Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, has said she would vote in favour of unification with Romania if such a question were put to a referendum, while acknowledging that public support inside Moldova is not there and arguing that European Union accession is the country’s more realistic strategic route.
Sandu made the remarks in an interview recorded for British podcasters Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Asked directly whether she supports unification with Romania, she replied that she would vote “for” in a referendum. In the same interview, she framed the issue in terms of regional security pressures and the difficulty, as she put it, for a small state to “exist as a democracy and a sovereign nation” in current conditions.
Sandu’s comments touch a longstanding fault line in Moldovan politics: whether the country’s identity and future should be anchored primarily in its separate statehood or in the idea of reunion with Romania. Much of present-day Moldova corresponds to Bessarabia, a territory that formed part of interwar Romania and was then annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, before Moldova emerged as an independent state after the USSR’s collapse. Romanian is the official language, and Romania has been Moldova’s main external supporter in trade, energy links and EU alignment.
In the interview, Sandu argued that the late Soviet period may have been a moment when a public vote on unification could have been feasible. She referred to the national revival movements and mass mobilisation of the late 1980s, saying that debates about reunification were active but that no referendum took place, so the level of support was never tested. She also said the opportunity was “missed” in the early 1990s, when the Soviet system was breaking apart and Moldova’s post-independence settlement was taking shape.
As president, however, Sandu drew a line between her personal preference in a hypothetical vote and the political arithmetic of the country she leads. She said she understood there was no majority in Moldova for unification with Romania, while there is majority support for joining the EU, and that her administration is working towards that objective. Public polling has generally shown more Moldovans opposed to unification than in favour. In a September 2024 iData survey reported by IPN, 35.7 per cent of respondents said they favoured union with Romania, 54.8 per cent opposed it, and 9.5 per cent were undecided or did not answer.
Sandu’s emphasis on EU accession aligns with Moldova’s formal trajectory. The EU granted Moldova candidate status in June 2022, decided in December 2023 to open accession negotiations, and formally opened those negotiations at an intergovernmental conference in June 2024. A domestic constitutional referendum linked to EU integration in 2024 produced an extremely narrow result: 50.35 per cent in favour and 49.65 per cent against, a margin of roughly 10,500 votes, according to a Swedish government-backed analysis of Moldova’s recent elections.
The reunification debate has also resonated in Romania. A September 2025 Avangarde poll found 47 per cent of Romanian respondents in favour of unification with Moldova, 46 per cent against, and 7 per cent undecided. Around the same time, the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) welcomed the entry of Moldova’s “Democracy at Home” party into parliament after the September 2025 elections and argued that Moldova could amend its constitution and pursue reunification with Romania.
Sandu’s remarks were delivered against a wider backdrop of contestation over Moldova’s direction, with repeated official accusations in Chișinău that Russia is attempting to influence Moldovan politics through disinformation, illicit financing and vote-buying schemes—claims Moscow denies. For Sandu, the interview message was that the state’s immediate policy choices are constrained: unification may be an answer some favour, but EU accession is the programme that currently commands a workable majority inside Moldova.
