With the final results still coming in, it appears that the ruling Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) has won the general election in Moldova on September 28, but to secure victory, President Maia Sandu seems to have taken a page out of the “managed democracy” Kremlin’s playbook.

Moldova’s elections turned into a geopolitical battlefield as the incumbent pro-Europe Sandu wrestled with massive Kremlin interference that was playing on dissatisfaction with her rule and pro-Russian sentiment amongst many of her people. And she was playing rough.

Only 48 hours before the vote, two of the leading pro-Russian parties were excluded from the race on campaign funding irregularities.

In her televised address before the vote, Sandu drew a stark parallel with Georgia which she claimed had been “crushed by Russia” and the European path for Moldova that would lead to prosperity.

But this emotional appeal came with some blatant gerrymandering, as only two polling stations were opened inside Russia for expatriates, but embassies across the EU opened their doors to would-be voters.

The effort to ensure the pro-EU forces had the upper hand were underway well in advance. Tech guru and Telegram founder Pavel Durov admitted in a post that he was approached by French intelligence services and Moldovan officials earlier this year while in Paris and asked to shut down opposition channels.

At the same time EU foreign policy chief and former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas openly announced that the EU was sending a “rapid reaction” force to Chișinău to “assist” in the elections and “counter” Russian meddling.

Managed democracy

Observers have criticized Sandu and the EU of adopting the Kremlin’s tactics of “managed democracy”: playing lip service to the norms of democratic voting, but making extensive use of the so-called “administrative resources” to manipulate voter sentiment: both through hard means, like gerrymandering and the use of courts to ban opposition candidates, and soft means, like flooding the information space and social media with pro-regime propaganda.

“There was the term “managed democracy” in Russia - a regime of hybrid and increasingly imitational democracy that existed between either 1993 or 1996 and 2012 when Putin undid democracy altogether.” journalist and bne IntelliNews columnist Leonid Ragozin. “This is what is happening in Moldova.”

The opposition Moldova Mare party was barred from elections just two days before the polls opened, but remained in the ballots, so people voted for it, unwittingly stealing votes from other opposition parties in favour of the ruling PAS.

Foreign Minister Mihai Popșoi said diaspora voting could be prolonged as Sandu called on diaspora to take active part, but not the diaspora in Russia though whose votes have been suppressed by limiting the number of polling stations to just two, reports Ragozin.

There were unconfirmed reports that the bridges to the breakaway regions of Transnistria were blocked on the day of elections to suppress anti-Sandu votes. Transnistria remains under partial Russian occupation.

The widely spread Moldovan one million-strong diaspora, 15% of the total population that already enjoys EU visa-free travel, plays a vital role in elections, but more than a third of those live in Russia. The pro-Russian candidates, like former president Igor Dodon and oligarch businessman Ilan Shor, allegedly used cash incentives, disinformation, and vote-buying to sway support. PAS struggled in June 2024 local elections, winning with a razor thin margin, where pro-Russian parties gained ground in rural areas and among Russian-speaking voters.

Georgia on my mind

Critics say Sandu was using the example of Georgia to fan flames of Russia’s intentions for the country. "Georgia has once again become a Russian colony. Moldova will not repeat these mistakes," Sandu said.

Georgia is also an EU candidate country, but the ruling regime, led by oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili has broken with Brussels and maintains tight relations with Russia that has seen trade and investment flourish. That has led to almost a year of street protests as the majority of ordinary Georgian want to see their country accede to the EU.

“Georgia isn't, as she claims, a "colony of Russia", from what I could see they merely refused to be a colony of the EU, which is a pretty big difference,” political commentator Arnaud Bertrand said in a commentary.

As reported by bne IntelliNews, Georgia suffers from a similar voting breakdown as Moldova: the urban population in the capital strongly support the EU-direction, but the poorer rural population favoured Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream ruling party with its pro-Russia leaning.

Moreover, a side-by-side comparison of Georgia and Moldova reveals that George has easily outperformed Moldova in recent years, which remains one of two poorest countries in Europe. Last year Georgia's economy grew at 9.4% vs 0.1% for Moldova, according to the World Bank. “In fact since she became president in 2020, her country's GDP grew from $8.4bn to $9.25bn (so 10% growth in total in four years) when Georgia's grew by 45% (from $17.35bn to $25.13bn), Bertrand reports.

Romania

Critics say that this Moldovan election is similar to the last 2024 presidential election in Romania where far-right independent candidate Călin Georgescu came out of nowhere with a surprise first round win with approximately 22% of the vote.

However, seen as a pro-Russian spoiler, in December the Constitutional Court annulled the entire first round and Georgescu was barred from politics. The authorities claimed that Georgescu had received illicit funding from the Kremlin to run a highly effective social media campaign on TikTok and Telegram. A few months later, the authorities admitted they had no concrete evidence to substantiate that claim. A rerun returned pro-EU Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan, who secured 53.6% of the vote in the second round on May 18.

He defeated hard-right nationalist George Simion in a dramatic upset as Simion was leading the first round but garnered 46.4% in the second round.

Dan’s victory ensured that EU-member Romania stays in the anti-Russian camp, championed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Kallsa, and out of the growing Patriots for Europe championed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who have become a major thorn in the side of the European Commission (EC) executive.

Managed democracy

Russia's "managed democracy" is a political system that emerged following President Vladimir Putin's rise to power in 1999-2000. It blends democratic structures with centralized authoritarian control.

The term, coined by Kremlin insiders like Vladislav Surkov, is a hybrid regime where elections, media, and political opposition exist and prima facie appears to be a true democracy, but in reality elections are carefully managed to achieve certain results.

Unlike the presidents in Central Asia that largely score well over 90%
“victories” in elections, over time the Kremlin has become more subtle as it refines the system. Putin won a mere 52.9% in this first election in 2000, but was swept into office on the back of the start of the second Chechen war after a series of apartment bombs – widely seen as being orchestrated by the Federal Security Service (FSB) – killed hundreds of Muscovites in their beds in the middle of the night.

Since then, Putin’s share of the vote has risen steadily, both thanks to genuine economic prosperity he brought the country by ending Yeltsin’s chaos, but also as control over voting improves, driven by the introduction of an electronic ballot system.

Putin presidential electoral victories:

2000 (March 26): 52.94% (first round; against Gennady

Zyuganov at 29.21%).

2004 (March 14): 71.31% (first round; against Nikolai Kharitonov at 13.69%).

2012 (March 4): 63.60% (first round; against Gennady Zyuganov at 17.18%).

2018 (March 18): 76.69% (first round; against Pavel Grudinin at 11.77%).

2024 (March 15-17): 87.28% (first round; against Nikolai Kharitonov at 4.31%).Interestingly, in each of these elections, Putin has been moving towards making sure that he wins enough theoretical numerical votes that is more than 50% of the entire population, not just a whopping majority of the smaller group of just registered voters. This share is rising from 25% in the first 2000 election but was 52.7% in the last election in 2024.

However, the parliamentary elections are more important. Russia is such a vast country, the Kremlin has to rely on the regional deputies and governors for actual day to day operations and as some of the regions are so far and there are so many of them they enjoy a fair amount of autonomy.

At the same time, the election results need to cross various constitutional thresholds to protect Putin’s position: in theory the Duma can veto presidential orders and change the constitution if it can raise more than 66% of the vote, so the Kremlin ensures that the ruling United Russia controls that many votes. The Kremlin also needs to ensure that it has enough deputies to control the Duma’s key committees where laws are actually drafted.

In more recent years, the Kremlin has promoted other parties to add a veneer of improved plurality, however, these parties belong to the so-called “systemic opposition”, such as the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), that always vote the Kremlin-line on big issues. The “non-systemic opposition” like late opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison under questionable circumstances in February 2024, are excluded from the Duma.

The most recent example was 2021 Duma elections where, as reported by bne IntelliNews, the Communist Party (KPRF) are believed to have won the majority, defeating United Russia. However, when the electronic voting came in, those wins were overturned and United Russia took control. However, a statistical study showed clearly the result was systemically fixed in the Kremlin’s favour.

The system occasionally goes wrong: the fix in the 2011 Duma elections was so blatant that it sparked the largest mass demonstrations of Putin’s regime with more than 100,00 demonstrators on Bolotnaya Square in a park facing the Kremlin across the Moskva river.

Moldova and Romania are still a long way from a full managed democracy and have limited themselves to crude early-stage tactics of banning opposition leaders and parties in the run up the vote, a technique also favoured by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko in the massively falsified president elections of 2000 that sparked mass demonstrations.

However, Georgia has gone much further down the managed democracy path. Putin abandoned his “repression-lite” model of managed democracy following the return to Russia and arrest of Navalny in 2021. He ramped up the powers of his so-called foreign agents law to close down the opposition press and jail journalists. He also made using the word “war” in the press illegal after the start of the ”special military operations” in Ukraine in 2022.

Georgian Dream is adopting a growing number of these tactics, shuttering foreign-backed NGOs, arresting journalists, and it also introduced its own foreign agents law last year that kicked off the on-going mass protests that are still running nearly a year later.