Recent elections across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus—in Moldova, the Czech Republic, and Georgia—reveal deepening tensions between Western-backed elites and nationalist, often anti-Western movements challenging EU and US influence in the region.
What is rather interesting is the rhetoric surrounding each of these election processes. In Moldova, western governments and media have lauded the “convincing win” of the incumbent President, Maia Sandu’s PAS party, which “won” 50.16% of the vote, with, contrary to the EU narrative, a severely reduced majority in Parliament.
Needless to say, Sandu and her EU backers blamed the party’s relatively poor performance on “Russian interference,” conveniently ignoring the massive expenditure of state resources and EU influence intended to ensure her party remained in power. It should be noted that the “pro-Russian” opposition block won 49.84%, so “convincing win” is a bit of a stretch.
On the other hand, the results in the Czech Republic and Georgia delivered quite different results from those desired by the EU and US, with former Prime Minister Andrej Babis set to return to power in the country. Babis, a long-time critic of military support for Ukraine, is set to join Hungary and Slovakia in refusing to allow the supply of military aid to Ukraine using EU funds, as well as by dismantling the current Czech initiative to provide artillery shells.
Needless to say, Babis has been widely smeared as a “populist,” “Trumpist,” “pro-Russian,” etc. Having won 37% of the vote against the 23% of his pro-Western rivals in the pro-Western coalition of the current prime minister, Petr Fiala, Mr. Babis is expected to be called upon to begin negotiations with the other minor parties amongst whom the remainder of the vote was split in order to form a coalition government.
Finally, in Georgia, the municipal elections delivered a resounding victory to the ruling Georgian Dream party, with Georgian Dream sweeping the board, winning in every municipal race, receiving just over 70% of the vote in a clear rejection of the pro-Western opposition by Georgian voters. Needless to say, before the election even took place, Western embassies, particularly the EU Mission to Georgia, were decrying the process, claiming Russian “interference” and encouraging street protests.
It is interesting to compare the EU and other Western claims of “election interference” by Russia in Moldova and Georgia with the facts of each case.
In Moldova, the election was clearly interfered with, but not by Russia. As with the recent presidential elections, Sandu’s PAS party actually lost the election INSIDE Moldova but was saved by the diaspora vote, which itself was rigged strongly in her favour. Again, there was a massive disparity in the number of polling stations for the diaspora.
The countries with the most polling stations were Italy (75), Germany (36), France (26), the United Kingdom (24), Romania (23), the United States (22), Spain (15) and Ireland (12), with only two being opened in Russia. It should be noted that there are an estimated 400,000 Moldovans in Russia, while Italy has 100,000, something hardly reflected by the number of polling stations in each.
In addition, Moldovan citizens in the separatist region of Transnistria were also disenfranchised, with polling stations shut by Moldovan officials, moved across the river, and the bridges “shut for maintenance” or by “mining threats,” severely limiting the ability of voters to reach them. The bridges were only opened 20 minutes before the polling stations closed. The same story is true for the Gaugaz autonomous region, where the population has seen its political leadership targeted by politicised arrests and sham court proceedings. In this case, however, Sandu’s repressions had the opposite result, with Gaugaz voters giving only 3.19% to Sandu’s PAS and 82.35% to the Patriotic Bloc.
Very “free and fair”
In Georgia, where most Western governments still refuse to recognize the results of the 2024 parliamentary elections, the EU, through its puppet NGOs and media, has even been going so far as to defend the throwing of Molotov cocktails as “peaceful protests.” The hypocrisy of the EU position regarding the Georgian police handling of violent protests, contrasted with the extreme violence meted out by, for example, French, German, and British police against actual peaceful demonstrators, where incredible brutality has become the norm.
As with the previous anti-government protests in Georgia, in stark contrast to their European counterparts, Georgian police do not use force unless the opposition protesters use violence first.
Furthermore, the violence used by the protesters appears to have the full support of European officials, including the EU ambassador to Georgia, Paweł Herczyński, with the Georgian prime minister directly accusing the EU ambassador, saying:
“You know that specific people from abroad have even expressed direct support for all this, for the announced attempt to overthrow the constitutional order,” Kobakhidze said. “In this context, the European Union ambassador to Georgia bears special responsibility. He should come out, distance himself, and strictly condemn everything that is happening on the streets of Tbilisi.”
Needless to say, the EU has remained silent.
What is obvious is that despite all the money poured into Georgia through NGOs, the EU attempt to destabilize Georgia has failed, with the EU doing little more than offending the majority of the population of this socially conservative Orthodox Christian country. The same thing can be seen in Moldova, where the pro-EU candidate was only able to win through blatant vote rigging and exclusionary actions that disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters.
Needless to say, the hypocrisy of Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, was on full display as she posted on X:
My thoughts are with the people of Georgia, who stand for freedom and their European future.
Democracy cannot be silenced. Moldova is by your side.
Which, given her arrest of opposition politicians, banning of rival parties, and suppression of voters, is chutzpa indeed.
More ominous is the revelation by the Georgian government that the State Security Service had intercepted a large number of weapons and explosives that had been purchased on the orders of the Georgian Legion, the mercenary unit fighting on the Banderist side in the ongoing fighting in the eastern part of Ukraine. The first deputy chief of Georgia’s State Security Service, Lasha Magradze said:
“On the basis of intel information, the State Security Service found a large quantity of firearms, munitions, explosives, and detonators. According to investigators, Georgian citizen B. Ch., acting on orders from a Georgian representative of an armed unit operating in Ukraine, purchased a great quantity of firearms, which is proved by a lot of evidence. According to intel information, acts of sabotage with the use of the above-mentioned weapons were supposed to be staged along with massive violence and the attempted seizure of the presidential residence in Tbilisi on October 4,” he said, adding that security officers “neutralized a number of individuals who presumably were to bring munitions and explosives to downtown Tbilisi.”
Given that the Georgian Legion is tightly bound to the Ukrainian intelligence service, which is controlled by Western intelligence agencies, particularly British MI6, the American CIA, and the French DSGE, it is almost certain that this attempted armed coup was planned in the West.
Luckily for the people of Georgia, it has failed, at least so far.
With the rapidly rising risk of war with Iran, not to mention the US and European desire to spread fires along Russia’s borders in the hope of stretching Russian resources thin, unfortunately I doubt this will be the last attempt, however.
What is certain is that the EU and US have a very strange definition of “free and fair” elections, in that if the Western-supported candidate wins, they are “free and fair,” but if, God forbid, Joe Public elects someone the globalists in Washington and Brussels can’t accept, they are “unfair” or “rigged” by “Russian interference.”
As Europe fractures over the proxy war in Ukraine and the rise of nationalist governments, understanding the manipulation of “democracy talk” is critical. These elections are not just local contests; they are proxy battles in a much larger fight over who controls the narrative of legitimacy in the 21st century.
Jeffrey K. Silverman is a freelance journalist and international development specialist, BSc, MSc, based for 30 years in Georgia and the former Soviet Union
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