Moldova’s civilian society: the fragile flank of a European success story

Chișinău, June 2026. Victor Moșneag at Ziarul de Gardă premises. Photo: Gian-Paolo Accardo

The scandal reopened a debate civilian society groups have been having for years about how much has actually changed in Moldova’s institutions. The Legal Resources Centre of Moldova (LRCM), founded by 4 lawyers after the 2009 “Twitter revolution” protests, has tracked the justice system’s rebuild most closely.

“The judiciary from Moldova became very celebrated after they annulled the local elections in Chișinău, which was won by an opposition candidate,” says executive manager Ilie Chirtoacă, citing a decade in which “20 billion US dollars were laundered”, and a bank fraud that siphoned about 12 per cent of the country’s GDP – in both cases thanks to complacent judges and courts.

A vetting process modelled partially on Albania and Ukraine has since pushed out about a 3rd of the country’s judges and prosecutors in under 5 years, including the ultimate Court’s full erstwhile bench. “We had more than 100 judges leaving the system,” Chirtoacă says, as we meet him and his colleagues in the Centre’s premises, in central Chișinău.

The vacancies left behind are harder to fill: “more than 100” unfilled posts, in courts already carrying “1,000 cases per judge” – a shortfall he attributes partially to pay. “A judge’s wage in Moldova is more or little equal to that of a trolleybus driver” – around 900 euros.

Chișinău, June 2026. Dumitru Jomir, Victoria Mereuță, Octavian Iachimovschi and Ilie Chirtoacă at IPRE’s premises. Photo: Gian-Paolo Accardo

His colleague Dumitru Jomir, a erstwhile anti-corruption prosecutor, points to where the money inactive disappears: “everything related to public procurement… there is no sound criminal case in that, especially in the gas sector, railways, medicine procurement.”

He is candid, too, about the limits of the vetting itself, which checks the judge’s financial integrity through comparing their actual lifestyle against a decade of declared income: “the commission didn’t find yachts, cars or houses in Miami. I think the biggest difference is around €30,000 or €40,000” – modest sums Jomir notes, next to what campaigners erstwhile expected to expose. The vetting process besides monitors the ethical (potential conflicts of interest) and taxation integrity.

In this context, and considering Moldova’s chronical economical instability and citizen’s low trust in banks, especially after the 2014 bank fraud, it’s no wonder that gold shops and pawn shops, known as lombards, flourish on Chișinău’s main avenue: people like physical gold as a stable, inflation-proof savings vehicle alternatively than holding long-term deposits in Moldova leu, the local currency.

The economical bet

There are signs that Moldova’s European turn is beginning to produce an economical dividend. At the Moldova Investment Summit in early June, businesses, the EU and the Moldovan government signed letters of intent covering around €1 billion in investment — a considerable sum for a country whose GDP is below €17 billion. “Europe sees the chance in Moldova,” EU Commissioner Marta Kos said at the summit.

For Chișinău, attracting investment is more than an economical objective. It is besides part of the political bargain underlying accession: Moldova is being asked to carry out costly reforms and loosen economical ties built over decades with Russia, while demonstrating to voters that the European alternate can produce visible benefits.

A trolleybus on the city’s main avenue in Chișinău, June 2026. Photo: Gian-Paolo Accardo

Whether it does will test the same institutions civilian society groups have spent years trying to reform: if the investment pledged in June is to scope citizens alternatively than stall in the kind of opaque contracting LRCM and another NGOs have long criticised, it will request a level of procurement oversight neither organisation believes yet exists.

Screenshots and shadows

Russian interference in Moldova has not receded since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; it has redistributed. president Sandu describes this force as no longer episodic but permanent: “Russian influence is continuous. It continued before, during and after the elections. Unfortunately, this is the fresh normal,” she said at a press conference in June in Chișinău.

In politics, the network built around fugitive oligarch Ilan Șor – now a rotating cast of nominally independent parties after his own was outlawed by the Constitutional Court – remains the most visible vector, but not the only one.

Victoria Mereuță, a legal officer at LRCM, points to a fresh and troubling phenomenon: the emergence of organisations “that look like NGOs, but actually service political interests”. She mentions in peculiar a structure calling itself Eurasia: “last year we saw the creation of it, and besides any activities, like training young people and going for survey visits in Russia.”

Investigative journalists later linked participants in those trainings to activists who confronted authorities during protests in Gagauzia. Victor Moșneag’s own reporting found something more transactional underneath the ideology: activists in the vote-buying network “were receiving like a wage all period for being part of a very large organisation,” structured down to the level of individual polling stations, he says.

In the media, the shift has been migration alternatively than disappearance. respective Russian-language and Șor-linked tv channels were shut down after 2022, but, as IPRE’s Adrian Ermurachi, puts it, “closing TV, possibly is seen as a solution for individual — I think it’s not… people are not getting information anymore from TV, we are getting information from social media, Facebook, TikTok, especially TikTok, Telegram.”

Sergiu Tofilat, a investigator at WatchDog, which tracks disinformation networks, says platforms respond unevenly – TikTok, he says, has removed propaganda-linked accounts more readily than Facebook has. Deepfakes and cloned outlets have added a newer layer: “images of independent journalists,” Victoria Mereuță says, “are utilized to present different fraudulent schemes.”

In security, Defence Minister Anatolie Nosatîi counts about 50 unauthorised drone incursions into Moldovan airspace over the past 2 years, respective of them weaponised. “When you have dozens of missiles entering our airspace… it’s not an accident,” he says, describing Moldova as “a investigating ground for the hybrid war while the battlefield for the conventional war is in Ukraine.”

His ministry’s 2023 national safety strategy was the first Moldovan policy paper to state plainly that “Russia poses a direct threat to the Republic of Moldova” – before the war, he says, “we completely avoided” saying so, “in order not to provoke reactions.” Defence spending has risen from 0.3 to 0.6 per cent of GDP, targeting 1 per cent by 2030, a modest figure next to NATO benchmarks but a marked shift for an army erstwhile absent from public debate.

And in civilian society itself, the maneuver is delegitimisation. “A lot of effort goes to delegitimise civilian society,” LRCM’s Dumitru Jomir says. “If we print a report, quite a few effort will go into delegitimising our findings.” Victoria Mereuță describes the mechanics: “they take screenshots… of the budget we have on different projects, and then come up with a fresh narrative: look how much money they make, the luxury life they run, like oligarchs.”

A draft “foreign agent” law failed in parliament only, Jomir says, due to the fact that “the bad guys don’t have a majority yet.” The failure of about 80 per cent of any organisations’ backing erstwhile USAID support was suspended in 2025 gave those narratives fresh ammunition. “Elon Musk said that USAID is simply a criminal organisation,” Jomir recalls. “That means we, by extension, are a criminal organisation.”

Indispensable and exposed

The consequence is simply a sector that is, at the same time, more embedded in the improvement process than always and more precarious than it looks. The EU has made civilian society engagement a formal condition attached to Moldova’s accession letter, and NGOs sit on government working groups and feed reports into Brussels’ human rights monitoring.

Trust in them, Jomir notes, is markedly higher among people who have actually dealt with 1 – “52 per cent are trusting the NGOs if they are interacting or have interacted with them. If they didn’t, they are only 20 per cent” – a gap he says shows how much of the “civil society is corrupt” communicative rests on hearsay. “The trust is low,” he concedes, “but there is more trust in civilian society than there is trust in the parliament or political parties.”

Near the central marketplace of Chișinău, June 2026. Photo: Gian-Paolo Accardo

That same visibility, though, makes NGOs and independent media a preferred target, and backing remains scarce. “Like 10 grant proposals to get at least one,” is how WatchDog’s Sergiu Tofilat describes the search for money. 5 parties now sit in parliament, and, Dimitru Jomir warns, 4 of them – not only Russia’s conventional allies – “do not look at civilian society with very friendly eyes… you have a unified position [believing] that civilian society should be regulated more.” It is, in effect, a informing about what happens the day PAS’s majority erodes.

Gian Marco Moisé adds that “civil society is frequently perceived as an extension of PAS, which frequently needs to tap into its ranks to appoint specialists. This is surely the case of businessmen specified as current Prime Minister Vasile Tofan and his predecessor Alexandru Munteanu. An even more prominent example is Doina Nistor, Moldovan economical improvement Minister in Dorin Recean government (March-November 2025), who previously served as the USAID task manager.”

The 1 clean win

If Moldova has a template for reducing Russian leverage, it is energy, not politics. “We utilized to get up to 70 per cent of our electricity needs from the power plant in the region of Transnistria,” says Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu. “They would get the Russian gas for free, and produce electricity for us – a cyclical, locked-in approach.”

Since 2022, Moldova has secured at least 22 gas suppliers, scaled up renewable generation twelvefold, and synchronised with the European continental grid. “The Moldova you see these days versus [that of] 2022 – are different countries, energy-wise,” Junghietu says. It is simply a transformation Chișinău would clearly like to replicate in its politics and its information space. Power lines and supply contracts, though, are easier to rebuild than public trust.

What all interviewee agrees on, whatever their corner of the improvement effort, is that 2030 is not just a method deadline but a intellectual 1 – a chance, as IPRE’s Adrian Ermurachi puts it, to “use this opportunity” before “this window is going to close.” Whether it survives the next scandal, the next disinformation wave, or the next election in which a fragile majority should be rebuilt from scratch is the question Moldova’s civilian society cannot yet answer for itself.

That makes accession a question of reciprocity as much as reform. Moldova is moving rapidly to meet the EU’s demands, but sustaining public support will besides depend on whether Brussels can offer visible returns – investment, integration and credible advancement towards membership. If that exchange begins to look one-sided, the optimism on which the accession task depends could prove hard to sustain.

This article was produced as part of the PULSE collaborative project. Gian Marco Moisé (OBCT, Italy) and Katarina Morawecz (HVG, Hungary) contributed to it.