Moldova’s snap parliamentary elections from July 11th took all observers by surprise when the pro-European ‘Action and Solidarity Party’ (PAS) won the elections by a landslide with 52.7% of the votes (63 out of 101 seats). The success has been largely owed to the image that president Maia Sandu built for herself since taking office, who campaigned incessantly against political corruption, maintained a grass-root communication with her electorate and most importantly, rejuvenated the country’s diplomacy with its Western partners, which secured Moldova approximately 1 million vaccine doses in donations and hundreds of thousands more in purchasing access from European partners.
With nearly two-thirds of the legislature seats secured by the pro-European forces, the opposition is now formed by the ‘Communists and Socialists Bloc’, a coalition between the country’s former pro-Russian presidents, Igor Dodon and Vladimir Voronin, which scored 27.2% of the total votes (32 out of 101 seats), and the ‘Șor Party’, led by the infamous kleptocrat Ilan Șor, who currently runs his party from Israel while being trialled in absentia for his association with the stolen billion scandal of 2014, which scored 5.7% of the votes (6 seats out of 101). With this new political topography taking shape in Moldova, our Policy Researcher Andrei Stanciu shares his insights on what does the electoral result signal for the country’s future European path.
