The Hague Research Institute
for Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus & Central Asia

Referendum in Moldova: A Hesitating Choice for the European Path

November 2024

Dr. Roxana Andrei

Thri Advisory Board Member & The University Institute of Lisbon 

 

Moldova: not as close as expected

On 20 October 2024, a large part of the voters in Moldova casted a negative vote against their country joining the European Union (EU), by voting against changing the constitution of their country in order for the Republic of Moldova to join the EU. The referendum, organised at the same time with the first round of the presidential elections, barely passed with 50.35% votes in favour, but only after collecting the votes of the Western diaspora, where Moldovans voted 76.79% for the Yes option (ADEPT, 2024).

Regardless the final result of the referendum, the hard truth remains unchanged: the people living in Moldova were not fully convinced by the European way strongly advocated by the president in power, Maia Sandu, a former World Bank economist.

Maia Sandu has been firmly supported by the EU and she prides herself with being granted candidate status to the European Union for her country in June 2022, with the perspective of joining in 2030. As a result, in October 2024, the EU adopted a Growth Plan for the Republic of Moldova worth €1.8 billion, which comes to complement the €430 million in non-repayable grants allocated to Moldova between 2021-2024, under the Neighbourhood Development and Cooperation Instrument-Global Europe (NDICI-GE), in order to help the country’s most vulnerable consumers cope with rising energy prices, to support Moldova’s energy security and transition, to provide support to reforms in the justice sector, and to help with the green transition. In addition, since 2021, the EU has also provided Moldova with €1.6 billion under the Economic & Investment Plan (EIP) for the transport and energy sector.

In this way, the EU is at present the largest provider of financial assistance to Moldova and it is Moldova’s main trading partner. It is also a key security partner, having provided €137 million support to the Moldovan Armed Forces through the European Peace Facility (EPF) since 2021 (European Commission, 2024).

Photo Source: Vecteezy.com

What went wrong then? Where did the EU message fail to pass through and convince the electorate in Moldova?

1. Romania’s and the EU’s limited power of conviction
The EU’s consistent financial backing to Moldova has proved so far to be little convincing, as has the three-decades multi-level assistance offered by Romania, Moldova’s kin and main supporter.

Romania has been supporting Moldova on mostly all sectors, being the first country to recognise its independence in August 1991 and its main security provider. It has employed a wide range of soft policy tools, as well as financial assistance instruments and security guarantees in order to encourage Moldova’s stability and peaceful transition towards democracy and rule of law, while also being its main advocate for EU accession. Nonetheless, the results of the referendum do not reflect a visible success of the pro-EU message in the Republic of Moldova.

Under the Moldova Support Platform (MSP), an initiative of Romania, Germany and France, more than 30 states, along with dozens of international organisations and financial organisations provide Moldova with immediate political, financial and material assistance, such as covering the expenses with the infrastructure, as well with payment of salaries, pensions, and support of the socially vulnerable segments (Government of Republic of Moldova, 2023). Through the same MSP, Moldova received in the beginning of 2024 the first 3 out of the planned 19 armoured fighting vehicles Piranha 3 from Germany, at the initiative of the authorities in Bucharest, while Romania is also actively participating in supporting and training the Moldovan army forces (Comanescu, 2024). The Republic of Moldova is the main beneficiary of the Romanian policy for international cooperation for development and humanitarian aid, under the Democratization and Sustainable Development for Moldova Fund (Ion, 2024) , while Romania is the main foreign investing partner in Moldova.

Moldova is a vulnerable energy importer, being 100% dependent on natural gas imports and lacking its own storage capabilities, natural gas being the main resource used to produce electricity and to heat the homes in a country where 60% of the population fights energy poverty (UNDP, 2024). In 2021, SA „Moldovagaz” and SAP „Gazprom” signed a new 5-years deal for the import of natural gas from Russia at prices below the European average. Nonetheless, in October 2022, Gazprom has drastically reduced the delivered quantities of gas to 5,7 mcm/day (Government of Republic of Moldova, 2024a). In addition, the attacks on the Ukrainian energy and gas storage infrastructure, on which Moldova depends, along with the possibility of the gas transit deal between Ukraine and Russia not being renewed after 31 December 2024, pose further risks to the energy security of the country.

In this troubled context, Romania has nevertheless acted as a safety net for the energy sector of Moldova, despite its own possible limitations regarding the available gas storage capacity. Thus, if before 2022 the Republic of Moldova was importing the majority of natural gas from the Russian Federation via Ukraine, it has managed since to diversify its suppliers and routes by building a cross-border interconnector with Romania, the Iasi-Chisinau gas pipeline, along with the opportunity to use the trans-Balkan route in reverse mode, and with the possibility of utilising natural gas storage facilities in Ukraine and Romania (Government of Republic of Moldova, 2024b) . At present, Romania exports 10% of its natural gas production to Moldova through the Iasi-Ungheni pipeline, meaning 1.9 mcm (Ziua, 2024) and intends to expand the existing infrastructure with an additional pipeline by 2031, while also planning for a 400 KW aerial electricity connection between Suceava in Romania and Balti in Moldova (Romanian Ministry of Energy, 2023).

However, the natural gas prices have spiked in Moldova starting 2021, from 265 USD/1000 m3 in 2021 to 1193 USD/1000 m3 in April 2022, triggering a further increase in the prices of electricity (UNDP, 2024). This has led the population, already impoverished, to fear that joining the EU and the market liberalisation obligations would translate into life becoming even more expensive, an anxiety that has been successfully exploited and fuelled by the intense disinformation and propaganda that aimed to discredit the pro-EU referendum.

In this context, the people in Moldova, already benefitting from wide security coverage, be it in the military, energy or economic sector from their partner Romania, might regard as less attractive the EU offer, which comes with a strict package of conditionalities and obligations in return, which their neighbour has not imposed. In their own turn, both the EU and the Moldovan stakeholders have been criticised for being less successful in bringing the EU message closer to the people, by using a rather top-down approach largely disconnected from the broader population. Read more about the public diplomacy deficit and the communication gap that might have driven the choice of the Moldovan voters, in the article of our colleague, Dr. Dorina Baltag, “Lessons from Moldova’s Referendum: Navigating the Crossroads to a European Future”.

Photo Source: Vecteezy.com

”Moldovans are little attracted by the promise of an EU citizenship and of all the benefits that come with it, as it might be the case with the people in Ukraine in Georgia”

2. The EU’s one-size-fits-all limitations
For the EU to succeed in bringing Moldova closer and to avoid deepening its internal polarisation and lack of solidarity, it must tailor its approach to the needs and priorities of the Moldovan people, which differ in many regards from those in Ukraine and in Georgia. Placing all three countries in the same pool is doomed to lead to failure.

Moldovans are little attracted by the promise of an EU citizenship and of all the benefits that come with it, as it might be the case with the people in Ukraine in Georgia. That is because only between 2010 and 2021, out of a total number of approximately 2.5 million Moldovan citizens, a number of 1,027,091 people obtained Romanian citizenship and have thus been able to work, travel and live in the EU, as EU citizens. To this number, one must also take into account the hundreds of thousands of other beneficiaries that obtained Romanian/EU citizenship before 2010 and those who are still in the process of receiving it (Dosar Media, 2024).

Moreover, Moldova is still struggling with divided and inconclusive identities. The Republic of Moldova has emerged as an independent state in 1991, after centuries of being transferred between the Romanian Principates and later on Romania, on the one hand, and the Russian Empire and afterwards the Soviet Union, on the other hand. This has led to an erosion of identity and to further divisions between the predominantly Romanian population into Romanians and the more recently developed identity of Moldavians, forged from the remains of the dislocated Soviet past, to which many still look back in nostalgy. Adding a new layer, that of the European identity, might prove to be difficult in a country without a solidified, universally accepted national identity, with the majority still equivocal between being Romanian or Moldavian.

3.Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference

Last, but definitely not least, the choice of the people in Moldova has been impacted by the intensified Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), which has preceded the referendum and the presidential elections and which has escalated since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the first hours after closing the voting process, President Maia Sandu condemned “the unprecedented attack on the freedom and democracy” in Moldova (DIGI24, 2024).

Moldova is a small country, but of a strategic importance in the war in Ukraine, given its key position between Romania and Ukraine, by the Danube’s mouth used by Kyiv for its grain exports and less than 60 km away from Odesa. In the first year of the war, there were speculations about Moscow’s intentions to occupy Odesa and from there to connect with its forces already stationed in Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria, which finds itself under Russian influence. Since the beginning of the invasion, Moldova, although reinstating its constitutional neutrality, has been targeted by overt threats as well as by covert hybrid warfare techniques, in the forms of disinformation, propaganda, political and, as recently claimed, electoral manipulation.

At the request of the government in Chisinau, the EU established in April 2023 the EU Partnership Mission in The Republic of Moldova (EUPM), an exclusively civilian mission with the aim to contribute to strengthening the country’s crisis management structures and to enhance its resilience to hybrid threats, including cybersecurity, and countering foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) (EEAS, 2023). As it is too soon to evaluate the effectiveness of the EUPM in Moldova, it has become clear, in the light of the recent referendum and elections that its mission must go beyond a declarative one and that up-to-date techniques for countering hybrid threats and build awareness are crucial in order to keep the pace with the rapidly evolving threat techniques and actors. Coming closer to the population is essential, as it is the people themselves who are the main target of FIMI.

On 3 November 2024, following the second round of the presidential elections, Maia Sandu managed to obtain a second mandate with 55.41% of votes (Central Electoral Commission of the Republic of Moldova, 2024), this time as well with the strong support of the Western diaspora. She pledges to maintain her country’s course towards joining the EU and to uphold the European values. The news is a relief for Moldova’s neighbours and European peers, concerned with the increasing polarisation of the country and in need for reliable partners neighbouring Ukraine.

One key question remains though: how will the EU manage to make itself accepted as a credible counterpart for the population in Moldova, where a similar message and measures undertaken by a Romania – a kin country with which Moldova shares a common history, language and culture -, have been little successful in building sufficient confidence and solidarity, given the fact that the EU might be perceived as too foreign and too disconnected from the realities of the Moldovan people?

References

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