Pro-EU candidate beats Kremlin ally in presidential run-off in Moldova

Maia Sandu has defeated Kremlin ally Igor Dodon in Sunday's run-off of the Moldovan presidential election

Credit: Sergei Gapon/AFP

Opposition candidate Maia Sandu has won the presidential run-off in Moldova, defeating one of the Kremlin’s few remaining allies in former Soviet states.

Returns from all polling stations in Moldova, a country of 3.5 million situated between Ukraine and EU-member Romania, showed Ms Sandu, a 48-year old Harvard-educated economist, win 58 percent of the vote in Sunday’s race against Kremlin-endorsed incumbent President Igor Dodon.

In a country which shocked the world in 2014 by a theft of $1 billion from three banks thanks to corrupt officials, Ms Sandu is an unlikely political leader. She owns a battered car and a Soviet-era one-bedroom apartment, and she does not plan to move to the official presidential residence.

Ms Sandu, who won the biggest number of votes in her country’s post-Soviet history, has pledged to clean up Moldova’s notoriously corrupt government.

“We need the state to work for citizens, not for thieves and corrupt officials,” she told reporters as the results were announced.

The president’s powers in Moldova are limited so Ms Sandu, a former prime minister, would face an uphill battle to see her reforms through in the parliament which is dominated by Mr Dodon’s allies.

Ms Sandu on Monday vowed to seek a snap parliamentary election, telling Russian TV channel Dozhd that her team is looking for legal grounds to call a new vote “fairly soon.”

Incumbent President Igor Dodon has conceded defeat in Sunday's run-off

Credit: Dumitru Doru/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Unlike many of her predecessors who got into office thanks to pro-EU slogans but did little to eradicate corrupt practices, Ms Sandu, who worked in the World Bank in Washington before returning to Moldova in 2012, focused in her campaign on fighting corruption and building strong institutions rather than amplifying divisions between Russian-leaning and pro-Western voters.

Ms Sandu has complained about a disinformation campaign unleashed on her by the Dodon camp. A local court on Saturday ordered the Dodon campaign to stop distributing leaflets which claimed that Ms Sandu was “hostile to our friendly strategic relationship with Russia” and wanted to legalise same-sex marriage.

The Kremlin has publicly endorsed Ms Sandu’s rival, and Russia’s foreign intelligence agency SVR issued a rare statement last month, accusing the United States of plotting to instigate riots to topple Mr Dodon who was one of the few remaining staunch Kremlin supporters in the former Soviet space.

Ms Sandu’s convincing victory and her moderate rhetoric showed to the Kremlin that there was no point in casting doubt on the election results. President Vladimir Putin in a message to Ms Sandu on Monday expressed hope that her “activities as head of the state would encourage a constructive development of ties between our countries.”