2024-11-07
6 分钟While we take stock of what Trump’s victory means for the world, one country’s election result has had a more reassuring effect, at least for the EU. This week, Moldova reelected president Maia Sandu. Andrew Mueller explains what it means beyond the country’s borders and why it matters. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It has not been a completely terrible week for women attempting to get elected president of a polarized democracy.
Amid fears of an escalating war in Europe, and despite her bellicose, populist opponent being either in thrall or in hoc or both to Russia, the foreign desk explainer is happy to concede, grand scheme of things, that what is about to ensue is arguably not much.
But it's not nothing.
Though this is shaping up as one of President Vladimir Putin's better weeks for a while, it is not quite the cue for unadulterated triumphal pounding on his weird long table.
It might have been.
And for that we have Moldova to thank.
It is not easy to get people to pay attention to elections in Moldova, least of all when there's one going on at more or less the same time in the United States.
But people should pay attention to elections in Moldova and to the election Moldova has just had, which may well have consequences beyond Moldova's meager borders.
Moldova is a small country, maybe two and a half million people, occupying a little more territory than Belgium does.
Like Belgium, it is divided.
A sliver of Moldova insists that it is the Prydnestrovian Moldavian Republic.
This is more widely, and less time consumingly, known as Transnistria.
Transnistria has its own president currently, Vadim Krasnoyski, a former police officer animated by an almost manic nostalgia for the pre1917 Russian monarchy.
Transnistria also has its own money, postage stamps and flag, which, somewhat confusingly given the proclivities of the current president, has a hammer and sickle on it.
None of which would matter all that much if Moldova wasn't where it is wedged in between Romania and Ukraine, that is, right on the front line between the Eastern Europe now protected by membership of the EU and or NATO, and the former Soviet hinterlands, which Russia still seems to regard as its rightful possession.
Or if Moldova wasn't what it is, that is extremely vulnerable.
With a tiny army, no air force to speak of, and a constitution which commits it to neutrality that is theoretically precluding deterrent deployments by friendly states, though Moldova has taken the precaution of concluding a security and defence pact with the EU and bilateral agreements with others.
Transnistria, meanwhile, abides by no such scruples and is believed to host about 1500 Russian troops.
All of which is by way of demonstrating that there was quite a lot riding on Moldova's recent elections.
In the first round of voting a couple of weeks back, incumbent President Maya Sandu came first, but by an insufficient margin to avoid a runoff.