Moldova's pro-EU party wins outright majority in parliamentary election

Moldova's governing pro-European party won an outright majority in parliamentary elections held September 28, securing a mandate to keep steering the small former Soviet republic toward European Union membership despite what Brussels and independent election monitors described as an unprecedented Russian campaign to swing the vote.

The Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS), founded by President Maia Sandu, took 55 of the 101 seats in Moldova's parliament, enough to govern alone without a coalition partner. The pro-Russian Patriotic Bloc, an alliance of the Socialist and Communist parties led by former president Igor Dodon, finished a distant second. Three smaller parties also crossed the electoral threshold, according to results approved by Moldova's Central Election Commission.

The numbers

PAS won just over 50 percent of the vote to the Patriotic Bloc's roughly 24 percent, translating into 55 and 26 seats respectively. Three smaller parties also cleared the threshold for representation:

• Alternativa bloc — about 8 percent, 8 seats
• Our Party — about 6.2 percent, 6 seats
• Democracy at Home — about 5.6 percent, 6 seats

Turnout reached about 52 percent of Moldova's roughly 3.2 million registered voters, or about 1.6 million ballots cast, up from 48 percent in the last parliamentary election in 2021. A sizable share of that turnout came from the Moldovan diaspora in the EU and beyond, which has consistently favored PAS by wide margins in recent votes and which Sandu's party has credited with providing its governing margin.

Election day itself was disrupted by a wave of bomb threats against polling stations set up for Moldovan citizens abroad, including in Italy, Romania, Spain and the United States, which authorities said were designed to depress turnout among diaspora voters seen as reliably pro-European. Diaspora turnout has become a recurring flashpoint in Moldovan elections, with pro-Russian parties repeatedly alleging, without evidence accepted by election authorities, that overseas voting is skewed against them.

How Moldova got here

Moldova, a country of roughly 2.5 million people wedged between Romania and Ukraine, has been on a fraught path toward the EU since it was granted candidate status in June 2022, months after Russia's full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Sandu, a former World Bank economist, has made EU accession the central project of her presidency, arguing that integration with Europe is the only durable guarantee against renewed Russian influence over a country that still hosts Russian troops in the breakaway Transnistria region.

A joint international observer mission led by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's election-monitoring arm found the vote was competitive and well organized but "marred by serious cases of foreign interference, illegal funding, cyberattacks and widespread disinformation." Moldovan authorities and the European Union have for months accused Russia of funneling money to pro-Russian parties and organizing vote-buying schemes reaching hundreds of thousands of voters; the Kremlin has denied any interference. Two parties were ruled ineligible to run shortly before the election over allegations of illicit foreign funding, a decision observers said raised its own concerns about the impartiality of election authorities even as it targeted Moscow-linked networks. Roughly 1,500 Russian troops remain stationed in Transnistria, a breakaway strip of Moldovan territory along the Ukrainian border that has been outside Chisinau's control since a brief war in the early 1990s, and Moldovan officials have long argued that Moscow uses the territory as a staging ground for pressure on the rest of the country.

Who is affected

The outcome determines whether Moldova continues its EU accession track largely uninterrupted or pivots toward a more ambivalent relationship with Brussels and Moscow. It also has direct consequences for Ukraine, which borders Moldova and has relied on Chisinau's cooperation on trade corridors and sanctions enforcement since 2022. A PAS-led government is expected to keep pace with Kyiv's own EU membership bid, with the two candidacies often discussed together in Brussels. For Moldova's roughly 1 million-strong diaspora, many of whom left for economic reasons over the past two decades, the result also affects the pace of visa-free travel, labor-market access and other EU-linked benefits tied to continued accession progress.

Reaction

PAS leader Igor Grosu told reporters after the results were announced that the party's win reflected a broader public rejection of Moscow's pressure campaign.

"Russia threw everything dirty it had into the fight ... It's not only PAS that won the elections, the people won."

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas both welcomed the result, with the bloc's diplomatic service issuing a formal statement saying the vote "confirmed the people's enduring support for the European future" of Moldova and that the EU was "ready to take the next steps in the accession process." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Kremlin had "failed to destabilize Moldova." Dodon rejected the legitimacy of the count, calling on supporters to gather outside parliament in protest and later describing the government as operating a "one-party dictatorship," an accusation Moldovan officials dismissed as an attempt to delegitimize a result confirmed by international observers.

What happens next

Moldova's Constitutional Court is expected to formally validate the results by mid-October, after which Sandu will nominate a prime minister to present a cabinet for a parliamentary confidence vote. Outgoing Prime Minister Dorin Recean has said he will not seek a new term, leaving PAS to choose a fresh face to lead a government facing a sluggish, war-strained economy and the technical work of opening formal negotiations on the 33 policy chapters that make up the EU's accession process. Moldovan and EU officials have set 2030 as an informal target for membership, though officials on both sides have cautioned that the timeline depends on progress on judicial reform, anti-corruption measures and the unresolved status of Transnistria. Brussels has signaled it wants to move in parallel with Ukraine's own candidacy, meaning Moldova's pace will likely remain tied to the broader trajectory of the war next door as much as to its own overhaul of state institutions.