Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president, dares to stand up to Russia

Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president since 2020, has emerged as one of the most widely admired leaders in the swathe of eastern Europe once directly governed or heavily controlled by the Soviet Union. If, as expected in the opinion polls, she wins the first round of a presidential election on October 20th and prevails in a run-off on November 3rd, she will strengthen her reputation as a rare reformer who has proved able to beat back the all-too-common post-Soviet system of extreme oligarch-led corruption. A referendum on the same day on whether Moldova’s constitution should be changed to enshrine its intention to join the European Union—she is urging a yes vote—may be even more crucial for the country’s geopolitical future. A good result for her on both counts would severely set back Vladimir Putin in his campaign to recapture a dominant role in countries previously under Russia’s sway.

At first glance the diminutive, unflashy, 52-year-old Ms Sandu, a former World Banker, seems an unlikely standard-bearer for taking on the pugilistic Mr Putin—a sort of female David to Russia’s Goliath. Moldova’s population, shrinking through mass emigration, is generally thought to be 2.5m or so. It has a tiny 6,000-strong army. If Russia were to take over Ukraine, most Moldovans assume that their country, with a border of more than 1,200km alongside Ukraine, would be rapidly rolled over too.

For nearly 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Moldova was ruled mainly by a clique of pro-Russian and generally corrupt old-school wheeler-dealers who enriched a circle of oligarchs while most of its people were left to struggle amid poor public services and low morale, prompting mass emigration. This was the situation that Ms Sandu has been determined to reverse. 

Visiting the Harvard Kennedy School as Moldova’s president in 2022, she described herself when she enrolled there in 2009 as “a mid-level civil servant disappointed with the developments in my country” . On graduating in 2010, she joined the World Bank for two years.

In 2012 she was called back to be Moldova’s minister of education at a salary—she noted—one fifteenth of what she earned in Washington. Soon she was up against corruption. “Cheating at high-school graduation exams was almost a national sport,” she recalled in her Harvard speech. “People paid for good grades. A corruption ring involved parents, teachers, pupils and even people at the ministry. We ended it abruptly, and it worked...The rate of students who passed graduation exams nationally fell from 95% to 59%.” This confirmed her reputation for single-mindedness and honesty, rare qualities those days among Moldovan politicians. 

In 2016 she formed her own liberal, free-market political party and was narrowly defeated for the presidency in that year before winning it against a Kremlin-approved candidate in 2020. Her party went on to win a landslide victory in a general election the next year. 

Initially espousing cautiously pragmatic relations with Russia, she sharply switched to a wholesale pro-EU policy when Mr Putin ordered his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This prompted over a million refugees to flow through Moldova, where about 100,000 have remained. Along with covid-19 and a huge rise in gas and electricity prices, the government’s popularity may have dipped. It will be crucial for the prospects of reform that Ms Sandu’s party wins parliamentary elections next July. If, as seems likely, thanks to a cost-of-living crisis in the past two years, it does not repeat its landslide triumph of 2021 but still wins most seats, it may need to form a coalition government, possibly including parties more amenable to Russia. That will test Ms Sandu’s skills anew.