Maia Sandu
Maia Sandu has been president of Moldova since December 2020, the Harvard-trained economist and former World Bank adviser who beat the pro-Russian incumbent Dodon in the run-off of November 2020 by fifteen points on the diaspora's votes. Her party then won an absolute majority in the parliamentary election of July 2021. She has spent the years since taking the poorest country in Europe westward against everything Moscow could do. There was the candidate status for the European Union granted in June 2022 four months after Russia invaded the neighbour whose refugees Moldova took in, the accession talks opened in June 2024, and the referendum of October 2024 on writing the European goal into the constitution that passed by fifty per cent and three-quarters of a per cent after a vote-buying operation the police said cost a hundred million dollars. There was her own re-election a fortnight later by ten points in the run-off, the gas crisis of the winter of 2022-23 when Gazprom cut the supply and the price rose sixfold, and the energy independence bought from Romania since. There was the fugitive oligarch Shor's party banned and his money traced through Russian banks, and the parliamentary election of September 2025 that her party won again with fifty per cent against a Russian campaign the whole of Europe watched. She was born in Risipeni in 1972, studied management in Chișinău and public administration at Harvard's Kennedy School, worked for the World Bank in Washington. She was education minister from 2012 to 2015, when she closed schools and made the examinations honest and was hated for both. She founded the Party of Action and Solidarity in 2016 out of the protests over the theft of a billion dollars from three banks, an eighth of the country's output, in 2014. She was prime minister for five months in 2019 in a coalition with Dodon's socialists that removed the oligarch Plahotniuc, who had owned the state, and that Dodon then brought down. The presidency is weak on paper and she has made it the country's voice, unmarried, unsmiling, incorruptible by general agreement, and unloved by the half of the country that watches Russian television. Transnistria remains where it was, with fifteen hundred Russian soldiers and the ammunition dump at Cobasna. The accession she has promised for 2030 depends on the war next door ending.
- Lived: 1972 CE – ?
- Nationality: Moldovan
- Roles: president, economist, politician
