Moldova’s referendum has underlined how far the West’s influence over Eastern Europe is weakening as the Ukraine war drags on, argues Kevin Crane  

Moldova is a small country that has just had a big impact on European politics, but not the one its current leadership hoped it would have. The story was meant to be that this former-Soviet state was holding a referendum to declare its intention to join the European Union (EU) as soon as possible, permanently rejecting its Eastern Bloc past and embracing a fully Westernised future. It was supposed to be another political triumph for the American-led world.

The referendum did return a ‘Yes’ result on joining the EU, technically, but the victory for Moldova’s government has been a hollow one. The majority was just 50.38%, which is only just 11,400 more actual people than voted ‘No’ in the very small electorate. Even more damningly for the government, hundreds of thousands of Yes voters were among the large number of expatriates of the country who already live in EU member states (in addition to a quandary about whether votes were being collected in Moldova’s disputed territories), meaning that most Moldavian residents have in fact rejected membership. It’s a humiliating result for the dominant faction of the country’s political elite, but the impact of it will be felt well beyond the country’s borders and is part of a wider pattern that points to problems for the Western powers that are seldom acknowledged in our media.

A dividing-line nation

A bit like Lebanon in the Middle East, Moldova is a little state with big divisions. It has a convoluted territorial history and was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1991. Even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, it was caught up in an internal controversy about what to do next. The largest ethnic group in the state is Romanians and nationalist sentiment among this community often favours an argument that Moldova should properly be considered a part of the Republic of Romania. Ethnic Romanian political leaders were already flying that republic’s flag over Moldovan government buildings before the USSR had even fallen, provoking a violent backlash from the country’s main minorities.

There were two, mostly simultaneous uprisings, both resulting in the creation of self-declared new countries. The more well-known one was of a Slavic-speaking people in the East of the country bordering Ukraine, resulting in a Russian military occupation that exists to this day, creating ‘Transnistria’. Transnistria variously claims to be an independent state, or possibly a territory of Russia, but neither claim is taken seriously by other countries. The less commonly spoken uprising was by Turkic speakers in Moldova’s South, creating ‘Gagauzia’. The Moldovan government managed to negotiate the leaders of this breakaway into not declaring independence, but only based on recognising them as having considerable political autonomy.

There has been, fortunately, little real violence since the mid-1990s, but that does not mean that there wasn’t considerable political bitterness from pro-Western factions. Joining Romania had been ruled out permanently: that country doesn’t recognise minority languages and would never agree to carry over the Gagauzia deal, because this would then force them to open a similar deal for their own Hungarian minority. Then, over the decades, more and more formerly communist states in Eastern Europe began to accede to both the EU and NATO, including some former USSR members like Lithuania. For Moldova it just wasn’t an option: the Russian occupation in Transnistria means that they could not deliver border-control guarantees that the EU demands and is completely incompatible with Nato membership.

War as opportunity, and its limits

When Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the moment was seized upon by the Western powers to reconsolidate their position. Two formerly neutral countries, Finland and Sweden, were persuaded to sign up to the USA-led military bloc and other countries were under huge pressure to follow. America and the major Western European countries, in addition to providing massive military resources to Ukraine, went on a major propaganda offensive to renew the old Cold War-era sense of a unified, democratic West against Russia and various other authoritarian enemies.

It was in this context that the Moldovan government embarked on its project with the EU referendum, the question on the paper being if the country should amend its constitution to make joining the EU a key goal. The ethnic-Romanian-dominated parties believed that a surge in anti-Russian sentiment would break through previous political divisions, and finally enable them to integrate the state into the West, an opportunity that had been denied to them for the past twenty years. Off the back of their wafer-thin majority, they have said they are going to make that change to the constitution, but they have had a hell of a shock and the Moldovan opposition is feeling much more confident that they can reorganise to take control of the country.

The result is a strong sign that the potency of the Ukraine war as a motivation to Eastern European peoples to get behind what was known for a long time as ‘blue politics’ (based on the colour of the EU and Nato flags) is limited and may be running out. Two years ago, freeing Moldova from Russian military presence had been talked up across the continent as a potential next step, assuming that Ukrainian military victory had in fact been possible. This is not looking plausible now.

It wasn’t meant to be like this

It certainly isn’t the case that unlimited support for Ukraine is universally popular in the wider region. Farmers in countries like Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have staged militant protests against the flooding of grain markets with Ukrainian produce. Politics has also not been strongly favouring the most pro-war candidates. Hungary had already had a government that was strongly sympathetic to Russia, under the ultranationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán. The official narrative was that he was an anomaly, but last year, Western leaders got a nasty shock in Slovakia when Roberto Fico dramatically won re-election on a war-sceptical basis. Fico is something that pro-Western commentators tend to claim can’t happen in Eastern Europe: a moderate left-winger who isn’t part of the ‘blue-politics’ consensus. At the same time as the referendum was going the ‘wrong way’ in Moldova, he said the following at a press conference:

‘It is not a good idea to admit Ukraine into NATO, as it would be a threat to the whole world. Ukraine should instead remain neutral and receive security guarantees for this.’

Back in early 2022, statements like this were seeing politicians and other public figures being publicly attacked and losing their jobs. It is almost difficult to remember the absolute frenzy of pro-war sentiment that accompanied the start of the conflict. But it’s true: while illegal, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had not been unprovoked. Attempting to integrate Ukraine into NATO had been a deliberate provocation, one predicted by generations of analysts and experts going back to the end of the Cold War.

For the USA, the Ukraine war has been an opportunity to reassert its leadership and vision on what it defines as the ‘free world’. This is why Joe Biden’s White House has, up to now, been consistently avoiding attempts to bring the war to a negotiated end and providing Ukraine with essentially unlimited resources. Corralling Europe back into a unity project – which includes getting post-Brexit Britain in a leading role – was key to that vision. But the vision is faltering.

At home, Donald Trump is gaining votes from weariness with funding an endless war. In the Global South countries, there is widespread dismissal of the Ukrainian struggle as any kind of fight for ‘liberation’ that is relevant to them. Vladimir Putin is holding a BRICS conference of non-Western nations that seems to be attracting support from huge players like China. And now, even within Europe, we can really see signs that the zeitgeist of 2022 is fading away.