Political polarisation and democratic backsliding: Moldova’s Paradox

Moldova has been prone to socio-political polarisation due to historical, ethno-linguistic, and geopolitical factors. However, portraying modern Moldova as being torn between the West and the East oversimplifies the case. In Moldova, socio-political polarisation is indeed on the rise, but for the most part it is moderate rather than extreme, and the major fault lines are kaleidoscopic, cross-cutting, and touch upon much more pragmatic issues, such as economy and corruption. We argue that, on the one hand, by raising the stakes for all political forces, socio-political polarisation induces democratic backsliding: most Moldovan leaders indeed empowered the executive, dismissed prosecutors, restricted independent media, and raised electoral barriers. However, and paradoxically so, in Moldova spikes in socio-political polarisation secure political pluralism and act as a safeguard against autocratisation. Defying conventional political polarisation theories, Moldovans do not seem ready to give up key democratic principles for the sake of the prevalence of one political force over the other. In order to support our claims, we use survey data, existing indexes of ideological and affective polarisation, authors’ calculations of geographic polarisation, as well as several expert interviews.