With 95 percent of the ballots counted, current President Maya Sandu comes out on top in the vote for head of state in Moldova with 39%, but will go to a second round, BTA reported.
In it, her most likely opponent will be Alexander Stojanoglo, a Russia-friendly former Moldovan prosecutor-general who received 28 percent of the vote. The second round will be on November 3, according to the Associated Press.
About 51 percent of those eligible to vote voted yesterday in the presidential elections, which means 1.5 million voters, CEC data show. There were 11 candidates for head of state.
With 95% of the counted ballots for the referendum on the country's European aspirations, the result is 52% “no“ and 47 percent “for“ out of a total of 1.2 million ballots. The votes of the Moldovan diaspora, which is firmly in favor of the country's European path, are still being counted.
Moldovan President Maya Sandu said there was an unprecedented attack on democracy after the near-total results of a referendum on her country's European aspirations showed the anti-EU camp winning, AFP and Associated Press reported.< /p>
"Criminal groups acting together with foreign forces hostile to our interests attacked our country with tens of millions of euros, lies and propaganda to trap our country in uncertainty and instability,” Sandu said after the partial results were announced from the referendum on Moldova's European ambitions and from the presidential elections.
"We have clear evidence that these criminal groups aimed to buy 300,000 votes – "a fraud of unprecedented proportions," Sandu said. "Their goal is to undermine the democratic process," she added.
The two key votes came amid claims by Moldovan authorities that Moscow is waging a hybrid war to destabilize the country and divert it from its path to the EU. During the election campaign, there were allegations of funding of pro-Moscow opposition groups, the spread of disinformation, interference in local elections and a large vote-buying scheme.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby confirmed concerns about Russian interference in the Moldovan vote, saying last week that: “Russia is actively working to undermine Moldova's election and its European integration”. Moscow has repeatedly denied that it is interfering in Moldova.
„In the past few months, Moscow has allocated millions of dollars to influence the presidential election in Moldova,”, Kirby said. “We believe that this money went to fund her preferred parties and to spread disinformation on social media for the benefit of their campaigns,”, he added.
In early October, Moldovan law enforcement authorities said they had uncovered a massive vote-buying scheme organized by Ilan Shor, an exiled pro-Russian oligarch currently living in Russia. He paid 15 million euros ($16.2 million) to 130,000 individuals to undermine the two votes.
Shor was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison last year for fraud and money laundering in the case of $1 billion that disappeared from Moldovan banks in 2014. He denied the charges, saying the “payments were legal”. Shore's populist party, which is friendly to Russia, was declared unconstitutional and banned last year.
On Thursday, Moldovan authorities foiled another plot in which more than 100 young Moldovans were trained in Moscow by private military groups on how to cause civil unrest around the two votes. Some of them have also participated in “more advanced training in camps” in Serbia and Bosnia, the police said, and four people were detained for 30 days.
Sandu voted yesterday in Chisinau and told the media that “Moldovans must choose their own destiny, not others, nor dirty money or lies”. “I voted for Moldova to be able to develop in peace and freedom”, she said.
A pro-Western government has been in power in Moldova since 2021, a year after Sandu won the presidency. Parliamentary elections will be held next year.
Moldova, a former Soviet republic with a population of about 2.5 million people, applied to join the EU after Russia's full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine and was granted candidate status in the summer of that year, along with Ukraine. In June, Brussels agreed to start membership negotiations.