaving me pretty pessimistic, but my pessimism wasn’t warranted. The data point of the EU referendum last year, which was expected to win easily but won by less than 1%, to my mind seemed like a particularly bad sign for what to expect today. But!

Moldova’s pro-European party won a victory after a nail-biting election plagued by Russian interference, preliminary results on Monday showed, allowing it to retain its majority in Parliament after what many observers have called the most important campaign in the nation’s recent history.

The win, which still needs to be made official by the nation’s election commission, could further Moldova’s bid to enter the European Union. That prospect would have been under threat had parties aligned with Russia made serious gains in the race.

The election had taken on outsize global importance, considering that Moldova is a tiny nation of 2.4 million. Wedged between Romania and Ukraine, it is strategically important as the war in Ukraine rages on. The vote had also become a referendum on Europe versus Russia, with Moldovans choosing which vision of their future to embrace.

In the end, with the PAS actually clearing the 50% barrier, it wasn’t that close. (Given the number of votes that typically go to parties below the threshold, 45-46% is generally good enough for a majority of seats.) They’ll have at least 55 of the 101 seats, more than double their nearest competitor. This is a big deal for Moldova, obviously, and also for the EU. It’s also a reminder to not succumb to pessimism bordering on fatalism about Russia’s capacity to mess up other countries’ politics. (The previous sentence was written for myself as much as anyone else.)

Final note: presumably in light of the recent Romanian elections, people were bemoaning the problem of reactionary right wing diaspora voters, which was a major challenge in neighboring Romania (that they were able to overcome in electing Nicusor Dan earlier this year). For reasons I can’t begin to explain or even speculate about, the voting pattern in Moldova is the precise inverse of this. In the EU ascension vote that was unexpectedly close last year, the Yes side suffered a clear loss among Moldovans in Moldova, but was dragged across the finish line by the late counted diaspora votes, which came in at 77% for Yes. I suppose one story one might tell about this is that the extensive Russian ratfucking campaign in Moldova in 2024 was successful, but didn’t reach beyond Moldova’s borders effectively, but who knows.