Moldovan President Maia Sandu has taken Romanian citizenship, as have a large number of Moldovans. It is estimated that more than a million Moldovan citizens, excluding Transnistria, hold Romanian passports, while only a little over 20 Moldovan citizens live in Romania. Romanians hand out citizenship to Moldovan citizens on the condition that they do not reside in the secessionist province, that they have a Romanian-sounding name and surname, and that they, of course, say they speak Romanian.
In the previous parliamentary session in Chisinau, a law was adopted that declared Romanian the official language in Moldova, despite the fact that in the last census, 48,1% of Moldovans declared themselves to speak Moldovan, and only 31,8% Romanian (there are essentially no differences between the Moldovan and Romanian languages).
The Bessarabian Metropolis is in the same position in the Romanian Orthodox Church as the Metropolis of Montenegro and the Littoral in the Serbian Orthodox Church, and its believers are mainly those who declare themselves to speak Romanian and are openly pro-European.
Local “sovereignists”, led by former President Igor Dodon, have labeled Sandu and the deputies of her coalition majority as “traitors” to Moldova and servants of Bucharest who want to drown Moldova in Romania. They proudly emphasize that they are Moldovans and advocate for an independent and neutral state - which is just another way to express their closeness to Russia and aversion to the EU and NATO - they insist that their language is called Moldovan, they are believers of the so-called self-governing Orthodox Church of Moldova under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, they advocate traditional values, they are openly homophobic and generally opponents of the LGBTQ community, liberalism, individualism and the market economy.
In Moldova, we also have the Gagauz minority, a Turkic people of the Orthodox faith who prefer to use Russian rather than Romanian/Moldovan as a second language, are believers of the Orthodox Church of Moldova and between the EU and Russia, they are the second option. Transnistria is a story in itself. The majority are ethnic Russians and Russophone Ukrainians, while the number of Moldovans is decreasing year by year.
Since gaining independence, Moldova has danced between Romania and Europe on one side and Russia on the other. During the 1990s, a very popular joke was that “An optimist Moldovan learns English, a pessimist Moldovan (Romanian), and a realist Kalashnikov.” Some of the citizens of Moldova perceive the independence of the country as temporary, that is, a transitional period, and that sooner or later it will end up in someone's arms - Romanian or Russian.
Moldovan society was quite fluid until the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moldovans “walked” from Moldovan to Romanian identity, from the aspiration for EU membership to the expectation that Russia would embrace them, between money from EU funds and energy at preferential prices. In parallel, Moldovans were leaving the country - some went to the West (estimated at around 700 thousand), to Italy, France and Germany, and a negligible number to Romania (only 20 thousand), while others went to Russia in search of work (several hundred thousand).
Until the Russian aggression against Ukraine, President Sandu played on both tables, like all her predecessors: she kept the door open for European integration, but also the windows for relatively good relations with the Kremlin. However, in the spring of 2022, the Moldovan president had the courage to do what Belgrade did not want or dare. Despite the fact that more than a third of the population was strongly Russophile, Transnistria was under the direct control of Moscow, and Moldova, in the energy sector, was almost completely dependent on Russian energy sources, Sandu broke through and began to act, and not just talk European.
The first woman at the helm of Moldova realized in the summer that circumstances had changed and that Chisinau's entry into the European family of nations was much more realistic and likely than returning to the embrace of Romania. It is no secret that until a few years ago, Sandu was extremely pro-Romanian and close to the so-called unionists, but at the beginning of 2022 she significantly corrected her position, making Moldova's entry into the EU a priority of priorities.
After three years, the results are fascinating: a poor, backward, corrupt and dysfunctional state in the hands of organized crime and local powerful people began to change so quickly that the number of Russophiles fell, for the first time, below 30%, and the changes are visible to the naked eye for anyone who has been to Moldova in the last few months.
Sandu has created a team of very capable people who are working with great enthusiasm and almost day and night to implement the European agenda. This change motivated the EU to set a precedent and, for the first time in its history, to carry out a counter-offensive against Russian propaganda and the spread of fake news during the election campaign. In the previous period, the EU behaved “Christianly” towards geopolitical “bullies”, taking blows and turning the other cheek, naively believing that the results, aid, investments and actions of the EU speak convincingly enough for themselves.
In Moldova, EU officials went down to the people for the first time, figuratively speaking, and began to explain to citizens directly what was happening, refuting Russian propaganda point by point.
The Kremlin spread three narratives in Moldova: the first was that voting for the EU meant a path to war, as in Ukraine; the second was that the EU was taking away Moldova's identity and was only coming to take cheap labor and other resources; the third was that the EU would force Moldova to implement the LGBT agenda, and that Orthodoxy would be abolished or marginalized.
The results of the EU campaign on the ground were much better than expected, which was also reflected in the election results.
The important question here is not what would have happened to Montenegro if Serbia had by some chance followed the same path as Romania, rather than the opposite. It simply did not happen and it is futile to engage in alternative history, but the Moldovan-Romanian case is indicative of the fact that political positions are not formed on values, but on antithesis, that is, on defining oneself as opposite, different and distanced from the other or others.
So, what you are not is more important than what you are. This makes it easier to understand the phenomenon of why it is possible for the same group of people to support and recite praises for Aleksandar Vučić, present themselves as a great opponent of the previous DPS regime, and participate in the ruling coalition that is leading Montenegro into the EU. And on the other side, we have a group that still fiercely defends the achievements of the DPS's decades-long omnipotence, sharply criticizes the SNS regime in Serbia and its tentacles in Montenegro, and its pro-European and pro-Western orientation survives only because Vučić's Serbia is moving towards Russia and China.
The Montenegrin and Moldovan cases show how much circumstances, as well as the elections of neighboring countries, can determine the direction of political formations and ethnic groups. It is not only Montenegrin in particular that policies are not adjusted to worldviews, but that worldviews are adjusted to the interests of a particular group, be it political, identity-based, ethnic or some other. The only three functional democracies in Asia, apart from Israel, were created in response to communist dictators in China and North Korea: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Moreover, a new nation was born in Taiwan, although the majority of the inhabitants of Formosa belong to the same ethnic group that is dominant in the mainland of the country - Han.
Montenegro did not go that way, although it could have, some would say should have. This is how it came to the point where political formations that are pro-Russian and pro-Serbian in their words are working more on bringing Podgorica closer to EU membership than those whose mouths were full of Europe, and in their actions they shaped Montenegro more according to the rules of the Russian than the European state structure: kleptocracy, corruption, nepotism, the intertwining of the state and organized crime, abuse of position, clientelistic economy, etc.
After five years, the leaders of the DPS think and act like Mujo and Haso in the yogurt joke. Those who are older will remember the joke in which Mujo leaves the bakery angrily and complains to Haso, who asked him why he was so angry:
- How could I not be angry? I ask for burek and yogurt, the saleswoman says she doesn't have yogurt. I say, give me cheesecake and yogurt, she doesn't have yogurt again. I say, give me greens and yogurt, she doesn't have yogurt for me. So what would you, a sick person, do in my place?
Haso looks at him in surprise and says:
- I would throw that yogurt at her.
Thus, the DPS insists on what no one disputes, refusing to face its own demons and to step out of the patterns of division that no longer exist. With Montenegro in NATO and tomorrow in the EU, it is not fighting for the state, but for it to be better. In other words, if you want yogurt, change the bakery. Or, as the American writer Rita Mae Brown would say: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again under the same circumstances and expecting a different result.”
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