Turkish flags may replace the pro-Russian sympathies of the Gagauz - Moscow political scientist
Having lost the first round, the current President of Moldova Igor Dodon will not be able to win the second.
The director of the Progressive Policy Foundation, Oleg Bondarenko, writes about this in Moskovsky Komsomolets, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
In his opinion, Dodon, under the current conditions, has a vanishingly small chance of winning in the second round, since “the history of elections knows practically no examples of a government candidate winning in the second round who lost in the first round.”
“I don’t at all presume to say that this means Moscow will lose again - after all, in order to lose, you have to play! And “responsible officials” from the relevant departments have never been able to do this,” Bondarenko believes.
He also emphasizes that if Dodon was an illusion of pro-Russianism, then Sandu is unlikely to become a fake Westerner.
“Her agenda includes all issues from reducing the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moldova to the prospect of unification (union) with Romania, of which she has citizenship. It also cannot be ruled out that after Sandu’s victory the conflict in Transnistria may be reopened. At least in the case of integration with Bucharest (which will look like absorption by Romania), this will certainly happen. And even then peace negotiations will need to be held in Berlin, which controls both the politics of Bucharest and (by that time) Chisinau,” the expert writes.
He also points out that in Gagauzia in the south of Moldova, where Dodon received more than 80 percent of the votes in these elections, and the entire population voted repeatedly for any kind of union with Russia, Turkey has been very active for the last 10 years - building cultural centers there, opening libraries, invests in infrastructure.
“The entire Gagauz leadership, led by ex-communist Irina Vlah, is regularly invited to Ankara, and Turkish leader Erdogan did not consider it beneath his dignity to come to the center of the autonomy of Comrat. Therefore, very soon the Turkish flags flying there may displace sympathy for Russia among the local population. And in Moscow everyone will continue to “express concerns” and “concerns.”
Well done Turks, they work while others sleep. But this does not mean at all that Turkey will become an ally of Russia in our underbelly - on the contrary, in the person of Ankara we get a strong and tenacious enemy, returning to its former historical regions of presence. And in Russia, sometimes one gets the impression that the slogans of the fighters for sovereignty of the late 1980s were best learned not just anywhere, but in Moscow. That’s why they try to keep the maximum distance from all the post-Soviet republics - otherwise (God forbid) they will sit on your neck again,” Bondarenko sums up.
Turkish flags may replace pro-Russian sympathies of Gagauz people – Moscow political scientist