Moldova¶
The Moldovan cases show an election defended against foreign money with instruments that look, in form, like those used to exclude opponents. Courts, the election commission and the security service acted together and close to the vote, on evidence later found sound but under time limits that restricted any remedy. The exclusion’s legitimacy rests on the quality of the evidence and the speed of the decision, and the two pull against each other.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Worth a look. Voters who wanted to choose the excluded candidates lost the option, and the party’s members face a year of restrictions. Parties funded from abroad, from any direction, learn that exclusion can come days before a vote. A later government could use the same court and commission against a party funded from the other side, and the excluded, either way, will have a patron ready to call it persecution. Decisions taken earlier, with time for appeal, would reduce that risk.
August 2026: Twelve months¶
On 4 August 2026 the Central Court of Appeal restricted the activity of Heart of Moldova for 12 months, on the request of the Ministry of Justice, citing “reasonable suspicions regarding the correctness of the financing of the activity” of the party raised by the election commission and the security service. The clerks note that the measure taken in haste before the vote has now been taken again, at leisure.
September 2025: Candidates removed¶
On 26 September 2025, two days before the parliamentary election, the Central Election Commission excluded Heart of Moldova’s candidates from the list of the Patriotic Bloc, in which the party ran. The day before, the Chisinau Court of Appeal had approved a request from the Justice Ministry to restrict the party’s activities, after searches earlier in September in an investigation into vote-buying, illegal party financing and money laundering. The party called the decision “illegal and politically motivated”. The OSCE observers’ final report records that the commission could not conclusively confirm serious financing violations but found reasonable suspicions, that the Supreme Court found the security service’s information on about 1.2 million euro from “the criminal Sor organization” well-founded, and that decisions in the two days before the election “limited their right to effective remedy”. The clerks note that a court came first, and the election commission second, and that the calendar left little room for either to be challenged.