Vasile Tofan: Fresh Paint on a Rotting Structure

The nomination of Vasile Tofan for prime minister is not the start of a fundamentally new political chapter. It is an attempt to squeeze as much extra time as possible out of Moldova’s existing governance model

11 July marked five years since PAS won its crushing victory in the snap parliamentary elections of 2021, taking full control of power. Yet, by a cruel twist of the calendar, the anniversary coincided with one of the most severe crises the party has endured in all that time. The governance model it constructed has ceased to cope with the accumulated problems, made abundantly clear by the latest prime minister’s resignation. The hastily convened consultations with parliamentary factions, the emergency meeting between Maia Sandu and the ambassadors of the European Union and the G7 – all of this reveals the degree of anxiety inside the ruling regime. Judging by selective leaks, the president tried to convince the diplomats that there is, in fact, no crisis; that the European integration course remains unshakeable; and that the slight hiccup in the government’s functionality is nothing more than a technical pause, to be resolved next week. This desire to project “political calm” is entirely understandable: for external partners, preserving a sense of predictability in Moldova on the eve of opening the accession clusters is of paramount importance. The trouble is that foreign representatives are themselves steeped in our political reality and are perfectly aware of the true scale of the crisis. On Saturday, on the very anniversary of PAS’ rise to power, Sandu announced the name of the prospective prime minister: businessman Vasile Tofan. His candidacy was, as expected, put forward by the PAS faction – the only one to respond to the “consultations” called by the presidency. Every opposition force unanimously boycotted the invitation, branding it an imitation of democratic procedures and demanding snap parliamentary elections. They insist that changing the name in the prime minister’s chair does nothing to alter the fact that all key decisions are still taken within the narrow circle of a single party that still holds a parliamentary majority but has by now largely squandered its legitimacy. The need for a new prime minister arose on 3 July, when Alexandru Munteanu unexpectedly tendered his resignation, citing his inability to continue exercising his mandate in keeping with his own principles and convictions. The revolving door has long been PAS’ go-to method of crisis management. Against a backdrop of economic and energy turmoil, Natalia Gavrilita stepped down from the cabinet back in 2023; her successor, Dorin Recean, failed to secure his return to the post after last autumn’s parliamentary elections and brought in Alexandru Munteanu, who lasted all of eight months. Tofan, should PAS deputies vote him in, will be the fourth prime minister in the party’s five years in power. It is obvious that the problem lies not in the individual personalities but in the very architecture of power. Vasile Tofan has long been familiar to anyone who follows Moldovan politics. He was already seen as the leading candidate for prime minister after the 2025 parliamentary elections, though back then, by his own account, he needed “a little more time” to put his business affairs in order. Yet, just eight months later, Tofan has, rather tellingly, suddenly found the time. Even more striking is that, the very day after Munteanu’s resignation, he publicly unveiled a plan of twelve priority measures: from tax reform to an overhaul of the labor code, which looks very much like a script prepared well in advance. It seems that the ruling party has simply gone back to its original option, even though an enormous amount has changed in the interim. If, a year ago, a new prime minister could count on a political line of credit and a relatively stable power vertical, today he will have to operate against a backdrop of PAS’ plummeting ratings, mutual mistrust among the elites, and an intensifying struggle between various influence groups. Almost immediately after Tofan’s nomination was announced, the central question arose: will he be able to form a government on his own terms? For that is precisely the condition that will serve as the main indicator of his mandate. If the new prime minister conducts a sweeping review of ministerial posts, replaces agency heads, brings in his own team, and begins dismantling the entrenched governance schemes, then we can speak of at least a minimal degree of freedom of action. If, however, the apparatus remains virtually unchanged and personnel decisions continue, as before, to be made by intra-party clans that have carved up key financial and administrative resources among themselves, then what we will have before us is, once again, a figurehead – a nominal chairman with no real power. The would-be prime minister’s CV is more than impressive. A 44-year-old partner at the investment fund Horizon Capital, which manages assets worth 1.6 to 1.8 billion dollars and specializes in investments in Moldova and Ukraineб including the countryэs largest bank, Maib, he is a graduate of both Erasmus and Harvard Business School and has sat on Maibэs supervisory board since 2018. Such a track record would undoubtedly grace any candidateэs résumé for a post at a major transnational corporation. At the same time, it raises serious doubts as to whose interests this man will actually represent at the head of a sovereign stateэs government. It is easy to guess that the main beneficiary of this appointment will be, first and foremost, the group closely tied to the banking sector, as well as the clan headed by former prime minister Dorin Recean, whose wife, as it happens, works at that very same Maib. No less revealing were Tofan’s own first statements. Rather than broadly outlining a program of action, he almost immediately declared the need to preserve continuity with the course of the previous cabinet and to complete the reforms already under way. Against the backdrop of the current crisis, this looks odd. It is as if the new prime minister is arriving not to change the system but to service it, just like all his predecessors. Tofan’s pronouncements on European integration are also of interest, in particular, the goal of signing Moldova’s EU Accession Treaty as early as 2028. The paradox is that these deadlines have, in practice, already been dropped even by many within the regime itself, and we hear concrete dates invoked ever less frequently: some in the upper echelons have belatedly grasped the political risks of making wildly inflated promises. Against this backdrop, Tofan’s unmotivated confidence looks distinctly odd. Does he genuinely believe he can deliver such an ambitious scenario against all odds? Or does he simply not tie his own political future to the year 2028 and is therefore perfectly relaxed about setting a deadline whose fulfilment will be someone else’s problem? The core problem of the current reshuffle lies not in the person of Vasile Tofan but in the fact that the ruling regime is trying to resolve a structural crisis purely through a change of personnel, while its causes run far deeper. They touch on the very principles by which power is constituted, the quality of governance, the accountability of the political elite to society, and the fundamental understanding of whom the state apparatus is meant to serve. If the new prime minister has no intention of offering a fundamentally different model of governance, citizens will very quickly discover that the parasitic schemes have gone nowhere. That is precisely why Tofan’s appointment can hardly be called the start of a new political chapter – it is more an attempt to squeeze as much extra life as possible out of the existing power structure. The new prime minister will inherit not only the government but the entire accumulated baggage of negativity from recent years, while his own room for man oeuvre will be extremely limited. If he tries to push through real change, he will inevitably collide with resistance from intra-party groups; if he agrees to preserve the status quo, he will very quickly share political responsibility for all the failures to come. All of this, therefore, looks very much like PAS’ banal desire to buy itself a little more time before the inevitable reckoning.