Moldova’s turncoat president?

Graham Stack in Kyiv for business new europe (www.businessneweurope.eu)

 

Marian Lupu is the man widely tipped to become Moldova’s next president – but not, as expected, the Communist Party successor to incumbent President Vladimir Voronin. Instead he looks set to be the winning candidate from the opposition coalition.

Moldova’s president, like in some other CEE countries, is elected by the parliament. Lupu, since 2005 the telegenic speaker of Moldova’s single-chamber parliament and a member of the Communist Party, had long been the favourite to succeed President Voronin via being elected by a Communist majority in parliament. And following violent post-parliamentary election protests at the Communist victory on April 7 that wrecked the parliament he presided over, Lupu erupted in front of state TV cameras. “This was not vandalism, this was… an attempted coup d’etat,” he spluttered. “What happened in this building wasn’t just chaos, those were actions well-thought in advance.”

After towing the party line in such a way, Lupu, “young, apparently loyal to Voronin and a disciplined member of the Communist Party,” according to Chisinau think-tank Viitorul’s Igor Munteanu, seemed all the more likely to get the nod. But Voronin surprisingly plumped for the more pliable Prime Minister Zinaida Grechanaya as the party’s presidential candidate in the parliamentary votes held in May and June. This proved to be a terrible decision – with 61 votes out of 101 in parliament needed to elect the president outright, the Communist Party, with just 60 seats, failed to win over a single opposition vote in the two rounds of voting, forcing Voronin to call new general elections for July 29.

Lupu’s revenge for being snubbed came on June 10 when, following the second parliamentary vote, he dropped the bombshell that he was quitting the Communist Party for the small centre-left Democratic Party, citing the authoritarian and reactionary structure of the Communist Party.

This shift proved to be fatal to Voronin’s hold on power. Campaigning with the slogan “Lupu for President,” the Democratic Party took 13 seats in July’s snap elections, whereas in April the party hadn’t even overcome the 6% threshold to enter parliament. The swing voters seem to have come wholly from the Communist camp – the Communists won 12 seats less than in April, ending up with only 48, meaning they now have no chance of electing their own candidate as president.

With the announcement on August 8 that Moldova’s four opposition leaders – Mihai Ghimpu, Serafim Urechean, Vlad Filat and Marian Lupu – were forming an Alliance for European Integration, which has 53 MPs in the 101-seat parliament – enough to form a government, but too few to vote through their choice of president – Lupu will reportedly be the man the opposition puts up to be president. However, with one of the leaders of the Communist party, Vladimir Ţurcan, in mid-August calling Lupu a “traitor,” Lupu is unlikely to be backed by his former party and so the political crisis in country appears likely to continue for several months more.

Lupu lazuli

For so long regarded as the likely successor to Voronin as Communist Party president, and now the hot favourite as opposition-backed president, there’s much head scratching about what he actually stands for? “Lupu’s quitting the Communist Party was the most radical decision Moldovans have seen from him. Risk-averse best decribes Lupu,” says independent political analyst Ion Marandici.

As parliamentary speaker for the last five years, Lupu had little direct policy input. However, he is associated with the reform wing of the party that backed investment-friendly measures such as a zero-rate corporate tax introduced in 2008. In fact, despite the name, Voronin’s Communist Party has been largely reformist in the economic sphere, with a longstanding commitment to joining the EU. However, opponents accuse Voronin of simply pursuing his own business interests under the guise of liberalization.

Before joining the Communist Party and becoming speaker of parliament in 2005, Lupu’s entire career had been in the Ministry of Economy and Reforms, achieving senior positions at an early age. He started at the ministry in 1991, after completing a PhD in Moscow. By 1997, at the tender age of 31, he had risen to become head of the foreign trade department in 1997. In this capacity, he directed Moldova’s negotiations on joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Moldova’s accession to the WTO in 2001, beating Ukraine and Russia by almost a decade, is thus the biggest feather in Lupu’s cap to date, and the achievement has lent impetus to the country’s ongoing integration with Europe. Simultaneously to WTO accession, Moldova pursued an ambitious energy privatization programme, selling off its power generation assets in 2001 to Spanish group Union Fenosa for cash and $55m investment commitments over five years.

As a result of Lupu’s success with the WTO, he was promoted to vice economy minister in 2001, and then to economy minister in 2003. In this capacity, he strove with limited success to reduce the red tape that strangles the Moldovan economy. “Lupu was never a Balcerowicz or Chubais,” says Nicu Popescu, senior analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Polish and Russian reformers. “Critics say he failed to push through a reformist agenda while in the Communist Party. But he was one of the most successful technocrats and has a strong international background.”

With the current economic downturn hitting Moldova hard – a 13% GDP drop is on the cards for 2009 – Lupu’s experience in working with international financial institutes and organizations could prove a crucial resource. Lupu is fluent in English and French, and has trained in New York and Geneva. His ability to work with Russia is also an advantage: Lupu lived and studied in Moscow during the heady days of Perestroika in 1987-1991. “Lupu, if he becomes president, will offer a very different style to Voronin, but allow for policy continuity,” reckons Popescu. “Most importantly, he will be more in touch with international opinion than Voronin.”

Kazakhstan turns up heat on Moldovan oligarch oil assets

Graham Stack in Chisinau for business new europe (www.businessneweurope.eu)

Kazakh authorities have brought criminal charges and tax claims against oil companies owned by the oppositional Moldovan oligarch Anatol Stati, in what appears to be a case of authoritarian rulers in the former Soviet bloc learning to cover each other’s backs.

Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin’s animosity towards the small country’s richest man has long been known. But when the Moldovan press published last October an apparently leaked letter from Voronin to his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev calling on the Kazakh authorities to crackdown on Stati’s activities in the country, he was ridiculed for having overreached himself. It seemed far-fetched that the Kazakh authorities would heed a request from tiny Moldova to discriminate against a foreign investor.

Stati owns two smallish Kazakh oil and gas companies, KazPolMunai and Tolkynneftegaz, and claims to have invested half a billion dollars in the companies since acquiring them in 1999. The special purpose vehicle Tristan Oil was set up in 2006 to issue bonds on the back of the KazPolMunai and Tolkynneftegaz licences. Stati and his holding company Ascom also run operations in Turkmenistan, Kurdistan and South Sudan. It’s a comparatively small setup, but for Moldova, Europe’s poorest country and Ascom’s historic base, it’s big business – and that inevitably means politics.

“[Stati] runs and finances propagandistic campaigns and in non-transparent ways funds political parties in opposition to the current government,” Voronin wrote in the alleged letter, which also accused Stati of engaging in sanctions-busting in Sudan.

Eight months on, no one is laughing any more at Voronin’s bizarre letter, as Stati’s Kazakh operations are facing existential threats from a united front of Kazakh regulatory authorities, including the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, the Tax Committee, and economic crime investigatory units. “We have no doubt about the authenticity of the letter, although the allegations are ludicrous,” Artur Lungu, vice president and CFO of Tristan Oil, tells bne. “It is no secret that relations between Mr. Stati and President Voronin are bad.”

Stati has publicly denied he actively funds oppositional parties – although as a Moldovan citizen it would be entirely within his rights to do so. But the fact that Ascom deputy CEO Iurie Leanca decided to run for the opposition Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Filat and another Ascom top manager, former deputy foreign minister Anatol Salaru, became deputy chairman of Moldova’s Liberal Party led by Mihai Ghimpu and Dorin Chirtoaca, might have convinced Moldova’s authorities otherwise.

Moreover, Stati’s 33-year-old son playboy son Gabriel, a football club and nightclub owner in the Moldovan capital Chisinau and star of celebrity gossip columns, publicly called on Moldova’s youth to vote against Voronin’s Communists in the April parliamentary elections. Gabriel Stati is married to the daughter of opposition Democratic Party Chairman Dumitru Diacov. When mass protests disputing the election results turned violent on April 7, the Moldovan authorities immediately blamed the Statis for instigating the violence, and had Gabriel Stati extradited from Ukraine to Moldova, where he is now in jail awaiting trial.

Kazakh intrigue

However, for Stati’s business interests, the worst blow had already been struck a good deal before the elections in faraway Kazakhstan. From late 2008 onwards, following Voronin’s letter to Nazarbayev, a number of Kazakh agencies began targeting Tristan Oil’s local subsidiaries in a style reminiscent of Russia’s notorious attack on the country’s then-largest oil company Yukos, which was owned by the renegade oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

First up was the Kazakh Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in December. Based on recent changes to legislation that entitled the government to break or change existing licence agreements, the energy ministry challenged Tristan Oil’s licences, alleging it hadn’t supplied all information to properly evaluate the fields in 2003.

The licence dispute with Tristan Oil was not unique, and a provisional agreement reached in March gave grounds for optimism. But hopes were dashed in May when other authorities turned up the heat. The Tax Committee and local economic crime investigators launched a double whammy of back tax claims totalling $31m coupled with trumped-up criminal charges, resulting in an assets freeze eerily reminiscent of the Yukos case in Russia. The criminal charges relate to company-operated pipelines that investigators suddenly decided should be reclassified as trunk pipelines that were operating without state permission. The mounting pressure culminated in the arrest of the CEO of Tristan’s largest subsidiary Kazpolmunai, Moldovan citizen Sergiu Cornegru.

The escalation in May made it crystal clear that Tristan Oil was the target of a systematic campaign, according Lungu. “But we can only speculate about who is behind this,” he says.

Besides the “Moldovan version”, linked to the Stati-Voronin feud, there is also the “Kazakh version”, according to Lungu. State-owned oil and gas national champion KazMunaiGas named Tristan Oil’s operating companies as potential acquisition targets at a Merrill Lynch-hosted investment conference in April and is currently evaluating Tristan’s operations, Lungu claims. “Both these versions have their merits,” says Lungu. A Moldovan synthesis of the two is that Voronin’s son Oleg is seeking an ownership stake in Stati’s Kazakh companies in conjunction with KazMunaiGas. “We are definitely not expecting diplomatic support in Kazakhstan from the Moldovan authorities,” Lungu says acidly.

Don’t trust Twitter, Moldovan activist warns Iranians

25 year old Moldovan activist Natalia Morar, who helped trigger Moldova’s post-election protests in April labeled by media the first ‘Twitter Revolution’, has warned Iranian protestors not to trust the Twitter internet service.
:
“This new technology has great positive potential,” Morar said in Chisinau, capital of small ex-Soviet republic Moldova. “But it has equally great danger because of its anonymity and speed. It is too easy to manipulate. Government provocateurs can use it for their own bad purposes.”

“The problem is not only the possibility of government manipulation,” says Morar, “but also that you cannot control what you have started. Things can escalate too easy.”

Morar is now facing a 8-15 year jail sentence on charges of inciting mass disturbances, after Moldova’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ exploded into violence April 7. Morar and her Hyde Park group used Internet and twitter to launch peaceful protests against apparently rigged elections April 5. But on the second day of the protests in Chisinau, stone-throwing youths swept police aside to set the parliamentary building on fire. Morar says she had no connection to the violence.

The Moldovan government ruthlessly exploited TV footage of the mayhem and destruction to smear the opposition as a whole. Morar, and many others in the opposition, allege that government provocateurs mingled in the crowd and acted as ringleaders among the violent minority, while also agitating in cyberspace.

Morar says she and her fellow activists watched the Iranian events unfold with a mixture of joy and trepidation. She says the Moldovan authorities are also nervous about events in Iran. “When protests broke out in Iran, Twitter.com was inaccessible for a while in Moldova.”

Morar is critical of Western media for hyping an unreliable medium like Twitter. “Social networking sites, email, mobile phones are all less anonymous, so more reliable, and were in fact much more important than Twitter in Moldova. But they are less accessible to Western media following events. My fear is that the Iranians will trust Twitter too much.”

Moldovan wine goes upmarket

Graham Stack in Chisinau for business new europe (www.businessneweurope.eu)

Beyond the clamour and colour of Moldova’s “Twitter revolution” in April, a silent revolution in the tiny ex-Soviet country’s wine industry might change the country more fundamentally. A 2006 Russian ban on Moldovan wine forced leading wineries to raise their sights and aim for western markets.

First the bad news: Moldova’s thousand-year-old wine culture has suffered three severe set backs over the last century and a half. At the end of the 19th century, it was devastated by phloxera. Then, under Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika-era anti-alcohol campaign, 50% of vines were grubbed up. The latest affliction came in 2006 in the form of a Russian prohibition on wine exports, motivated by Moldova’s flirting with Nato.

Considering that winemaking accounts for 20% of Moldovan GDP, 28% to 30% of export revenues, employs around 27% of the labour force, and that around 85% of Moldovan wine was exported to Russia, this was more than a major problem. By January 2007, Moldova had lost an estimated $180m in sales. Wineries soon found themselves unable to service their bank debts, and 30% of them had been taken over by banks or were facing bankruptcy.

The good news, though, is that Moldova’s leading private wineries used the shock to “desovietise” and began switching their focus from the Russian market to European markets, changing their product and whole business approach in the process.

More of an odour than a bouquet

Every second bottle of Soviet wine was Moldovan, but this spoke about quantity not quality. Wine in Soviet times was little more than alcoholic fruit juice to be swashed down before the real drinking began, packaged in gimmicky bottles, and vinified semi-dry or semi-sweet. Quality dropped further in the nasty 1990s. Former top Georgian politician Irakli Okruashvili infamously described the wine that Georgia exported to Russia as “shit,” and the epithet could equally have applied to Moldovan produce at that time.

With economic growth restarting in 2000, Moldovan wineries started to invest in western equipment. The closing of the Russian market in 2006 then forced them to go the whole hog and try their luck on Western markets. “In 2007, six wineries formed an association, the Moldovan wine guild, to position themselves more strongly on foreign markets,” says Dumitru Tcaci, marketing director of winery Château Vartely and also of the Moldovan Wine Guild. The other members include Acorex Wine Holding, DK-Intertrade, Lion-Gri, Vinaria Purcari and Vinaria Bostavan.

“These six companies constitute one-third of Moldova’s total wine exports,” says Tcaci. “We want to become a strong marketing organization and boost the international competitiveness of each individual member. The six companies are the leaders in supplying Moldovan wines to the European market, and have all won awards in prestigious international contests.”

The Moldovan wine guild was supported by USAID, the US economic assistance agency. According to Douglas Griffith, the chief consultant employed by USAID to refocus Moldova’s wine industry towards European consumers, marketing alone wasn’t enough. “The product has to change as well and our work consisted of helping the wineries develop new skills and adopt new practices for producing new internationally recognized styles, such as the younger, fruitier wines produced in Australia, California, and Chile.”

“The newly founded Moldova Wine Guild demonstrates the commitment of seven major Moldovan wineries to create a category of high-quality Moldovan wines that can compete internationally; and it is already putting Moldovan wine on the map.,” believes Griffiths.

The basic shift was from Soviet-style sweet wines to the dry reds acceptable to European palates. This was coupled with developing internationally appealing brands. DK-Intertrade’s Firebird Legend is now widely available across Eastern and Western Europe, with a UK listing. Acorex developed the “Taking root” brand.

According to Tcaci, 12% of the value of Moldovan wine exports in 2008 went to the EU, up 27% on 2007. Admittedly, almost 40% of this amount went to Poland. But the Moldovan wine guild is also aiming to break through to Western European markets. UK sales doubled from 2006 to 2007, albeit from a low base.

Moldovan wine is also gradually finding its ways back to Russia after the import restrictions were eased in late 2007. Sales to Russia grew by 50% in 2008. However, a strict new regulatory regime means additional expense, so that Moldovan wines have moved up a price category. Now they compete in the same price category as the Bulgarian, Argentinean and Chilean wines that replaced them on Russian shopshelves during the ban.

In addition, market research shows that Russian tastes are changing from Soviet to European, ie. from sweet to dry wines. So the virtues developed by the Moldovan wine guild members will be just as needed to regain their previous share of the Russian market as to crack Western markets.

Oops she did it again

Graham Stack in Chisinau  for business new europe (www.businessneweurope.eu)

Oddly for someone thrown out of mighty Russia on charges of being a threat to state security and planning the violent overthrow of the government, 25-year-old journalist Natalia Morar looks as if sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And for someone facing up to eight years in jail on charges of inciting mass riots, she seems remarkably bright and fresh – and as surprised as anyone about the scale of the protests that followed Moldova’s parliamentary elections on April 5.

Morar’s current problems all started the morning after Moldova’s elections. She and six like-minded friends from their informal pro-democracy group Hyde Park met at a café for a brainstorming session on what to do about the seemingly rigged elections. President Vladimir Voronin’s ruling Communist Party had got precisely the right number of seats in parliament to allow them to name the next president without having to talk to the opposition parties. Voronin himself must stand down after two terms in office, and has openly said he would seek a Den Xiaoping status for himself, referring to the late Chinese leader who never held office as the head of state or head of government, but served as the de facto leader of China for almost 20 years.

The elections results were just too neat to be true, Morar and her friends thought, although the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) had largely given the vote a clean bill of health. But on the internet, rumours abounded of voting lists packed with the names of dead souls and emigrant workers.

Morar’s friends decided to organize a flash mob for that evening to take place using Twitter, Facebook and the Russian social network site Odnoklassniki, plus good old-fashioned sms. They counted on getting together a crowd of a several hundred at the most, Morar told bne at a secret location in Chishinau. Instead of the hundreds they expected, tens of thousands turned out – estimates range from 10,000-20,000. Moreover they returned the next day as well.

The crowd was initially peaceful, but very suddenly on the Tuesday after midday, the mood turned ugly. Stones rained down on the under-equipped and undermanned police. Protestors burst through the police cordon into the parliament building and presidential office. Fire broke out in the left wing of the parliament, and protestors defenestrated computers and files. “The violence had nothing to do with us,” explains Morar. “At that time, we together with the political opposition leaders had called on the crowd in front of the parliament to disperse and join the official demonstration in front of the government building.”

Conspiracy or cock up?

The outbreak of violence was so unexpected and unusual for Moldova that it has given rise to a host of conspiracy theories. According to Morar and other opposition activists, there were police provocateurs among the crowd, who incited and organized the violence with the aim of discrediting the democratic opposition. Many neutral observers also report that there emerged unidentified micro-leaders in the crowd giving instructions how to act.

The Voronin administration has its competing conspiracy theory: that the protests were engineered by Romanian agents with the aim of destabilizing Moldova and initiating reunification of the two countries. The government points to the fact that the protestors hung out a flag of Greater Romania on the parliament, which, it should be noted, encompasses not only Moldava, referred to by Romanians as Bessarabia, but also Ukraine’s Bukovina region around Czernowitz, which belonged to Romania before the war.

The Kremlin also has its conspiracy theory: that it was an attempt at a US-inspired “coloured revolution”, with Morar and Hyde Park playing the role of youth organizations like Ukraine’s Pora and Serbia Upor.

However, while it is perfectly possible that all three conspiracy theories have an element of truth, taken on balance, the cock-up theory is preferable.

The first major cock-up related to Moldova’s non-existent crowd policing. Before the violence started, observers report that protecting the parliament building from tens of thousands of demonstrators stood a thin blue line of sometimes not more than 10 local bobbies. This can be attributed to surprise at the numbers, but is also a result of the extremely negative international media response to police violence against demonstrators in Russia and Georgia in 2007-2008. In Tbilisi in April, there was a minimal police presence despite 50,000 demonstrators turning out.

Additionally, Moldova, Europe’s poorest country with no recent history of mass protests, seems simply to lack any trained and properly equipped riot police, just as it lacks tanks, luckily. Even after the protests turned violent and stones started to rain down on the police, reinforcements wore helmets mostly lacking visors, and carried non-transparent steel shields, greatly limiting their ability to defend themselves. This turned policemen into sitting ducks for stone throwers. Policemen were seen reduced to tears by the assault, where they weren’t masked in blood. Many simply ceased to offer resistance.

This also does not seem to have been feigned weakness to provoke an attack. This correspondent’s room in Chisinau looked directly on to the courtyard of the Interior Ministry, where in the days following the protests, hasty but fairly desultory attempts to train police on how to use seemingly new plexiglass riot shields could be seen.

The second major cock-up relates to the crowd. Activating young people via Internet and sms does not necessarily mean getting a crowd of peace-loving democratic Euro-youth together, as activists such as Morar might have hoped for. The most connected population group are the 14- to 20-year-old boys in computer-game and football-fan age, and these are also the most likely to have a go at under-equipped and outnumbered police on the first warm day of spring. A fair proportion of the protesters were minors. Add to this that Chisinau’s universities are all within walking distance of where the demonstrations took place; it was no coincidence that protests turned nasty when lessons ended at 1pm.

Moreover, this segment of the population is most prone to hold nationalist convictions as a surf through the chatrooms of the region shows. Nationalism in Moldova among the younger generation is Greater Romanian nationalism, dreaming at unification, and as such deeply anti-Communist, though not necessarily democratic. 120,000 young Romanians have already taken up Romania’s offer of dual citizenship. Add to this the desolate economic situation in Moldova – where many qualified young people are forced to take menial work abroad due to lack of chances home – and you have a very disaffected youth.

Morar, while alleging the presence of government provocateurs, also told bne that, organizing the protests, she and her friends crucially underestimated two factors – the unpredictable power of social networking technologies, and the political convictions of Moldovan youths. Now Morar’s groups are the inadvertent victims of the protests they triggered, but did not control. On April 15, Morar was placed under house arrest and is facing up to eight years in jail on charges of inciting mass riots.

Moldovan elections to strengthen Euro-communism in one country

Graham Stack for Russia Profile (www.russiaprofile.org)

Analysts Say That the EU Will Push Ahead with Europeanizing Moldova in Partnership with the Ruling Communists

Moldova might be “Europe’s poorest country,” but it is rich in anomalies. The parliamentary elections held there on April 5 only added to these. It all went off a little too smoothly in the end. President Vladimir Voronin’s ruling Communist Party took just under 50 percent of the popular vote, but won just over the necessary number of seats in the parliament (61 out of 110) to ensure that the Communists will name the next president. Voronin is due to step down after the two terms in office stipulated by the constitution.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), while noting skewed media coverage, confirmed the results. “I am delighted with the progress of democracy in Moldova. These elections were very good, and they gave me great confidence in the future of this country,” said Petros Efthymiou, the head of the delegation of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and a special coordinator of the OSCE short-term observers.

The results roughly dovetailed with the exit polls, but the number of mandates was marginally more than predicted, meaning that the results could have been fiddled with to ensure a sufficient number of seats to elect the president. Moldova’s constitution is a unique mix of parliamentary and presidential – the president is elected by the Parliament in a secret ballot, with up to two rounds of voting. However, in other respects it is a presidential republic, with the president appointing the prime minister, and the executive branch separate from legislative one. The president also determines foreign policy.

The parliamentary elections were thus also de facto presidential elections. Since the incumbent president Vladimir Voronin, by far the most dominant figure in Moldovan politics, has to step down after two terms, a lot rested on the outcome of these elections.

Voronin has openly stated that he would pursue a Den Xiaoping outcome, allowing him to continue to determine the country’s trajectory while not holding the highest office. This lent the Communist Party a powerful motive to force through an unchallengeable electoral result, similar to that achieved by United Russia in the 2007 Duma elections in Russia, intended as a future power base for then President Vladimir Putin.

“The elections of 2009 were neither free nor fair,” said Igor Munteanu, the director of Chisinau’s Institute for Development and Social Initiatives. “The reason is that the ruling party has acquired almost unlimited resources to influence and advocate its interests. With no counterbalance force from the judiciary, and with the main opposition parties largely fixed into internecine wars, these elections provided a textbook study on how to not conduct elections, rather than following the general standards of the OSCE/CoE.”

Sixty-eight year old Voronin is unlikely to seek the post of prime minister, however. Munteanu believes that Voronin will most probably remain in the Parliament, meaning that the whole construction of his party will change, with the focus of the “vertical of power” shifting elsewhere and “leaving the presidency more as a decorative institution.”

The exact identity of the Communists’ candidate for the presidency is still a mystery. “Since he [Voronin] personally tried to reduce the chances of any potential rival/candidate inside of the ruling Communist Party, all candidates that were suggested by the media were met with criticism or ostracism from the presidential office,” said Munteanu.

Marian Lupu, the former speaker of the Parliament, is one person often mentioned as a possible next president. While apparently loyal to Voronin and a disciplined member of the party, he had in the past even spoken out in favor of future NATO membership for Moldova. “Voronin will look for a less intelligent and more faithful figure to occupy the presidential seat, which he will keep under control while taking the office of the parliamentary speaker,” said Sergiu Panainte, a project coordinator at the Soros Foundation Romania.

Moldova is not only anomalous in terms of its constitution and its geography (it counts as a Black Sea littoral state although it is landlocked). It is also one of the few countries to be both attempting to reintegrate a secessionist region — the tiny self-proclaimed Transdnestr republic–while staving off attempts to be absorbed by the neighboring big brother Romania, with which it shares history and language.

Its foreign policy is equally anomalous: in the 1990s, Moldova strove to reunify with Russia within the Russia-Belarus union, until Russia’s refusal to play ball caused the same Communist Party to make a smooth shift in 2005, and aim at EU membership and cooperation with NATO instead. Experts see the elections as having paradoxically strengthened the Communists in negotiations with the EU, and thus given new impulses to Moldova’s integration with the union.

Independent political analyst Ion Marandici said that “the Moldovan Communists have declared very often that their goal is to join the European Union. That is why, paradoxically, they will go on with the economic reforms while continuing to infringe on media freedom, freedom of expression and more generally on human rights, in order to combat their political competitors.”

Marandici sees the elections as having strengthened Moldova’s hand in negotiations with the EU. “The victory of the Communist Party will force the EU to regard the Moldovan Communists not merely as a historical accident, but as legitimate representatives of the Moldovan voters,” he said. “The EU dealt carefully and decided to keep some checks on the Communist elite before elections, and indirectly conditioned the signing of the Enhanced Agreement [the document replacing the expired Partnership and Cooperation Agreement] with the conduct of free and fair parliamentary elections.”

With the OSCE observers having declared the elections free and to a certain extent fair, the EU will now have to continue its negotiations with the Communist Party, believes Marandici. “That is why probably in the near future, we will witness the signing of an Enhanced Agreement between the EU and Moldova that would envisage the status of an ‘associated member’,” he said. “The European soft power approach succeeded in Europeanizing the Moldovan communists.

Unfortunately, it failed to delete some of their Soviet-era habits and parts of their biography. These are simply incompatible with European values.” Igor Munteanu, however, believes that this core incompatibility will limit EU openness to Moldova. “The election of Communists has clear implications for EU’s offer to Moldova. Since their rule is not equivalent to democratic rule, Moldova will be met with open suspicion and mistrust, which could further encourage its leadership to seek ‘consolation’ in a tango with Russia.”

But in view of disappointment with the results of the “colored revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the year 2008 seems to have seen a shift in European thinking regarding the feasibility of revolutionary change in what are very weak and fragile states. In 2008, the EU even started talking to and opening doors for “Europe’s Last Dictatorship,” Belarus, next to which Moldova looks much more democratic. Instead of a U.S.-sponsored regime change, the new European strategy seems to be to persuade existing undemocratic regimes to change their ways peacefully, using the positive incentive of increasing integration with Europe.

In fact, this is not really anything new. In neighboring Romania, most of the work in getting the country ready for NATO and the EU was done in the 1990s by the Party of Democratic Socialism (PSD) under President Ion Iliescu – direct heirs of the notoriously repressive Ceausescu Communist dictatorship, in comparison to which Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus is a shining example of democracy.