Georgia and Moldova’s “bad” elections

The West does not realise that its goal of sole dominance over Russia’s neighbouring countries is no longer feasible.

The exclusive orientation towards the West is over in the countries surrounding Russia. In Central Asia this is already an established fact, in Transcaucasia and Moldova there are different manifestations and variants, and if no major war intervenes, this will eventually happen in the Baltic states as well, and who knows if not even in Poland. This is not about the growing realisation that Russia will not lose the war in Ukraine, nor will it suffer the predicted “strategic defeat”. Much less is it about Moscow becoming the new centre of gravity for these countries, as could be the case in Belarus. The danger of a new Russian autocracy of the “Soviet type” is one of the myths of Western propaganda. The simple reality is that Russia neither can nor wants to return there. On the contrary, for decades it has been open to a condominium with other powers, in which certain balances and respect for the sovereignty and integrity of these countries are defined.

Neutral Ukraine as a bridge
country between Europe and Russia

Many misinformed people will object here with regard to what happened in Ukraine, forgetting that the military invasion was Moscow’s response to the West’s clear objective of imposing exclusively Western domination in Ukraine with the aim of securing a direct strategic military threat to the Russian regime. Moscow never intended to counter this with the same claim for exclusivity. The Russian leadership was content with Ukraine to be neutral, a bridge country between Europe and Russia, while the West insisted that, contrary to the clear and majority opinion of its population, the government in Kiev was given the choice of “either with us or with them”. This decision was the aim of the trade agreements presented to Kiev by Merkel and Barroso’s EU in 2013. There was also the invitation to join NATO in 2008, in violation of the basic principles of neutrality and non-alignment enshrined in the country’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The results of all opinion polls also pointed to a clear geographical divide on these issues and clearly indicated the risk of civil war.
  All of this is well known, and the West is now trying very similar means in countries like Georgia and Moldova. But it won’t work. Not so much because Russia will not lose the war in Ukraine, although that does play a role, but because of something higher, more general and more fundamental: because the balance of power in the region and in the world is changing.

BRICS summit marks the
beginning of the end of US dominance

The BRICS summit on 22–24 October in Kazan (Russia) marked the beginning of the end of the international system that has been dominated by the United States since 1944 (Bretton Woods) and has since been used aggressively against the global majority. Kazan shows that a large number of countries are prepared to take a different path. This is something that was not possible in the past, e. g., at the Bandung Conference in 1955, but is feasible today because the dwarfs of that time have grown and some have even become giants. The weight of Chinese power is combined with the strategic experience that Russia inherited from the USSR. At the same time, a multitude of large and small players are demanding more autonomy. All this enables the BRICS to be independent of the West, to trade, to finance each other and even to protect themselves militarily. The world is in the process of reorganising itself, and the West is not part of it. And not only that: Brussels, Berlin and Paris do not seem to understand the situation. In today’s world, there is a multitude of players (Iran, China, Russia, Turkey...) among which the Western powers will be just one of many. The small countries of the European periphery understand that they must adapt to this plurality, which, incidentally, gives them more room for manoeuvre and more opportunities to act more freely than vassalage to an exclusive power would allow them.
  After a quarter of a century of unfulfilled evocation of a “bright European future” with very negative results, in countries like Georgia and Moldova, and certainly not only there, it is not a question of “either-with-us-or-with-them”, nor of “pro-European versus pro-Russian”, “democracy versus autocracy” and so on, but of access for these countries to a more open and freer playing field. In view of this situation, the EU is behaving like a short-sighted imperial hegemon in its subjugated periphery.

Referendum on
Moldova’s accession to the EU
financially supported by the EU

In order to steer votes towards the Brussels-backed candidate Maia Sandu, a referendum on the country’s EU membership was held at the same time as the presidential elections in Moldova. With an abstention rate of 50 percent, only 50.4 percent were in favour. However, accession to EU requires a two-thirds majority to amend the constitution, which Sandu does not have. This means that the referendum has failed. The referendum was accompanied by European financial aid amounting to 2 billion euros (800 euros per inhabitant, with a minimum wage for Moldovans of less than 300 dollars), which the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced on the spot to support Sandu’s victory. This obvious interference could not prevent Sandu from losing the election in the interior of the country and only winning in the second round on 3 November with the votes of the Moldovan diaspora in the EU – a highly controversial episode that was hardly mentioned in our media.

Moldovans in Russia could
hardly participate in the elections

40 percent of the Moldovan working-age population live abroad. The majority of these emigrants, around half a million, work in Russia. These emigrants were able to register to take part in the elections until 6 September. As the Hungarian ambassador explained, the majority of people registered on these lists came from Russia (38 per cent), followed by people living in Italy (11.5 per cent), Germany (9 per cent), the United States (6.6 per cent) and Romania (5 per cent). Despite this, only two polling stations were opened in Russia (exclusively in Moscow, compared to 17 in various Russian cities in the 2020 elections), while there were 60 polling stations in Italy, 26 in Germany, 20 in France, 17 in the United Kingdom, 16 in Romania, 16 in the United States, 11 in Spain, 10 in Ireland and 6 in Portugal. Previously, “Sandu had blocked pro-Russian television stations and barred a number of politicians from participating in the election because they had violated electoral law or illegally received funds from abroad,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The election was observed by the OSCE delegation in Moldova, where nine of the ten directors in the last thirty years have been American and which is already a NATO apparatus. However, no Russian or CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) observers were present.
  The heads of the Moldovan government are of Romanian nationality: President Maia Sandu, the speaker of parliament, the prime minister, the foreign minister, the vast majority of ministers and parliamentarians from the ruling party, most of the heads of department, the members of the Constitutional Court and the head of the secret service. Moldova is a multinational and multilingual country. 53 % describe their language as “Moldovan” and 23 % as “Romanian”. The difference between the two is minimal, but the nuance is identity-forming. The remaining third of Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians and Gagauzians consider “Moldavian” to be the national language. In such a country, the government declared “Romanian” and not “Moldovan” as the national language… Despite all these inconsistencies, which illustrate the EU’s methods in its oppressed periphery, Russian electoral interference has been denounced by the EU.

Showdown in Georgia

In Georgia, the elections were portrayed as a showdown between a “pro-Russian” ruling party (Georgian Dream), which wants to restrict freedoms through the control of NGOs, and a “pro-European” democratic opposition. The Georgian Dream is not “pro-Russian” but is pragmatically oriented towards the balance of power mentioned above. That is, they neither support sanctions against Russia nor participate in the hostile climate towards Moscow that is common in the Baltic republics or Poland, preferring instead to stabilise relations with Russia, with which Georgia has not even maintained diplomatic relations since 2008. There are 25,000 NGOs operating in Georgia, 90 per cent of which are financed from abroad. These organisations’ access to European and American money has colonised entire sectors of the country’s public sector and services, such as education, health, justice reform and infrastructure. It is these unelected bodies in Western hands that are eroding sovereignty and democracy and buying off entire populations that depend on them with projects and grants. For this reason, and because of their open hostility to the ruling party, the Georgian Dream has stipulated that organisations that receive more than 20 per cent of foreign aid must register, as is the case in the United States, which, however, are presented as “Russian law” and “Putin’s influence”. In reality, interference is mainly Western. They do not want to recognise the defeat of the opposition in the parliamentary elections on October 26^th.

The President of Georgia is French

While in Moldova the highest government officials and the President Sandu are of Romanian nationality, the President in Georgia, Salome Zurabishvili, is French. She served as a French diplomat in charge of post-Soviet affairs at the Quai d’Orsay [French Foreign Ministry] and French ambassador to Georgia in 2003 and 2004. Under the disastrous Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, the protagonist of the military attack on Russian forces in South Ossetia in August 2008 – often referred to in our media as the “Russian attack on Georgia” – she was Foreign Minister. In any case, this European figure, reminiscent of the colonial era, does not recognise the result of the elections of October 26 in Georgia and supports the calls of the EU and the US for an uprising in the streets.
  As Ambassador Varga says, the EU and the USA do not want to accept Georgian reality as the basis of the country’s foreign policy. This reality is based on the fact that Georgia is a successor state to the Soviet Union, shares a border with Russia, its economic interests, tens and even hundreds of thousands of family and friendly relationships and the logically resulting cultural and linguistic overlaps with its neighbouring country. The West does not understand that times have changed and that its goal of dominating Russia’s environment alone and even mobilising it for a direct conflict with Russia is no longer possible because it contradicts the new realities in the world, which go far beyond the logic of “either with us or with them”. •

Source: https://ctxt.es/es/20241101/Firmas/47843/Rafael-Poch-Georgia-Moldavia-Rusia-elecciones-Occidente.htm of 1 November 2024

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Rafael Poch-de-Feliu (born 1956 in Barcelona) was the first foreign correspondent of the major Catalan newspaper “La Vanguardia”, based in Moscow from 1988 to 2002, in Beijing from 2002 to 2008, and subsequently in Berlin and Paris. He is the author of several books on political developments in Russia, China and Germany. He currently writes regularly for the online newspaper ctxt in the section “Imperios combatientes” and blogs at rafael.poch.com. In April 2023, he published his latest book, “Ucrania, la guerra que lo cambia todo” (Ukraine, the war that changes everything).