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Maia Sandu lost the elections in Moldova, so she is only the president of the diaspora, writes the pro-Kremlin media, pushing this conclusion through disinformation and manipulation and misinterpretation of facts.
NEWS: Maia Sandu lost the presidential elections - and will still become president. She lost the referendum to amend the Constitution, but her party will amend it.
Sandu lost the elections in Moldova. She is the president of the Western diaspora.
The Central Electoral Commission of the Republic of Moldova declared valid the second round of the presidential elections held on November 3. The incumbent president Maia Sandu won the presidential elections over former prosecutor Alexandr Stoianoglo with a small margin (55.4% to 44.6%). In Moldova, however (without the diaspora), the situation was the opposite.
Sandu won with the help of manipulation of vote counting and administrative resources – censorship in the mass media and blogosphere, control over the CEC and the electoral system, law enforcement bodies and special services, reprisals and threats to their own citizens.
In the second round, Sandu obtained slightly fewer votes than in the second round of the 2020 election (943,006). Stoianoglo, on the other hand, gathered 347,036 more votes than in the first round. An impressive growth for someone who, just half a year ago, was not even known outside of Chisinau.
Sandu formally won thanks to the votes of the Moldovan diaspora in Western countries. Only two polling stations were set up in the whole of Russia and 10,000 ballots were distributed to 300,000 people.
The polls in the West lacked effective voting observation and control mechanisms, which created enormous opportunities for rigging the results through fraudulent insertion of ballots, organized transport of supporters, corruption links between the ruling party and the local diaspora.
The fate of the country was decided by people who do not live in it, a country of high taxes, high prices, dictatorship and national debt. And they will not die for the Western values when Sandu involves Moldova, at the behest of Washington, in an armed conflict with Russia.
[...] The Moldovan authorities manipulated the votes inside the country as well. For example, they prevented the residents of Transnistria (a region recognized by Chisinau as part of Moldova) from reaching the polling stations, and in addition, there were false bomb alerts.
NARRATIVES: 1. Maia Sandu achieved a shady victory in the presidential election. 2. The presidential election was rigged.
PURPOSE: The purpose of such manipulation and disinformation is to cast doubt on the results of the presidential elections and challenge Maia Sandu's office, narratives that will most likely be brought back into the public sphere in the next four years. Also, to inoculate the idea that the diaspora, which usually has more pro-European views, should not decide, i.e. vote.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The article is based on disinformation, manipulation and misinterpretation of several facts. First of all, the statement that Maia Sandu lost the elections in Moldova is an erroneous interpretation. Maia Sandu won with over 55% of the votes, and to separate the votes in the country from those in the diaspora has no legal basis. Considering the large number of Moldovan citizens abroad, which, according to some unofficial statistics, would represent a third of the country's population, the Moldovan authorities set up a large number of polling stations. The interest of the Moldovans settled abroad in the elections in the Republic of Moldova increased after 2009, when the authorities began to open more polling stations, including outside the diplomatic missions. From 33 stations for the 2009 parliamentary elections, over 230 stations were set up for this year's election. The number of voters also increased practically constantly - from slightly more than 10,000 in 2009, to about 330,000 in the second round of the presidential elections. In the previous presidential elections, the number of voters abroad in the second round was also significantly higher compared to the first round , according to data provided by the specialized source www.alegeri.md.
Given that Moldovan legislation allows voting abroad, including the opening of polling stations outside diplomatic missions as well, to separate voting outside the country from domestic voting is tendentious. Voters from different regions of the Republic of Moldova have different preferences too, but this does not mean that the elected head of state is only president in the regions where she obtained the majority.
In addition, one can notice a different approach of the author towards the voters from the diaspora, presenting them as people who do not live with the hard realities of the Republic of Moldova, compared to that towards people living in the Transnistrian region, claiming that the authorities restricted their right to vote. But theoretically they do not know the realities of the Republic of Moldova either, since they live in a separatist region, which considers itself an independent state.
The Diaspora of the Republic of Moldova continues to play an important role including in the country's economy. In the last two years, citizens living abroad have sent home two billion dollars that is, more than 10% of the GDP of the Republic of Moldova. These are only official transfers; the total amounts are much higher.
Another manipulation that the article resorts to is the way in which the numbers of voters who supported one candidate or another are presented. In the case of Maia Sandu, the author stresses the fact that she got a little less votes in the second round than 4 years ago, and in the case of Stoianoglo - that he got 347,000 votes more than in the first round. It would have been fair to use the same reference. The number of voters who voted for Maia Sandu also increased by more than 270,000. Moreover, the decrease of 13,000 votes in 2024 compared to 2020, after a 4-year term in which she was blamed for all the problems facing the country, does not seem that big.
There is no evidence of massive election fraud in polling stations in the West. In fact, there have been accusations that voters were transported in an organized manner to several eastern states, such as Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and even paid to vote against Maia Sandu.
The Central Electoral Commission presented the preliminary results of the elections, and the judges of the Constitutional Court will decide on their validation.
The claim that Maia Sandu lost the constitutional referendum is also a lie. The results of the referendum on the European integration of the country, which Maia Sandu proposed and supported, were validated by the Constitutional Court, and the changes in the Constitution have already entered into force, being published in the Official Gazette.
LOCAL CONTEXT/ ETHOS: On October 20 and November 3, presidential elections were held in the Republic of Moldova, which Maia Sandu won with over 55% of the votes. The voting took place in the context of extensive disinformation campaigns and even vote buying , as shown by several journalistic investigations, but also investigations and raids organized by law enforcement bodies. The Kremlin would have been behind such campaigns, and the main intermediary was the fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, sentenced to 15 years in prison in the large-scale bank fraud case of 2014 and who also formed a party alliance – the Victory Bloc.
On October 20, the republican constitutional referendum on the European integration of the Republic of Moldova was also held. This election exercise was the main target of the Russian propaganda. However, the referendum passed, albeit narrowly, and was validated.
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