General elections will take place in Moldova's autonomous region of Gagauzia on 15 November 2026. They will be held to elect the region's Governor () and the members of Gagauzia's local parliament, the People's Assembly of Gagauzia.
History On 1 September 2026, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) of Moldova scheduled general elections for 15 November in the autonomous region of Gagauzia to elect both the region's Governor () and the members of the People's Assembly of Gagauzia, the region's local parliament. The move brought to an end a legislative deadlock in the region following the conviction of the previous governor, Evghenia Guțul, who received a seven-year sentence over illegal financing related to the outlawed Șor Party.
On 21 September, Grigorii Uzun, a member of the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM), announced that he would not run in the election for the post of governor. This was despite him having been considered the PSRM's likeliest candidate, with Uzun being who ran in the 2023 gubernatorial election in the second round against Guțul. His announcement was due to the fact that he did not speak Romanian ("Moldovan", as he called it) at the time, as new provisions had been adopted in the electoral code in August requiring candidates for the post to speak both Gagauz and Romanian. Subsequently, on 24 September, the PSRM announced it would back , who submitted his registration documents to run as a candidate for governorship on the same day. Gagauz had been a member of Gagauzia's People's Assembly between 2012 and 2014 and had held three consecutive mandates as member of the Parliament of Moldova since 2014.
Analysis On 10 September, Igor Grosu, the President of the Parliament of Moldova, asserted that the Gagauz general election should take place in a fair and transparent manner and that the authorities would not tolerate attempts to bribe voters or buy their votes or other maneuvers to influence the results. He also stated that influence methods, which he attributed to Russia and to criminal groups, could be used during the election period, including attempts to corrupt, manipulate and discourage participation. As the pan-European think tank European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) stated, Russia had spent four million euros to buy 27,000 votes in the previous 2023 gubernatiorial election in Gagauzia, helping secure the victory of Guțul, who was an affiliate of Moldovan pro-Russian fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor.
The Centre for Strategic Communication and Countering Disinformation (StratCom), an administrative body of the Moldovan state, analysed potential risks and vulnerabilities within the regional information space in the context of the general election in Gagauzia, highlighting the risk of attempts to exploit political and identitarian tensions and delegitimise the electoral process, as well as the potential hazard of a coordinated amplification of manipulative narratives via digital means. The centre evaluated these potential risks in the context of hypothetical information manipulation and foreign interference activities. StratCom highlighted the increasingly frequent use of tactics such as the creation of "civic platforms" with political agendas, the fostering of suspicions regarding the electoral process to pave the way for its subsequent contestation, collective victimisation, the stoking of fear through narratives about war and NATO accession and the use of domestic and international election observers as a tool for manipulation.
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