Moldova recently made headlines as the country finally achieved EU candidate status alongside neighbouring Ukraine. Despite this, the country and its pro-EU government still face a great number of internal and external challenges on the way to further socio-economic success.

Politics in Moldova is on the edge of a perpetual crisis. It will be up to a new democratically minded generation to turn the trend.

Former prime minister Maia Sandu was victorious in her bid for the Moldovan presidency on November 15th. Popular in the West, she will need more allies at home in order to act on her anti-corruption program.

The challenger Maia Sandu and the incumbent Igor Dodon will go head-to-head in a second round of the Moldovan presidential election on November 15th.

In understanding the impact of the Eastern Partnership in Moldova, it is worth examining what it has failed to deliver for the Moldovan state and society. In this regard, it is a cliché that the strategy “started as a transformative mechanism and ended as a stabilisation and differentiation package of norms and measures”. Moldova has not become more stable or predictable, more prosperous or functional – and definitely not a place where the majority of its citizens would prefer to get old.

By mid-2020, and one year after the fortuitous change of political power in Chișinău (after the politician/oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc fled the country in June 2019), the state of Moldovan-EU relations has continued to be plagued by the same structural institutional pathologies for at least the previous three to four years: systemic corruption, state capture, shady transactions, divisive political identity, beleaguered institutions, legal nihilism, endemic poverty, and the list goes on.