Meanwhile, the major voter magnet and Russian leaning Party of Socialists thinks the association treaty with EU ought to be annulled and the state steered to the East, integrating with Russia and her ex-Soviet satellites based customs union. The communists, however, suffered a mighty fall losing over half of former support.
Still, it’s obvious in the elections result that Moldova is quite divided – into two – in its strategic choice of direction, the European trend in a majority rather thin. At that, the support of Russian or Western minded parties is quite clear-cut also geographically. Doubtless, the situation awards Russia certain options to impact Moldova’s politics towards destabilisation. Already at the recent G20 summit in Australia, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel mentioned that Moldova may be a next conflict area after Georgia and Ukraine.
As a sign of potential instability, the pre-elections mess was quite impressive. Namely, a party far from marginal in its support – Patria, led by the businessman Renato Usatii with dealings in Russia – was removed from elections altogether due to illegal foreign financing. The chairman of the party fled the country. Promptly, the removal of Patria was disapproved by Russian foreign ministry. From the Russian side, media coverage of the results has also been rather clear: the portal gazeta.ru, for instance, featured the headline «Russia lost Moldova». Russian vice prime minister Dmitri Rogozin, however, advised the «comrades» to think about what the sidelined Transnistrians would have voted for.