By Andreas Rinke
CHISINAU (Reuters) -The French, German and Polish leaders promised support and the prospect of joining the European Union on an Independence Day visit to Moldova, where President Maia Sandu’s pro-European allies face a stiff challenge in an election next month.
Standing alongside Sandu in her Soviet-era office building on Wednesday, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Donald Tusk all praised Moldova’s resilience in the face of what Chisinau and Western allies say is a campaign of meddling from Moscow.
A majority Romanian-speaking country of 2.5 million between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova has seen power alternate between pro-Western and pro-Russian political groups for decades. Wednesday marks the date of its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Russia has troops stationed in a largely Russian-speaking region that broke away from Chisinau’s control in a brief war in the early 1990s.
Moldova applied to join the European Union at the same time as Ukraine applied, days after Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Moldovans voted narrowly in favour of pursuing EU integration in a referendum last year. But Sandu’s anti-EU opponents are mounting a strong challenge ahead of the Sept. 28 parliamentary vote.
“Independence is not guaranteed: it depends on the choices we make,” Sandu told the same news conference, warning of risks from “illegal foreign financing, disinformation, cyber-attacks, paid protests”.
Germany would do everything possible to get Moldova in a position to open the first chapter of EU accession negotiations in the autumn, Merz said.
“We will send experts to support reforms,” he added. “German and European money is helping secure energy supplies and boosting small and medium companies.”
Polls suggest a hard-fought race between Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity and the pro-Russian bloc of Communist and Socialist parties.
Once heavily dependent on Russia for energy and export markets, Moldova has reoriented its economy towards Romania and the EU since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Kremlin propaganda says the Europeans want to prolong the war and that the European Union oppresses people,” said Macron. “These are lies.”
Tusk echoed that sentiment, saying there was “no safe EU, no safe Poland, no safe France or Germany without an independent and safe Moldova.”
(Additional reporting by Michel Rose in ParisWriting by Thomas EscrittEditing by Kirsti Knolle and Peter Graff)
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