President Dodon will leave in a week, no matter how much the deputy Shor will help him maintain control over the Government and the new parliamentary majority. Will Dodon retire to the household he built since he became president, will he go to his estates in Russia or will he end up in prison?

Many repeatedly accused Dodon of theft and treason during his four years in office. Considering that the court notices on Dodon’s name remain, imprisonment is the option for him.

In the nearly 30 years since Moldova’s independence, no president nor any other high-ranking official has been convicted and sent to prison, although there have been enough instances. The time has come to break the rule and stop threatening with jail only in electoral campaigns.

You hear from people “we are tired of Dodon, we want to get rid of him as soon as possible and to end the problem.” I wonder if Dodon is aware that, in the last four years, he has been a problem for Moldova. Now, he will be the one to face problems. Because of his recklessness and political infantilism, Dodon lost these elections. He lost not only his voters but his political allies too.

In a few days, we’ll get rid of Dodon. Maia Sandu will step into office on December 24, the day of the inauguration ceremony. Today, only the controversial deputy Shor remained Dodon’s ally because of the protection in the stolen $1 billion case. After December 24, even Shor may turn his back on Dodon. Moldovan politics is full of surprises.

We are again at the point where we have to start from the very beginning. 

Moldova has had five presidents since Independence: Mircea Snegur, Petru Lucinschi, Vladimir Voronin (two terms), Nicolae Timofti, and Igor Dodon. None of the five brought Moldova to a worse condition than Dodon, both in the internal and in the foreign affairs. Under the leadership of Dodon, Moldova’s so-called success story of the Eastern Partnership was reduced to international isolation and no relations with its neighbors. It turned into a poor and abandoned state, with one-third of the population gone around the world after being robbed, lied, betrayed, and humiliated. 

Dodon outdid his own recklessness by declaring that the Russian army, which attacked Moldova in 1992, stopped the war in the breakaway Transnistria region. He even addressed the alleged leader in the Transnistrian region as President of Transnistria, therefore recognizing Transnistria as a separate region.

With Dodon, “we have been hostages of a Stalinist-Putinist criminal regime. Moldova is not a state. Soviet gangs have ruled for 30 years” says a ZdG reader in a letter to our newsroom. 

Starting with December 24, Moldova’s and Dodon’s roads will separate. We’ll start a new path. Moldova needed a new leader, accepted by the citizens, by both the West and the East, and we have this leader now.

It will be more complicated to build up relations with the East. Dodon boasted that he would have re-established relations with Russia. In turn, he made them more complicated. Things must be taken from the beginning. 

With Europe it will be easier; they have already declared their support for Moldova, and there has always been greater openness from both the USA and Romania. 

Things are more complicated with Ukraine. Kyiv owes old debts to Chișinău on border issues and the rights of Romanian communities in northern Bukovina and southern Bessarabia. Relationships must be restored to the condition of good neighborliness.

Maia Sandu started her activity with the statement: “No more international isolation, we will promote an open foreign policy, in the interests of the country and its citizens. We want to build Europe at home – European institutions, European schools, European roads, European hospitals, European salaries.”

In three weeks, the elected president, Maia Sandu has had more foreign meetings than Dodon in four years. Moldova unblocked its relations with the EU and the USA. Relations with neighbors, Romania and Ukraine, were resumed, and relations with Russia were examined. President of Romania Klaus Iohannis will pay an official visit to Chișinău before the end of 2020, and in January Maia Sandu will make her first official visit to Kyiv.