Big test on the Russian borderlands, part 1

Alert readers might have noticed that, of the six countries I mentioned yesterday as holding elections this weekend, three (Georgia, Lithuania and Uzbekistan) are former Soviet republics and a fourth, Bulgaria, while never actually absorbed by the USSR was one of its most loyal satellites. Add to that another former republic, Moldova, which voted on Sunday and will do so again two weeks later, and it’s clearly a time of major activity on Russia’s borders.*

I’ll try to cover the five in two parts: today, the two where the conflict is most acute.

Moldova has been disputed between Romania and Russia for more than two centuries; the majority is ethnically Romanian, but it was incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1940 and again in 1944. In 1990 it became for the first time an independent state, but its politics has balanced precariously between pro-Russian and pro-European forces.

In the last parliamentary election, in 2021, the pro-Europeans won a large majority and have been pressing ahead with their agenda of seeking membership of the European Union – candidate status was approved in 2022 – and trying to combat corruption and Russian influence (the two largely overlap, although corruption on the pro-European side is far from unknown). But the Russian invasion of Ukraine greatly complicated the security situation, and Russia, which occupies the breakaway state of Transnistria to the east of Moldova, is keen to stop the project of European integration.

President Maia Sandu, also strongly pro-European, was seeking a second term in Sunday’s election, having first been elected in 2020 with 57.7% in the second round against the then pro-Russian incumbent. To bolster her chances, the government also scheduled a referendum to amend the constitution to entrench its ambition to join the EU, believed to be a popular cause.

But things didn’t work out that way. Instead of a comfortable victory, the referendum only scraped through with 50.4% of the vote, a margin of less than 12,000 votes. For most of the count it looked to be headed for defeat, being saved by the votes from outside Romania, which ran strongly in favor.

Sandu topped the poll in the first round, but also with much less support than expected, and victory in the runoff (to be held on 3 November) is by no means assured. She finished with 42.5%, well clear of pro-Russian Alexandr Stoianoglo on 26.0%. But three of the next four candidates, with 22.4% between them, are also pro-Russian and their votes will mostly flow to Stoianoglo.

Sandu and her allies have blamed Russian interference for their poor showing, and there is certainly plenty of evidence of Russian money flowing to their opponents. The EU, of course, has also promised funds for Moldova’s European future, but not quite at the cash-in-suitcases level. (It’s also fair to point out that Moldovan opinion polls have a poor record.) But whatever the reason, the result has revealed the country to be deeply divided about its future.

Meanwhile in Georgia, next SundaySaturday‘s parliamentary election will also pit pro-Russian against pro-European forces (although most geographers would say Georgia is not really in Europe). There a strongly pro-European government headed by Mikheil Saakashvili was ousted at the polls in 2012, after having provoked and then lost a war with Russia. (As with Moldova, breakaway border territories are the main issue, in this case South Ossetia and Abkhazia.)

Since then the government has been headed by Georgian Dream, the party of oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. It also claimed to be pro-European, and for a time the claim seemed justified: it applied for EU membership in 2022 and was granted candidate status last December, although accession talks have not been opened. It also condemned the invasion of Ukraine and voted against Russia at the United Nations.

In the last two years, however, the government has moved closer to Moscow. Last year it proposed a law to crack down on foreign NGOs, very much in the Putin mold; public protests forced it to back down, but a revised version was passed earlier this year. As a result it has alienated many of its former supporters, including president Salome Zurabichvili (who was elected with Georgian Dream’s support in 2018 but is now very much in the opposition camp) and former prime minister Giorgi Gakharia (who resigned over the arrest of opposition leader Nika Melia and now has his own party, For Georgia).

So the feud between Saakashvili and Ivanishvili has become a matter of geopolitics, and it seems that, not for the first time, the future of Georgian democracy is on the line on SundaySaturday. There’s not much doubt that the majority of its people support a European orientation; the question is whether they are fully convinced that Georgian Dream is imperilling that, and if so, whether the election will fairly allow them to express that view.

Opinion polling is probably no more reliable in Georgia than in Moldova, but for what it’s worth Georgian Dream has been polling around the 40% mark, well down from the 48.2% that it scored in 2020. The opposition is divided among four main alliances plus some smaller players, but voting is proportional across the whole country (with a 5% threshold), so it should be possible for them to combine for a majority if the government’s vote falls sufficiently.

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* In the broad sense, anyway. Technically neither Moldova nor Uzbekistan shares a border with Russia, but they are close enough for the relationship to be hugely important – and as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, the exact location of the Russian border can be a matter of dispute.