By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
December 17, 2024
On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.
She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the "vetting" was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not "western oriented" and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.
You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking "Western orientation".
Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was "won" by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was "won" by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.
In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.
There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia - the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that's the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.
As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.
In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.
Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU - won with a majority of 10,555 - and for President Sandu - majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.
It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.
This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.
Calin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.
In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.
Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.
The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the World nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from "Western security services" of Russian online campaigning for him.
Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.
Which is what an election is.