Perspective: Maia Sandu Abandons the Tightrope
May 10, 2025
Back in December 2021 Politico released their “Class of 2022,” their annual ranking of the 28 most influential people in Europe. They split their list into Dreamers, Doers and Disrupters and ranked Moldovan President Maia Sandu as #6 on their list of Dreamers. Each leader had a tagline summing up Politico’s assessment of their position or their goals in that year - Maia Sandu’s was “The Tightrope Walker.”
Their profile of her noted that after the landslide PAS parliamentary victory in Summer 2021 Sandu had “the political space to start pushing her domestic reform agenda forward.” The profile noted that her big challenge would be to balance the country’s position between Moscow and Brussels with a particular emphasis on the need to keep Russian energy flowing to Moldova.
Three years later much has changed. Moldova is no longer reliant on Russian energy and Moldova’s potential EU membership, which Politico called a “long-term aspiration” now seems tantalizingly close. Obviously, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was and is responsible for the tectonic shifts that have occurred in the last years. It is also largely responsible for Moldovan’s poor perceptions of the domestic reform agenda. Geopolitical and security issues have held government attention and slowed reforms to some degree, but just as importantly, inflation, cost of living worries and rolling crises have distracted voters from some of the real domestic successes.
None of this is really news and I’ve spilled lots of digital ink on these tensions over the last 3 years. Today I want to focus on something that has gotten less attention but seems to be a major new factor in Moldovan politics. President Sandu and PAS are increasingly abandoning the tightrope and taking sides. I don’t refer simply to the Russia vs EU question, but more generally PAS is vacillating less and choosing more. The decision to full-throatedly back Nicușor Dan in the upcoming Romanian elections, even as George Simion maintains a major poll lead, is but one example.