Chisinau, a turning point: Maja Sandu wins the presidential elections

The new pro-European president won 53% of the votes. The outgoing president was explicitly supported by Putin. The vote of Moldovans abroad is fundamental. An apparently peaceful political changeover, unlike Belarus.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Pro-European candidate Maja Sandu, leader of the "Action and Solidarity" party, won Moldova’s presidential elections: she surpassed the outgoing pro-Russian president Igor Dodon with 53% of the vote. Dondon has been in office since 2016 and was representative of the Moldovan Socialist Party. Sandu started celebrating last night, when it became clear that her rival would no longer be able to catch up with her.

Fears of clashes and protests were allayed by the clear victory of the opposition leader, allowing Moldova to give a lesson in democracy to the many ex-Soviet countries, such as neighbouring Ukraine before and Belarus this year, where a peaceful political alternation seems impossible.

An important role in the Sandu victory is to be attributed to Moldovan citizens residing abroad, in Europe and North America, who mobilized with unprecedented percentages. In the first round about 150,000 Moldovans voted from abroad, and over 250,000 in the ballot, the vast majority in favour of the reforming candidate.

Dodon's defeat is also a clear defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had explicitly supported his companion, and is now witnessing a new display of anti-Russian impatience in the territories of the former Soviet empire. In an online conversation with the outgoing president on 28 September, Putin augured him "every success in the next elections, and so we will be able to continue the work begun together for the re-establishment of our interstate relations and their development".

In recent weeks, Russia had received many warnings about the Moldovan elections, accusing the United States of meddling and preparing a new "flower revolution". Instead, it was precisely the Muscovite interference that pushed the Moldovans to free themselves from the suffocating embrace of the historical Russian masters. Dodon had in fact promised to re-establish a closer relationship with Moscow, cancelling agreements with the European Union.

To overturn the previous policy, Sandu will now have to find a solid majority in parliament, where she controls only a fraction of 14 deputies; Moldova is in fact a parliamentary republic, where the president does not have all the necessary powers to act autonomously.

Dodon himself leads the group of 37 socialist parliamentarians, and could ally himself with at least 15 other deputies. The Moldovan parliament is a single-chamber assembly with 101 seats, which up to 2016 elected the country's president. This rule was cancelled after the last elections, returning to universal suffrage. The new balance of powers will be the first task of the new president.