Election Lessons on Both Sides of the Prut: How Voters’ Priorities Are Changing

Christian RUSSU

The failure of the ruling coalition partners in the Romanian presidential elections means long-term consequences for the political future of our country

Yesterday, the constitutional structures on both banks of the Prut almost synchronously issued conclusions on the presidential elections. In our country, the results of the second round and the victory of the incumbent head of state, Maia Sandu, did not surprise anyone. But our neighbors will now have to conduct a full recount of the votes, taking into account the resonant results of the first round of voting. I have already written that the current electoral processes in Moldova and Romania have similar unpleasant features: aggressive information campaign, search for the omnipresent “hand of Moscow”, elimination of undesirable candidates with the help of controlled state structures. However, despite such unscrupulous mopping up of the electoral field, the political elites in both Chisinau and Bucharest failed. Authoritarian methods of rule and attempts to retain power, more typical of kleptocratic regimes, against the background of a failed internal political course caused a sharp and unambiguous reaction of the population. But if in our country the citizens’ protest vote only frightened the ruling regime, the citizens over the Prut, who had fully tasted all the delights of the globalist politics of recent decades, sent their political elite to the dustbin of history. It is indicative that the main messages of the ruling coalition candidates, liberal Nicolae Ciuca and social democrat Marcel Ciolacu, in the election campaign were promises of further progress in integration into Euro-Atlantic structures: full-fledged accession to the Schengen zone, visa-free regime with the USA, receiving additional loans and grants from Brussels, etc. The former NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana even pretended to be a glossy EU bureaucrat. The situation in our country was the same. Maia Sandu and her team boasted, demonstrating their “achievements”: the status of EU candidate, the opening of access to Brussels funds, the beginning of accession negotiations. Many Moldovan citizens, unlike their more advanced neighbors, simply do not know that behind these flashy slogans are poverty and misery, European tariffs and forced emigration in the next few years. Maia Sandu and her entourage were saved by the diaspora, to which the re-elected president belongs. Unencumbered by thoughts of earning money for the sake of survival, this layer of Moldovans has long lived by other categories. For them, cheap low-cost flights from Chisinau are more important than the economy and agriculture. In the case of Romania, both the country’s population and the diaspora were united in the opinion that behind the slogans of the elite and its servants, long disconnected from the urgent needs of ordinary citizens, there is nothing. Many believe that Calin Georgescu’s success is due to skillful exploitation of social media, but TikTok resources would be useless in the absence of Romanian society’s demand for new leaders who focus on national interests rather than geopolitical rhetoric. The failure of narratives promoted by the country’s mainstream media was a clear evidence. The media turned out to be as out-of-touch as the authorities themselves.  That is why the long-standing rule of the two main political forces in Romania was on the brink. For Moldova’s political and intellectual establishment, the political system of the neighboring state with its Western-style stable basis and narrow circle of participants has always been an example. Romanian citizenship and integration into the political processes over the Prut became the most promising focus area. The leaders of the ruling PAS, Ion Ceban from MAN and many others wanted to become a branch of Romanian parties or a partner of the Bucharest mastodons. This was the core component of all Chisinau ideologues. Now this direction loses its significance and, importantly, jeopardizes financial prospects. The elites ruling on the banks of the Prut are setting up schemes to tie up financial flows in key areas from energy to transport under the banner of two Romanian states. Nobody is going to give up their plans so easily. The struggle for power will continue, but the methods will be toughened. The shock in the ruling coalition of national liberals and social democrats has passed. It is planned to revise the results of the first round of elections in order to bring at least Marcel Ciolacu back into the game, otherwise failure in the parliamentary elections is inevitable. A widespread campaign of discrediting is launched against the leader of the race, and the main resource of the latter, TikTok, may be banned. I do not exclude that one of the coming days Romanians will wake up with a new-old president and life will remain the same. There may be no room in the new system for the conservatives and populists: Georgescu, Sosoaca and Simion, but it won’t be for long. Without a reset of power, Romania will come closer to a new revolution. For our political elite, the lessons are as obvious as they are contradictory. Many in Chisinau considered it farsighted to clear the country’s political field of any potential competitors in advance and to refuse to play games of democracy. This is presented almost as a model of countering hybrid attacks from the outside for many European countries. The preservation of a relative plurality of opinions in social media may be considered a flaw, but this can be mendable. Others even saw it as a sign of their own superiority and the possibility of ideological expansion beyond the Prut. Such chauvinistic reflections in the capital’s political environment are quite acceptable, if only as a sign of the sovereignty of the state’s elite. But what we do not see against the background of political turmoil in Romania is the awakening of conservative leaders, supporters of traditional values, defenders of ordinary people. The recent troublemaker of the Chisinau elite, Alexandr Stoianoglo, could have taken advantage of the current events to consolidate the electorate and fight uncompromisingly, but, apparently, his plans didn’t include this from the beginning. But it does not mean that another non-party candidate will not appear on the horizon at some point, which will again cause a stir or even provoke a “general cleansing” in the country’s political elite.