Knocking on Europe’s door

The ar­rival of pro-Eu­rope Maia Sandu in the pres­i­dency in De­cem­ber has meant that this small coun­try of only three mil­lion peo­ple is now look­ing to­wards the Eu­ro­pean Union. Moldova is one of the poor­est coun­tries on the con­ti­nent, with a pop­u­la­tion un­der­mined by em­i­gra­tion, a very vul­ner­a­ble econ­omy and high lev­els of cor­rup­tion.

Right now some 50% of its cit­i­zens are in favour of EU mem­ber­ship, while an­other 33% are against and pre­fer to look to Rus­sia, ac­cord­ing to the lat­est opin­ion polls. Lo­cated be­tween Ro­ma­nia and Ukraine, the de­bate be­tween East and West, be­tween Eu­rope and Rus­sia, is a per­ma­nent one in Moldova. For the Krem­lin, Moldova is a strate­gic coun­try, as pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin tries to main­tain Russ­ian in­flu­ence over the for­mer So­viet re­publics as part of his ex­pan­sion­ist pol­icy. Moldova’s at­tempts to move closer to the EU means that Moscow is sell­ing the coun­try gas at a much higher price than it does Be­larus or Ser­bia.

Yet the EU has not given Moldova many rea­sons to hope it can join the bloc any time soon, as it de­mands that the coun­try make a se­ries of sweep­ing po­lit­i­cal, eco­nomic and ju­di­cial re­forms. Nev­er­the­less, last sum­mer did see Brus­sels hand the coun­try an un­prece­dented 600 mil­lion euro eco­nomic re­cov­ery pack­age as it tries to main­tain close ties with the Moldovan au­thor­i­ties in the cap­i­tal, Chisinau.