Moldovans repeating national elections on Wednesday face a stark choice: vote for the ruling Communist Party and receive loans from their Chinese and Russian backers worth well over a third of national income, or put their faith in the West.
The outcome of the vote is too close to call, according to opinion polls and political analysts, though few expect a repeat of the riots and brutal police crackdown that followed April's turbulent elections that were tainted by fraud allegations.
Those elections and Wednesday's vote are having an impact well beyond the borders of this small ex-Soviet nation of four million, stoking a fierce geopolitical competition for its loyalties.
Vladimir Voronin, Moldova's outgoing president and likely speaker of the next parliament, turned sharply east after April's events, when anticommunist protesters stormed his office and the parliament building. He accused neighboring Romania of provoking the riots in an attempted a coup d'état and angrily rejected European Union criticism of his handling of the election aftermath, in which hundreds of opposition supporters were jailed, and two people died.
Mr. Voronin, a former baker and Soviet-era interior minister, traveling to Moscow in June, got a warm welcome and a pledge of $500 million in loans for infrastructure projects in Moldova. It wasn't revealed what conditions were attached to the loan, and it isn't clear whether the offer would remain if the communists were to lose their grip on power.
That presents Moldovans with the prospect that voting against the communists could mean relying instead on the West, specifically the International Monetary Fund, to help lift up the country's economy.
On Monday, Mr. Voronin denied accusations that the money came with a political price attached, in an interview with Russian news agency Interfax. He said Moscow had made no conditions, "unlike certain international organizations." He didn't specify which organizations he meant.
Last week, China also put its substantial resources behind Mr. Voronin, when China Overseas Engineering Group Co. signed a memorandum of understanding for $1 billion in loans for infrastructure projects.
The two pledges are equal to 37% of Moldova's $4 billion annual gross domestic product and dwarf the amount of money on offer from Western institutions such as the IMF.
The EU hasn't tried to match the Russian and Chinese loan offers. But it has sent a string of officials to encourage clean elections, including last week's visit by Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, a big proponent of EU expansion into the region. An IMF official in Moldova said a mission was expected to arrive in Chisinau to negotiate a new loan facility as soon as a new government is formed.
China's interest in Moldova, a small and distant country with few natural resources, has baffled some diplomats in the capital, Chisinau. But they note that China has long had close relationship with Mr. Voronin's government, one of the last in Europe to call itself communist.
China Overseas Engineering Group didn't return calls for comment, and the Chinese Embassy in Chisinau couldn't be reached.
Russia's interest in Moldova, where its military supports a separatist enclave of Russian speakers, is evident. Moscow is determined to protect its zone of influence in the ex-Soviet bloc and saw April's violent postelection street protests as part of "Romania's Anschluss policy toward Moldova," said Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Studies in Moscow, in a reference to Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria. Most of Moldova is Romanian speaking and belonged to Romania before World War II, when it was seized by the Soviet army.
Mr. Markov said the two offers of loans don't indicate any rivalry between Moscow and Beijing. "I would not be surprised if Russia asked the Chinese to offer money, because both are interested to reverse this trend of Western-backed regime change in the region," he said. Since 2003, postelection street protests have led to changes of government in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
Political analysts in Moldova say the country's Western-leaning opposition parties are more likely to lose than gain votes in Wednesday's poll, which was forced not by the street protests but the failure of the Communists to gather the 61 votes needed in the 100-seat parliament to elect a new president.
Some Moldovans are skeptical the Russian and Chinese money will materialize, whoever wins the election.
