Octawian Milewski: Moldova needs collective international support to succeed with reforms in Maia Sandu’s second term

Vladimir Mitev, The Bridge of Friendship, 5 November 2024

On 3 November 2024, Maia Sandu won the second round of the Moldovan presidential election with 55.35% of the vote (930,000 votes) against Alexandru Stoianovoglo’s 44.65% (750,000 votes). The victory was made possible by the outstanding support for Maia Sandu among the Moldovan diaspora, 83% of whom supported her. There was also a high voter turnout – 54.34%.

The Bridge of Friendship spoke to Octawian Milewski about the reasons for Maia Sandu’s support, the figure of Alexandru Stoianoglo and his attitude towards the EU, the division of the country between the Romanian-speaking majority and the Russian-speaking minorities, the role of the diaspora, Polish policy towards Moldova and Milewski’s expectations of Maia Sandu’s future government. Octawian Milewski is a political scientist specialising in Moldova, Romania and Central and Eastern Europe, based in Poland, born in Moldova and educated in Romania.

According to Octawian Milewski, Maia Sandu’s great success is that under her rule it became clear that the country’s only path to progress was to develop relations with the EU. Asked whether Stoianoglo could not also be considered a Europhile because of various elements in his political biography or family history, Milewski replied that Stoianoglo was close to the great oligarch of the Moldovan transition, Vladimir Plahotniuc, and that if there were any European traits in his behaviour, they were not the result of emotion, conviction or European spirit, but of calculation and opportunism.

As for the division of the country, which was also evident in the referendum, Milevski attributes it to two centuries of Russian colonial policy in Bessarabia, which created a spirit of submission. Milevski agrees that not all the votes against Sandu were bought or rigged. Her party and her government also made mistakes. Moreover, the political battle for the next few years will only end in the summer of 2025, when parliamentary elections will be held. According to Milewski, the European political trend in the country is currently in favour of these elections, but it is not clear whether a majority in support of Sandu can be formed in the future parliament. To bring the country closer to the EU and away from the post-Soviet space, Maia Sandu is likely to make changes to her team and step up judicial reform. Moldova also needs European expertise, such as that currently coming from Romania or Poland, Milewski added.

Asked about Polish interest in Moldova, Octawian Milewski, who is based in Poland, said that ten years ago Poland was very active in the Eastern Partnership. Subsequently, many of Poland’s initiatives were adopted at the European level. But today Poland and Eastern Europe are different. That is why activities in this region can no longer belong to one country alone, but can only be collective.

Mr Milewski, we have just seen Maia Sandu win the presidential elections in the Republic of Moldova. Who or what won this election? Was it just a geopolitical election, or was it also a kind of election related to Moldova’s internal affairs?

It is a complex victory. We cannot look at it simply, can we?

Obviously, the pro-European option won and Moldova proved that, one way or another, the majority in the country is pro-European. Maia Sandu got 11% more votes than her opponent, who got many of his votes through an elaborate electoral fraud massively sponsored by the Kremlin, by Russia. 

So we should say that the pro-European option has won, just as it won two weeks ago in the referendum on constitutional changes, when it was about to be derailed and falsified by the same kind of fraud. 

Two weeks ago we didn’t have enough understanding of the scale of this operation, which is a hybrid operation, a complex operation involving thousands of people, with tens of millions, if not more, of euros, dollars and rubles invested in this operation. And in two weeks’ time, for the second round of the presidential elections, the electorate has been mobilised. And it is an eminently pro-European, pro-Western electorate. We should say that if this electorate had the same sense of itself, of its power, two weeks ago, then the “yes” option in the referendum would have been 60%, not 50.5%, as the final result of the pro-European referendum showed. There is no doubt that it could have been 60%. It happened as it did, reality can be changed. But once again the pro-European option won.

The pro-Russian option has been badly damaged, but it hasn’t been completely defeated. We should not forget that the big battle, the battle of all battles, will take place next summer. In all likelihood, things can change next summer.

But if there is a general election in this term, then we will probably have an election in July next year. And to conclude my answer to you, we should not categorically ask who has won. We can only say that whoever has the first chance to win now is the pro-European option, because the whole confrontation ends with the parliamentary elections next summer.

So we should not ask this question categorically. Yes, this battle has been won again by the pro-Europeans, but the big battle is next summer.

If we leave aside geopolitics, what does the Maia Sandu option mean to Moldovans, and what does the Stoianoglo option mean to Moldovans?

One could simply take the list of projects that have been implemented in the last three years in particular, since her party, the party that she founded and the party that now governs, the Party of Action and Solidarity, we call it PAS, took power. Since it came to power, the achievements have been the adoption of a strategic course that is now enshrined in the constitution. So that is an achievement.

This is an achievement when you as a state, finally, after 30 years, three decades of existence as a state, you know that your only option is European, to reach the European Union and to achieve prosperity, development, peace, very importantly, in this group or family of states and nations. This is an achievement without geopolitics, although we must always keep geopolitics in mind. 

Another achievement, and Maia Sandu said it, is that we have not had a war on the territory of Moldova, especially in the last two and a half years, because we have to take into account that Moldova was on Russia’s invasion list. We know it now, and it was directly or indirectly conveyed by the Russians, by generals, by politicians, by propagandists, that Moldova was on the list for invasion from the south, from the Odessa region, from the Danube delta. Moldova was on the menu. 

And Maia Sandu and the entire ruling class in Chisinau achieved this minimal condition of not allowing the escalation of hybrid operations to degenerate into something more dangerous.

Let’s remember that in the first months of the invasion, the great invasion of Ukraine, that is, in the spring and summer of 2022, Transnistria was waiting for the Russian armies to reach its territory, which would have meant war in Moldova. The same could be said about Gagauzia. Gagauzia has always been transformed into a Russian stooge region in Moldova, and this is also proven by the results, the election results.

96% of the citizens of Gagauzia voted against Maia Sandu on Sunday. The same, unfortunately and regrettably, could be said about the tiny region of Taraklia, which is a region in Moldova populated mainly by ethnic Bulgarians. Unfortunately, they are always in partnership with Gagauzia.

Other achievements include the improvement of infrastructure in rural and urban areas of Moldova.

There are projects to build roads in areas that have been ignored in Moldova at least since the collapse of the USSR. This is the achievement of her government and the achievement of her foreign policy. She has managed to attract over $1 billion in grants from the US and twice that amount from the EU. And let me just remind you that a week or two before the first tour, the EU pledged a sum of 1.8 billion euros until 2027 for Moldova’s development. This is not even a loan, this is a grant for development projects in Moldova. This is a huge achievement.

Moldova doesn’t have the industrial capacity to develop on its own. It needs investment to reach the level that will allow it to develop in a self-sustaining way. It still needs years of investment. And to attract that investment, it needs a stable, wise and well-organised system of government. The incumbent party has made many mistakes, but it has achieved this. And that is an achievement. This is very important because without this overarching framework you cannot move forward. 

And let me remind you that we have a war next door. We have a war of total destruction in Ukraine. Of course, I have to mention that the opening of the EU doors came unexpectedly. It was not planned to apply for association, not for integration, at least not until 2025 or 26.

And then the war just changed all the plans, like abruptly, unexpectedly. Ukraine, of course, was the first to open this door, to knock on this door. And it was immediately followed by Moldova and Georgia on the same day.

If we look again at what each of the candidates represented, couldn’t it be argued that Stoianoglo’s also somehow pro-European because he had an important contribution by voting for the association and free trade agreement with the EU 10 years ago. And he’s a Romanian citizen. His daughter works at the European Central Bank. So, it looks like there is some proximity also between him or his family at least and the European Union.

I refuse to accept that logic. I simply reject it. I think it is a cover-up. It is a maskirovka. You know what that means in Russian, what it means to hide your real identity, your real intentions. 

If we take the fact that he voted, he was just an MP when he voted for this. He was an MP from the oligarchic party of Vladimir Plahotniuc. By the way, he was also one of those MPs from the Democratic Party who voted to facilitate what would soon become the theft of the century in Moldova. What kind of European are you if you actually vote for laws that facilitate billions of euros in bank fraud, stealing these billions from your own country, from your own people?

Now to come to this, because he has a citizenship, a Romanian citizenship, and he has a passport, that actually means nothing. Just to make an analogy, the wife of the so-called leader of Transnistria, Krasnoselski, also has Romanian citizenship. Another almost one million Moldovans have Romanian citizenship.

Do you know how many of these Moldovans identify themselves as Romanians? Seven percent, and these are the preliminary results of the Moldovan census that took place this year and will be published in about a month. So the possession of this Romanian passport is actually a statement that you have taken practical steps, choices in your life to facilitate your access to the social goods of the European Union. These four freedoms are given to you automatically – capital, movement, etc? So this is what the vast majority of Moldovans mean when they take this passport.

This is done for practical security, personal security purposes, plans, whatever you want to call it. So having this passport doesn’t mean much to Stoianoglo. By the way, I can quote the Socialist Party, which supported Stoianoglo in this, like massively, totally, in this election campaign, about 90% of them have Romanian passports. And this party at the beginning of 2021, all of them, down to the last one, went to Moscow to be informed and instructed about Russia’s next steps in Moldova. All of them have Romanian passports, I remind you.

Stoianoglo is one of them. Stoianoglo is one of those two-faced Januses who don’t invest too much of their identity, their emotions, in the possession of a Romanian passport. By this logic, I think that the ethnic Bulgarians from Moldova who do this also don’t quite understand what the essence of being a European Bulgarian is.

And this is proven, by the way. I don’t want to offend anyone, I don’t want to offend the feelings of the ethnic Bulgarians. I can even open a personal parenthesis here and tell you that one of my ancestors is from southern Moldova and has Bulgarian roots as well. It is my great-grandmother. 

In any case, the Bulgarian ethnic group is next to the Gagauz ethnic group in Moldova because of their pro-Russian attitude, regardless of their passports. I know this is a strong statement, but it has been proven time and time again by the way they vote, by their electoral behaviour, by the way they protest against Europeanisation, development, peace and prosperity in Moldova.

Why is this happening? It doesn’t happen, because they are inherently evil. No, no. That is not what I mean. 

It happens because they have been subjects for generations, objects of imperial engineering. They have been subjected to daily propaganda, russification, imperialisation, transformation into individuals who are supposed to defend the frontiers of the Russian Empire.

And this started less than a generation ago. This policy of transforming them into what they are started in the 19th century. So we are now seeing the consequences of that.

And to come back to this idea of why the passport means nothing to them, it’s just a ticket for them in the end. A ticket to travel freely to the European Union, to find a well-paid job, or at least much better paid than in Moldova, to benefit from the social goods, the security goods, the policies of the EU countries. That is all.

The possession of a passport is not a deep identity. So Stoianoglo is one of those imperial individuals. And there are hundreds of thousands of them in Moldova, not only of Bulgarian or Gagauz ethnicity, but also Russians, Ukrainians and Moldovan Romanians from Moldova.

They think so too, many of them. And the results of yesterday’s elections prove it. About 750,000 people voted for Stoianoglo yesterday. So you can include them, or the majority of them, in this category. And this also says that Moldova is a divided country. Nobody should doubt that.

And these changes will hopefully not happen overnight. It will take decades to convince the population at large that things should be different and not the way they think they are. It is a long struggle. It also requires proactivity. A proactive attitude, not only on the part of pro-Europeans in Chisinau or in Moldova or in the Western diaspora, but also in Brussels, in Berlin, in Paris, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Warsaw. Only in this way can we, as Moldovans, hope that the possession of a Romanian passport will be much more than just a ticket to free movement within the European Union.

If I develop a little bit the idea that the country is divided and you spoke about some of its minorities, one argument I have heard from these minorities is that they feel somehow alienated from the Romanian-speaking majority. And that’s also a question in terms of geopolitics. Couldn’t or can’t Maia Sandu, maybe in the past, maybe now that she’s won, make some effort to say to the people who voted against her, who even voted no in the referendum, that they can also be seen as Europeans? Because I think her main argument was that it was Russian interference, bought votes, that made people vote against her. But theoretically, in a future European Moldova, everyone will be a European citizen, not just people who vote for Maia Sandu.

Vladimir, I completely agree with you that we cannot look at this in a simplistic way. Aside from the division, she was saying that the interference meant a lot, but the interference didn’t involve 750,000 Moldovans. Let’s just look at it and agree that more than half of those who voted for Stoianoglu are not ethnically Gagauz or Russian-speaking minorities.

No, they are still Moldovans who speak Romanian at home, on the street, everywhere. So the country is not only divided along ethnic lines. They exist, but they are secondary.

The minorities are indeed weaponised, they are turned into security issues and weapons of public narrative through propaganda. And they are objectified in the narratives of some politicians with a pro-Russian background. And this is a procedure, this is a pattern, not only in Moldova, we have to take this into account, this happened in Ukraine, this happens in Georgia, this happens wherever Russian interference takes place.

This is a way to divide and rule the fringes of their empire. And they see us as their, you probably know this Russian word pridatak (придатък), which means a legacy of their conquest. So once they come and smoke a cigarette in your territory, you are always theirs. You cannot claim it, you become their slave. That is how they perceive you. So back to the question of whether Maia Sandu is putting this down to Russian interference.

Of course she doesn’t want to oversimplify. Let’s look again at these Gagauz and Bulgarian regions in Moldova. After Chisinau, the Gagauz Autonomous Region has been the region that has benefited most from investments, grants and development projects in the last decade and a half. No other region has received so much cheap money from outside. And by the way, this is the region that receives money not only from Chisinau, from the Moldovan budget, but also from Romania, from the EU, from Turkey. There are other subsidies, and yet 96% of this population votes against EU integration.

Why is that? How does it happen, why does it happen? I agree with what Maia Sandu said and the ruling party understands – that there is a lack of communication. There is a response to this Gagauz hostility in Chisinau. If you go there and try to explain to them that they have a lot to gain from this integration, and they react to you in a hostile way, even in the voting booth, you are obviously not very motivated to go there. Let’s face it.

It’s humanly normal to react that way. And it happens every day, day after day. Why does it happen?

Well, one of the problems is that the region has been ignored from the point of view of media coverage. Chisinau has allowed a lot and a massive amount of Russian propaganda to infiltrate every home in Gagauzia. Secondly, and this is Chisinau’s fault, the programme for teaching the basics, starting from the university level in the region, was not thought out, composed and programmed in Chisinau.

These regions have been studying Russian textbooks or textbooks written by those Russian cultural, educational, political agents in the region. This is very important. It is very important because identity is important in this respect.

This has been a problem, a huge problem, because the previous governments of the last decade were only interested in Gagauzia to get votes, to divide the Gagauz among themselves, to get votes and to manipulate the region, in a way, to put it briefly, to the interests of the elites in Chisinau, in the capital. So this game didn’t take place during Maia Sandu’s term, but it was already too late. It was too late.

And also, you know, we are talking here about the weakness of the Moldovan state. We have to admit that the Moldovan state has not been overwhelmingly consolidated in the last three and a half years, let’s say four, since Maia Sandu came to the presidency. Let’s admit that Moldova is heavily infiltrated by Russian-sponsored criminality, and we have seen it in these elections. There are agents sponsored and employed by Russia.

And I’m not suggesting that we look at this in a simplistic way. There are hundreds of FSB, GRU and SVR individuals, I cannot call them professionals, in Moldova. The same is happening in Ukraine.

The same is happening in Georgia. We are in the middle of a hybrid war, and we have been in it all along. We just didn’t want to admit that we were there.

And the government in Chisinau didn’t do everything it could to do that. Again, just to follow up, the relationship with these regions is also an expression of the weakness of the judicial system, because there have been a lot of investigations, criminal investigations of wrongdoing, economic crimes and so on, everywhere, but they never reach a final stage. Why is that?

Because the judicial system in Moldova is only halfway through the reform. We still have three, four years of judicial reform, when prosecutors, judges will start to deliver finished, closed cases, there will be indictments and so on, and all this criminality, all this Russian-sponsored agentura will start to diminish in size, influence, power, ability to manipulate the population at large. It’s a long process and what Maia Sandu and her PAS party are doing is not enough. Nor should we simplify it. 

It’s not just PAS in this game. There is a constellation of pro-European organisations from civil society, from the diaspora and so on, from the professional community, who are also involved in all this. So when we talk about PAS and Maia Sandu, we have to take them into account.

Maia Sandu, and also people close to her, have some suggestions or rhetoric that now, in the second term of her mandate, she will be much stronger, much bolder in doing reforms. To what extent do you think that this greater courage and willingness to reform will be able to produce results, especially as you also said that Moldovan society is divided and I think it’s difficult to carry out reforms when half or almost half of society is perhaps opposed to you or to the reforms you are trying to carry out?

It won’t be easy, I’m sure. The biggest battle, the battle of all battles, is coming up, politically speaking, and that’s the general election next summer. As I said, in order to maintain this course, they need to maintain more or less the same distribution of power in Kishinev.

Even if in the next parliament there will be no single party that will dominate the parliament, that will have more than half the seats in the parliament, Maia Sandu should have a lot of the symbolic power and the political power that it has so far. The idea is still to have a coalition of pro-European parties. But this is very difficult to achieve because, in principle, PAS is almost alone in this. PAS is almost alone in this. It’s highly unlikely that they will achieve the political dominance next summer that they achieved in 2021. And the votes we have had in the last few weeks are proof of that.

At the same time, when you say that Maia Sandu promised that we are going to take off the white gloves and we are going to start fighting these anti-state forces, those who are making the institutions even more fragile than they are now, one of the expectations in this regard will be an overhaul of the government in the next month, I would say that probably by mid-December, maybe even next week, there will be changes at the top of the government. A number of ministers will lose their seats, their positions, and they will be replaced, and that will have to include a change of style.

It’s hard to say how that will be achieved. I’m not from the state, I’m from the diaspora, and I’m thinking about what resources they can find to achieve this. Moldova has always been helped a lot by the ability to involve actors from outside, from the European Union, in this political process.

But at the moment, for example, there are, by my count, more than 30 Romanian officials in the ministries, at expert level, who are doing a lot of advising and improving in certain ministries. There are also Polish officials, for example, paid with EU money, consultants, advisers, who are doing the same thing in the Ministry of the Interior, in the energy sector. And this proportion of this kind of expertise will have to be drastically increased, tripled, quadrupled and so on.

It will have to go into the hundreds. You have to bring in these kinds of specialists to make up for the lack of human resources, which are now mainly found in the Moldovan diaspora. Because a lot of the best human resources are in the diaspora and they have no incentive to come back for many reasons.

We won’t discuss it now. Now, again, when we talk about taking the gloves off and being more consistent in fighting this massive anti-state interference in Moldova, I’m expecting, I’ll see if that’s going to happen. I don’t know. You could say this is my speculation now.

I’m expecting the installation of a government regime that will probably give you certain shortcuts to make quick decisions. I’m wondering if this could mean that the democratic process will suffer from this kind of action. I don’t know if they will be taken, but I would expect them.

Because we have to admit and we have to bring home the idea that Moldova is in the first line of a hybrid operation, a hybrid war. The zero line is in Ukraine, and it’s not a hybrid war, it’s a war in the full sense of the word. While Moldova comes next at par with Georgia in all this conflict, which keeps growing and growing and coming closer and closer to us in the European Union, and which is already in Chisinau and Tbilisi and definitely in Kyiv.

So there will be a hardening of attitudes. I assume that there will be a change of attitude on the part of the Moldovan police, who will have to change many of their approaches to the way they investigate and fight crime. But this will have to go hand in hand with the proper functioning of the prosecution and the judiciary.

Because that is the key, without those people who are taking these cases, these criminal cases to their logical conclusion, you cannot prosecute, you cannot put these criminals in prison. And we are talking about hundreds of criminals who are free in one way or another. Many of them are in the so-called Ilan Shor parties.

They are in the Victoria/Pobeda bloc. They are in that banned, forbidden party called the Chance Party. They are also in Igor Dodon’s Socialist Party, at least some of them.

They can be found in local administrations, not only in Gagauzia. They are found in certain local administrations at the level of raion.

This scourge must be fought, because otherwise, if they are not brought to justice, next July we will have a reversal of the strategic course of Moldova. And if a pro-Russian group or a pro-Russian alliance of parties gets into the parliament, to rule in the parliament, to impose their prime minister, we will have a country that will be blocked. We will have a country more or less like Georgia now.

That is as much as I can tell you now. In the next few days I’m expecting more in this sense from the presidency, from the prime minister in Moldova, from the leadership of Moldova. But for now, this is Monday, we are just a few hours after the re-election of Maia Sandu.

There is still some euphoria, people are catching up on their sleep, but in the next few days, I assume already on Wednesday, we will have more signals in this regard.

You are based in Poland and you mentioned that not only Romanian, but also Polish experts have been advising and working with the Moldovan government. And perhaps it should be said that Poland was a very important country about 10 years ago, and it was again Donald Tusk who was involved in the diplomacy around the signing of the Association and Free Trade Agreement between Moldova and the EU. Poland was very interested in Moldova and I was wondering how this is going now and how it will go in the future, given that Donald Tusk is again leading the government in Poland and Moldova has just voted to join the EU.

When this happened a decade ago, we were on a wave of policies that depended on the Eastern Partnership platform, which was co-invented, co-proposed by Poland, Sweden, and there was a role for the Czech government initially in this macro-policy proposal. So when Tusk visited Moldova sometime in 2012, if I’m not mistaken, people were very enthusiastic. Moldova was expected to develop faster.

There was much less hostility than there is now. We were one or two years away from the annexation of Crimea and so on. So this is my way of saying that we are not in the same world anymore.

The world has changed dramatically. Poland has changed dramatically too, I would say. It has been less than a year since the new government, the coalition of parties led by Tusk, came to power.

In Warsaw, we are still in the process of overhauling a lot of wrong policies and decisions made by the previous Law and Justice government in Warsaw. This process is not over yet and it takes a lot of energy from Warsaw. Warsaw is also a different, more assertive actor in the field of defence.

This also has to be taken into account. A  lot of Warsaw’s thoughts and minds, so to speak, are elsewhere than trying to find a role as an EU country, as an EU leader in Eastern Europe. The world is different now. The architecture of the region and Poland’s role in it has changed very dramatically. So I cannot say that we should see Poland as an exclusive leader in the region.

Many of the policies that Poland designed a decade and more ago have been adopted by Brussels, by the European Union. This is a success, I would say, of Polish policy-making, policy-designing a decade and a half ago. So they are now institutionalised. They are integrated into many of these approaches. They’re not even believed and they’re not even seen as something that started in Warsaw or in Stockholm or in Prague. And that is a success, we have to admit. It is also a Polish success. And it should be said whenever possible. But apart from that, Poland is not the same in the region.

We shouldn’t be looking for the kind of actor, who is absolutely crucial. This is a collective approach. This is a collective policy. This is a collective effort. There are now various platforms in which Moldova is trying to have a voice or to adopt a voice. Some of them also come from Warsaw.

There is, for example, the Three Seas Initiative, which is not a platform that directly accepts Moldova or Ukraine and its ranks, but into which Moldova, for example, is trying to enter. And it will join as soon as it becomes a member of the EU, hopefully sometime in 2030. There are other such initiatives.

There are trilaterals. Before the war in Ukraine started, before the invasion, basically in 2021, there was an attempt to create a quadrilateral platform for actors. In the summer of 2021, at a certain point, there was a visit by three presidents from the region.

There was Zelensky, there was Iohannis, there was Duda in Chișinău on Moldova’s Independence Day in August. And suddenly they started talking about Chișinău Four. But then it didn’t take root.

I mean, the world has changed so much with this war that all these initiatives have been lost or forgotten or simply cannot attract enough energy, institutionally, financially, even intellectually, because we are in the middle of something, in the middle of processes that neither Kishinev nor even Warsaw or Bucharest can control.

After all, we have seen that the Moldovan diaspora changed the outcome of both the referendum and the presidential election, because on the territory of the Republic of Moldova the referendum was going to vote no and Stoianoglo was going to win, but the votes from the diaspora changed that. And there are even articles saying that by 2030 more Moldovans will be born abroad than in the Republic of Moldova. So this is a sign that the role of the diaspora is growing within the Moldovan political system or society.

How should we evaluate or appreciate the profile of the Moldovan diaspora, given that Moldova also has perhaps 200,000 or 300,000 people in Russia, and Moldovans are actually in many places, not only in the European Union. So, in short, what do you think the role of the Moldovan diaspora will be in the coming period? And what are the characteristics of this diaspora?

Vladimir, allow me to kindly correct your data. The Moldovan diaspora in Moscow, in Russia, although the bulk of it is in Moscow or in the surroundings, is less than 70,000.

Ok, I accept the correction, I have to say that I quote an article from Free Europe Moldova, which quotes a former Moldovan deputy foreign minister called Valeriu Chiveri.

No, no. This is outdated information, but it is important.

It is not a mistake, but the diaspora has come massively to Moldova and then left Moldova for Western Europe or the Western hemisphere. And this has been happening for the last few years. That is why at the moment we have at most 70,000 Moldovans in Russia.

This is very important because we see that the weaponization of this diaspora by Moscow is having less and less impact on Moldova. We have just seen this because they were not able to fly in and arrest enough of the diaspora living in Russia to manipulate and change the results of the referendum and the presidential elections. They couldn’t do it.

They simply cannot create enough scale with this diaspora. And this is important. Now, what is the size of this diaspora, which is spread mainly in the European Union, in the UK and in North America, mainly in the US and Canada, is over 1 million people, probably 1.1 million people live in this area. The electoral power of this population, if we take it in total, could be about one third of the total electoral power in Moldova. So this is a huge power. If it is activated, if it is given all the means to express its political will, it has a completely strategic impact on Moldovan affairs.

And this was basically proven yesterday when almost 330,000 people voted. This is unprecedented. That is almost 20% of the votes cast yesterday, coming from the diaspora.

Very few people, if any, expected that many Moldovans would come to vote, but they were empowered. So they were given the opportunity to come to, if I’m not mistaken, 235 or 240 polling stations around the world. They were given that right, they were basically enfranchised, and they expressed their will and they had a huge impact.

Moldova is being kept on course with the referendum and with Maia Sandu’s agency as a political actor, largely thanks to the diaspora. Let me just remind you that this morning, when the final results were announced, or almost the final results, Stoianoglo got over 51%, almost 51.5% of the vote in the country itself. So if there were, if we think that, if we admit that there weren’t any votes from the diaspora, Stojanoglo would now be president.

But the diaspora gave 330,000 votes, 83% of which went to Maia Sandu. That is massive. You can only get results like that in autocracies, right? But this was a democratic vote by the diaspora. So what does it mean? It means that Chisinau has a strategic reserve within this diaspora.

I think and I hope that there will be political changes with regard to this diaspora. There should be a deeper institutionalised dialogue about this diaspora, maybe a ministry, maybe a whole agency, but something has to change to give, to empower this diaspora in the most practical way. Because without this diaspora, Moldova would be different. We have to admit it, it would probably be a worse place. Yesterday, as I was watching the vote, I realised that Moldova now has two capitals. It has Chisinau, which voted 57% for Maia Sandu.

And it also has another capital, the diaspora, which basically means 370,000 votes, right? And a diaspora that voted even more massively, so to speak, excuse my tautology, in favour of this European idea. And that basically makes the diaspora the second capital.

And also if we think about the impact, what impact this diaspora has in terms of national, wealth, investment, that it has a massive share in the importance and in the survivability of the Moldovan state. So I’m expecting that in the near future this diaspora will be given more empowerment, more political empowerment. I’m not even talking about too many months in the future. Just in the next few weeks and months there should be some change to give this diaspora the opportunity to feel empowered and to have a seat at the table, so to speak.

Because you can only appeal to this diaspora when you need their votes, can you? That is, once every four years. That is not the way it should work.

This is also, of course, the consequence of the exodus of the population because of security, because of prosperity, because of many, many other reasons, but they’re all connected. And we should see it as the consequence of a national tragedy, because the country has lost in one generation about 35 or maybe more percent of its population, mainly because people left the country to find a better place to live. So this is what it means to have, and I think it is unprecedented.

I don’t know of any other country where the diaspora would count so much in terms of the voting mass, in terms of the strategic direction of the government. Of course, I don’t know much about a lot of other countries on the map, but I can’t think of any other example at the moment of a country where the diaspora has such a strategic impact on the country.

So, yes, just to conclude, this is a factor that should be at the table of the government in the near future, and it should be empowered and given the means to influence even more this pro-European course of the country, because it expressed its power last Sunday, a few hours ago, when it voted massively and said this is your strategic direction. And the last point, let’s say we had 330,000 votes and the capacity of this diaspora, if we admit in theory that they vote at 90 or 100%, it means that this diaspora can deliver around 850,000-900,000 votes. So what we saw yesterday is only a third of the potential of this diaspora.

Photo: Maia Sandu celebrating her victory in the night of 3 November 2024 (source: YouTube)

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