Indeed, the allegations of electoral fraud committed by the ruling party and the mass protests erupting in the capital city, Chisinau, do strikingly resemble the events in Tbilisi and Kiev. ![]() Recently, a Ukrainian friend asked me if Moldova, my home country, is on the brink of a color revolution like the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia or the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Similarly, the instigators of the current fracas seek mainly to move away from the ghosts of the communist past and integrate with Europe by rejoining Romania. Second, in contrast with many former Soviet states at the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldova's best intellectuals and liberal thinkers dreamed not of independence, but of reunification with Romania. First, when the Soviet Union annexed Moldova under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1940, Moldova was part of Romania, with which it shares a common language, culture, religion, and historical legacy. Moldova's history sets it apart from the other former Soviet countries in a couple of key respects. A color revolution against a democratically elected government would take Moldova off the right path, however sympathetic the concerns of the aspiring revolutionaries may be. Moldova cannot undergo a pro-democracy revolution because democracy is already deeply rooted in its national psyche: Ironically, it is the ruling Communist Party that helped consolidate democracy in the first place. The definitions-happy Western press has already dubbed the uprising the Twitter Revolution (a term first coined by Foreign Policy's Evgeny Morozov).Īs a student organizer of pro-democracy groups in Chisinau in the early 2000s, I fully supported the recent color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, but I had to answer no to my friend - and it's a good thing, too. As in the Georgian and Ukrainian cases, the crowd that gathered to protest in the center of Chisinau was mostly young people who want a complete rupture with the communist past and a sharp turn toward Western political systems and values. ![]()
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