The parliamentary elections in the Republic of Moldova have a clear winner who was not even up for election: President Maia Sandu.
Because the Action and Solidarity (PAS) party, which was the first party in Moldova's history to receive more than fifty percent of the vote on Sunday and will be the government in the future, was founded by Sandu and led until it last autumn Won the presidential election.
Since taking office, Sandu has worked towards the early election that she hoped would win a majority for the changes she had promised - fighting corruption and building an independent judiciary.
"I hope that this day ends the rule of thieves over Moldova," wrote Sandu on Sunday on Facebook.
Reinhard Veser
Editor in politics.
Follow I follow
The previous parliament was the product of another time.
When it was elected in February 2019, Moldova was still in the hands of oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc, who, although pro-Western, had actually established an authoritarian regime.
According to a report by the EU Parliament, Moldova was at that time a "captured state" that served a small group of powerful people for their own enrichment.
The two strongest factions were the oligarchs' party, which has since completely collapsed, and the socialists of the former pro-Russian President Igor Dodon.
These forces fiercely opposed the early parliamentary elections, which Sandu was finally able to overcome in May thanks to a ruling by the Constitutional Court.
Homophobic and Racist Resentment
The second strongest force behind the PAS, which has 52.8 percent of the vote and 63 of the 101 seats in parliament, is Dodon's Moscow-based electoral alliance of socialists and communists with 27.1 percent. The third party with 5.7 percent of the vote is the businessman Ilan Schor's party in the parliament in Chişinau. Schor had been sentenced to prison for money laundering and his involvement in a large-scale fraud in the Moldovan banking system. About 48 percent of the 3.2 million eligible voters took part in the election.
The socialist-communist bloc had tried to make the choice a geopolitical decision between East and West.
During the election campaign, the two parties warned against the fact that the EU and NATO wanted to deprive Moldova of its sovereignty, make it a staging area for military maneuvers and impose foreign, "family-hostile" values on it.
Both homophobic and racist resentments played an important role in the campaign of the two “left” parties.
Integrity and free from affairs
The PAS, on the other hand, concentrated on domestic political issues during the election campaign. "Some political forces want to use geopolitical issues to avoid questions about corruption," said President Sandu at the beginning of the election campaign in May of the FAZ To leave behind large parts oriented towards the west and towards Russia and also to address the Russian-speaking population group. The 49-year-old president, who worked for the World Bank in Washington before her political career, is considered to be of integrity. So far, she had also succeeded in keeping her party free from affairs - among other things through strict admission criteria.
Against this background, the PAS seems to have partially succeeded in opening up new layers in the parliamentary elections. It was able to win a number of constituencies in which a majority had voted for the socialist Dodon and thus against Sandu in the presidential election in the fall. However, the party owes its success in no small part to the votes of the Moldovans living abroad. Of the approximately 212,000 voters who cast their votes in consulates abroad, 86 percent voted for PAS. Since such a result was foreseeable on the basis of experience in previous elections, there had been a violent struggle before the election about the number of polling stations in Western Europe, where numerous citizens of the poorest country in Europe work.
Sandu and the PAS hope that, after this election, Moldova will be supported by the EU in overcoming the consequences of the corona pandemic and in building new state institutions. The country signed a partnership and cooperation agreement with the EU back in 2014. But because of the apparent corruption under the ostensibly “pro-Western” oligarch regime and because of election manipulation, Brussels temporarily frozen financial support for Moldova in 2018. The cooperation got going again when Sandu was prime minister for a few months in 2019 after the PAS and Dodon's socialists overthrew authoritarian rule with the support of both the West and Moscow, but the financial aid was based on conditions of transparency and the rule of law knotted,whose fulfillment with the previous parliamentary majority was questionable. In June the EU approved an economic stimulus plan for Moldova worth 600 million euros.