Moldova has demonstrated its democratic resilience, and now it's the European Union's turn to rise to the challenge. Sunday's legislative elections in this tiny territory, strategically located between Romania and Ukraine, gave an absolute majority to President Maya Sandu's party, a member of the Action and Solidarity party, in a vote interpreted as a ratification of the path taken toward the EU, despite documented evidence of interference, disinformation, and attempted corruption.
It has been a colossal challenge for this former Soviet republic of just over two and a half million inhabitants, a candidate for EU membership since 2022. Moldova is a fragile democracy whose destiny is inextricably linked to regional instability. That's why the shadow of Georgia, another country divided between those who look west, toward the EU, and those who look north, toward Moscow—which has seen its accession negotiations suspended since the elections at the end of 2024 and the repression that followed—is silently looming over Moldova.
With the election results in hand, Brussels has begun to make its moves. The President of the European Council, António Costa, is reportedly sounding out Member States to try to relax the rules of negotiations with candidate countries, to implement qualified majority voting and thus be able to move more quickly in opening the different chapters of reforms.
The idea of decoupling Moldova's application for membership from that of Ukraine, which is paralyzed by Hungary's veto, is also beginning to be raised. However, despite the need to avoid Viktor Orbán's opposition, both the European Union and many EU capitals are reluctant to launch both candidacies. Some believe it would be a severe blow to Ukrainian morale in a context where EU membership is seen as part of future security guarantees. Others fear that Moldova's withdrawal from Ukraine would legitimize Hungary's veto and weaken the message of unity and support that the EU is trying to project in the talks on the immediate future of the war.
Although for Moldovans, the main concern is not geopolitics but corruption, economic discontent, energy insecurity, and frustration with the pace of reforms, Moldova's pro-EU trajectory is increasingly strained by transnational challenges and ideological agendas.
In March 2025, the opposition introduced a bill on "foreign agents," which failed, but which stigmatized civil society organizations, similar to the repressive model imposed in Russia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Republika Srpska.
In May, the mayor of Chișinau banned the city's annual Pride March, a decision that sparked a conflict with the head of state over the legality of the decision. At the end of July, the Moldovan capital hosted the Make Europe Great Again (MEGA) conference, which was intended to bring together far-right figures from across Europe and the United States, but Moldovan authorities blocked the entry of 17 participants.
All these movements reflect not only political polarization but also the constant threat to spaces for political contestation. Moldova is a country where disinformation has become an "endemic" problem, as IBEI political scientist Elena Simanschi denounced some time ago, with disinformation campaigns aimed at polarizing the electorate, which portray EU integration as imperialism, reforms as dictations Moldovan institutions and foreign governments as organizations controlled by foreign powers.
Furthermore, according to the Transformation Index published annually by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the institutional trust deficit is very high and fuels vulnerabilities that both internal and external actors can exploit.
As analyst Oana Popescu-Zamfir, director of the GlobalFocus Center in Bucharest, recalled last week, for Chișinau, each step taken by the European Union in Moldova "turns aspiration into resilience" and makes the country "more difficult to coerce and more costly to overdraw." Therefore, while EU financial support is conditional on Moldova carrying out the necessary reforms to guarantee good governance, the fight against corruption, judicial independence, and an efficient public administration, it is also necessary for Brussels to put on the table the necessary financial commitment to assist in all these endeavors.
