Moldova’s referendum result is a disaster for the EU

The Union’s failures over Ukraine have damaged its reputation in eastern Europe.

If you thought the Brexit referendum was a knife-edge vote, spare a thought for the Moldovans. The country wedged between Romania and Ukraine held an EU referendum on 20 October, in which the Yes campaign won with 50.4 per cent against 49.6 per cent. This result is not the last word. Moldovans did not actually vote to join the EU – only to change their constitution to make that possible. The big referendum is yet to come.

Or maybe not. The result is a disaster for the EU and for Maia Sandu, Moldova’s pro-Europe president. She needed more support. The previous polls suggested a large majority in favour of EU membership. Sandu accused the Russians of meddling when the No campaign took a lead.

The Yes campaign prevailed in the end only because of the votes by the country’s relatively high number of expats, many of whom live in Romania, Ukraine and Russia.

Moldova is a country at the intersection of two big European cultures, the Russian and the Romanian. This part of the world was once known as Bessarabia, a region that used to be a little larger than Moldova’s borders today. With the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812 that ended the Russia-Turkish War, Bessarabia was annexed by Russia. More than a hundred years later, after the Russian Revolution, the region reconstituted itself as the Moldovan Democratic Republic as part of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet period, the country switched to the Cyrillic alphabet even though its language is a sub-dialect of Romanian, a Latin language. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldova became independent and switched back to the Latin alphabet. What is left from the old period is a bitter divide between Moldovan and Russian speakers. Transnistria, a semi-autonomous Russian territory in the east of the country, is the most visible example of that divide. Russian native speakers today constitute only about 14 per cent of the population, but this minority is strong enough to produce the close vote of 20 October.

For the EU this is the most serious setback since the Brexit vote. Governments in Europe’s south-east are queueing up to join – there are nine candidates including Moldova and Ukraine. Another, Georgia, is holding parliamentary elections on 26 October, another test for EU enlargement. Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, is firmly in favour, but the current prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, is anti-Western and anti-EU. The government and parliament passed the notorious foreign agents bill in May which requires media and non-governmental organisations active in the country and that take funding from abroad to be registered as bodies pursuing the interests of a foreign power. For EU accession, this is a clear step away from membership.

Kobakhidze’s main campaign theme is to stop Georgia being drawn in to the Russia-Ukraine war to avoid what he calls a second front. I wonder whether Russia’s recent military successes in Ukraine, and especially the switch to a war economy, may have reinforced Kobakhidze’s message.

I also suspect that the visible decline in the West’s support for Ukraine may be a factor for Georgian voters. Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia in 2008. If he did so again, the West could not be relied upon to fight another proxy war in the region.

My social media feed is full of pictures of brave young demonstrators draped in the European flag on the streets of Tbilisi. But as we found elsewhere in Europe, the young activists in cities are usually not representative of countries with large rural populations.

The EU granted Georgia, along with Ukraine and Moldova, official candidate status last December, but the route will be arduous for all three of them. All have Russian communities and voters more inclined to support Russia than the West.

It is a lot easier for Russia to meddle in another country’s affairs when a part of that country’s population speaks Russian. The Moldovan authorities claim that Russia paid €15m (£12.5m) to 130,000 people as a bribe to vote No in the referendum. That’s a little over €100 per person. In a poor country like Moldova, this is a lot of money for many people. The bars for Russian meddling are very low, and that will continue to be the case.

In its enthusiasm for enlargement, the EU also tends to overestimate its own popularity. Enlargement is the only discernible pillar of Europe’s geopolitical strategy, but the Union is hardly in control of events.

The EU may also be underestimating resistance from existing members once the costs of the enlargement to economically destitute regions become clear. So far, only Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, has threatened to block Ukrainian EU membership. He will be gone one day. Where I see the real opposition to new membership is from Poland and other net recipients of the EU budget. Poland is by far the largest, a status it would have to relinquish as a price for EU enlargement.

This is why I think hopes of rapid EU enlargement are hugely overblown. The EU and its supporters have been suffering from an optimism bias. But this is not justified by recent events. The European economy is stagnating and falling behind the US and China. I cannot see a scenario in which the EU would formally break up, or lose more members, but there is a real chance that it might fade as a political force and lose its shine as a region of economic prosperity. That, in turn, will further weaken the argument for membership.