Earlier preliminary results had indicted a majority “no,” but a surge of ballots from abroad provided last-minute support for EU membership. The referendum comes amid allegations of Russia-backed voter fraud
With more than 99% of the votes counted, the “yes” vote for EU membership in Moldova’s referendum was slightly ahead at 50.28% — only 8,000 votes more than the anti-EU camp.
Earlier, Moldovans appeared to have rejected plans for the former Soviet republic to add its goal of joining the EU to the constitution, according to preliminary results from 70% of ballots in the country’s referendum from Sunday evening.
However, ballots from Moldovans living abroad were counted towards the end, giving the “yes” camp a last-minute push.
A largely agricultural country of around 2.5 million people, Moldova has sought to cut ties with Moscow and move closer to the EU since Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine in 2022.
The former Soviet republic began EU membership talks in June.
This is good news, although I wonder why they don’t just vote to reunite with Romania instead. Moldova really doesn’t need to be its own country. It basically exists because of Russian “separatists”.
I’m curious about this too. I’d be interested in a informed opinion by someone from Romania or Moldova that could share their insight.
It is a really fragile topic, at least for moldovans and I’d say it is mostly due to ideological reasons. A lot of moldovans do not identify themselves as romanians and this is due to 2 main reasons:
Out of these reasons Moldova had and has a huge debate over the existence of Moldovan language, just recently the constitution was updated stating that the state official language is Romanian. Within Moldova at this point there is the Moldovan dialect which differs a lot from other Romanian dialects, even the Moldovan dialect from within Romania, where Moldovan dialect has a mixture of russian/ukranian words.
So, as I said, Moldova exists because of Russia’s divide-and-conquer tactics. Moldavia/Moldova has been part of Romania or its earlier polities for at least 2000 years. This would be like a hypothetical Donbas Republic voting to join an EU of which Ukraine is already a member. Why not rejoin the country it was part of before Russian imperialism broke it apart?
The linguistic thing needn’t be an issue. Multilingual countries aren’t exactly rare in the EU.