Moldova gives decisive win to pro-EU party

What happened

Moldova’s ruling Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) Sunday won an outright majority of seats in pivotal parliamentary elections, keeping the former Soviet Russian satellite country on track to join the European Union within five years. According to uncertified results this morning, President Maia Sandu’s pro-EU PAS won 50.1% of the vote, versus 24.2% for the Moscow-aligned Patriotic Electoral Bloc.

Who said what

The election had “taken on outsize global importance,” because while Moldova is a “tiny nation of 2.4 million,” its location “wedged between Romania and Ukraine” makes it “strategically important” to the Ukraine war, The New York Times said. Sandu’s government warned throughout the tense campaign that Russia was meddling, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy votes and on a massive disinformation effort.

Moldova applied to join the EU after Russia invaded Ukraine, and last fall voters narrowly approved EU membership in a referendum and reelected Sandu to a second term. “In both cases, ballots from the hundreds of thousands of Moldovans living abroad — many in EU countries — were critical in swinging the result,” Politico said.

What next?

Maintaining its parliamentary majority keeps PAS from “having to form a coalition that would have most likely been unstable and would have slowed down the pace of reforms to join the EU,” Oakland University international relations professor Cristian Cantir told The Associated Press. But “Moldova will continue to be in a difficult geopolitical environment characterized by Russia’s attempts to pull it back into its sphere of influence.”

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