Chișinău — International observers said Moldova’s parliamentary election was competitive and well administered despite unprecedented foreign interference, illicit funding schemes, cyberattacks and disinformation — a verdict delivered on Monday, the day after voters handed President Maia Sandu’s party a renewed parliamentary majority.
The 28 September vote was watched by 391 observers from 50 countries — 245 from ODIHR, 108 from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, 24 from the Council of Europe’s assembly and 14 from the European Parliament — one of the largest missions the OSCE has fielded in recent years, sized to match the pressure the election was under.
That pressure was documented before polling day. Moldovan authorities carried out some 844 searches in the campaign’s final weeks, detaining 122 people in investigations into vote-buying networks allegedly financed from Russia; two parties were declared ineligible days before the vote over illegal financing. The observers’ statement on 29 September treated those facts as the backdrop rather than the story: election day itself, they found, was calm, professional and transparent.
The mission’s criticisms were pointed nonetheless. The late ineligibility decisions limited contestants’ ability to replace candidates and raised due-process questions; campaign finance oversight struggled to keep pace with illicit flows; and the information environment, though pluralistic, was saturated with coordinated disinformation that domestic fact-checkers could barely track.
For the OSCE, the Moldova mission has become the template of a new genre: observing an election whose integrity is attacked less at the polling station than upstream — in bank transfers, Telegram channels and troll farms. The statement’s language reflects the shift, devoting as much space to the informational and financial battlefield as to the count.
President Sandu framed the result as Moldova choosing Europe under fire. The observers, careful to a fault, framed it more narrowly: a real election, run properly, in conditions no member state should have to face. Between those two framings lies the country’s next five years — and, Brussels and Moscow both know, rather more than that.
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