Johan Fredriksson: Therefore, all Europeans should celebrate the election results in Moldova
Who ever cared about an election in Moldova. You gotta be kidding?
The small country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine has only played a role in Swedish history, right? When Charles XII squabbled during the calabash in Bender (a city in Moldavia). It was probably the last time that the Swedes received dramatic news from this direction.
But today’s confirmation from the Moldavian vote counters that the incumbent President Maia Sandu won the presidential election is news that all of us Europeans should be cheering for.
A loss for Sandu and the EU had been thrown into a predicament of a rarely seen kind.
Putin bussed people to the polls
Now the EU advocate Sandu won with 55 percent of the vote (against pro-Russian Stoianoglo’s 45 percent). But Putin did everything to stop her.
The Russian dictator bussed his people to the polls. He bribed oligarchs to buy votes. He lied, manipulated and beat himself up to cheat himself a triumph. Hell of a luck that the Russian president didn’t make it.
Then we would have had a Moscow-loyal Putin friend at the helm of this puppet state that Brussels has taken under its wing. This mini-country which thus lies like a powder keg between the EU-and-NATO country Romania and Western-backed Ukraine, where Putin’s troops are doing their utmost to tear the country apart.
Drop the bitter medicine
Guess if Putin would have let the champagne corks dance to the ceiling if he had succeeded in sabotaging Moldova’s path to EU membership. If the numbers had turned out like in Georgia recently, where the Russian-backed side, after extensive electoral fraud, suddenly emerged victorious despite all forecasts and calculations pointing towards the EU supporters winning.
Then the EU would have stood there with a dilemma from Dante’s inferno – to be forced to protest verbally against the result. To rattle and beat all the drums and pans of Brussels. Introduce new sanctions. But to finally bite the bullet and accept the bitter; that Moldova slipped them out of their hands and completely ended up in Putin’s pocket.
Because hadn’t the EU countries or NATO chosen to threaten military force to stop the Russian takeover?
It had been gut-wrenching and unprecedented in the history of the EU.
Now they got rid of this bitter medicine.
A signal that Putin can be stopped
Many sighs of relief echo across our continent in this now.
Of course, there remains the completely crazy strange situation with Transnistria, a part of Moldova that since the fall of the Soviet Union has been controlled by Russian troops and Moscow-led businessmen. But it’s a minor headache that should find its solution.
Moldova’s EU friends won this presidential election.
The government in Chisinau can now vigorously pursue the integration process with the EU.
A small country has taken a big step. A step that also for us paves the way for strengthened democracy in our fragile continent.
A signal that Putin’s illegal influence operations can be stopped.