Germany showed the world what reuniting a country costs. For Moldova, the road west through Brussels looks cheaper and considerably safer.
It’s often said that the Berlin Wall fell by accident, the result of Günter Schabowski, the unofficial spokesperson of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity party (SED), saying at a press conference early on the evening of November 9, 1989, that East German citizens could travel abroad without having to meet the previously onerous (and often impossible) requirements for such trips. Asked by a reporter when the new regulations would take effect, Schabowski replied, “As far as I know, they take effect immediately, without delay.” Tens of thousands of East Berliners took him at his word, immediately heading for crossing points into West Berlin. After a stand off between the crowds and border guards lacking instructions that lasted a couple of hours, East Germany’s government, realising that the cat was out of the bag and that it couldn’t shoot tens of thousands of people, opened its border. Less than a year later, East Germany ceased to be; absorbed, at great cost, into the German Federal Republic.
Since then, the trend has been the other way: countries breaking up (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia), territories declaring independence (Eritrea, East Timor, South Sudan). The Autonomous Region of Bougainville, in eastern Papua New Guinea, might be the next. Notably absent over the past 40 years have been countries following the German model and coming together.
Currently, the most spoken about candidates for a reversal of the trend are Romania (a NATO and European Union member) and the Republic of Moldova, which declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and much of which was, before the Soviet occupation, once part of Romania. The two are already close. The vast majority of Moldovans speak Romanian, and many have Romanian passports. Nicușor Dan, Romania’s president, and Maia Sandu, his Moldovan counterpart, get along well. A Romanian economist and former politician, Anca Dragu, is the head of Moldova’s national bank. A Romanian MP, Claudiu Năsui, was recently named as Moldova’s Minister of Economic Development and Digitalisation.
The idea of unification has cropped up from time to time ever since Moldova became independent, usually touted by Romanian nationalists but few others. Recently, the idea appears to have gone a little more mainstream. Sandu, who could never be accused of being a Romanian nationalist, said so herself in January on The Rest is Politics, a British podcast, declaring that she would vote for union with Romania in a referendum on the matter. Her officials later pointed out that such things were purely theoretical, given that no referendum is actually scheduled, and that there is no majority for one: a Public Opinion Barometer poll in September 2025 found only 33.4 per cent of Moldovans for union and 45.7 per cent against.Dan, who became Romanian president in May 2025, likewise favours union in principle but has insisted that the choice is for Moldovans to make. Romanians would also have a say, with any unification only likely to take place in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote on both sides of the river Prut, and although it is hard to gauge the mood in Romania as there are few reliable polls on the issue, there’s no guarantee they would favour absorbing their smaller neighbour.
The sheer cost of doing so would be the major stumbling block, and the hardest sell. Helmut Kohl promised West Germans in 1990 that reunification would need no new taxes, then reneged on his promise within a year; the Solidaritätszuschlag, a surcharge on income tax, was introduced in 1991. By 2015 transfers from west to east had been put at around two trillion euros. Karl-Heinz Paqué, an economist and former finance minister of Saxony-Anhalt, warned the regional gaps would endure. They have, with eastern output per head still running near two-thirds of the western level. At the weekend, Saxony-Anhalt voted for a far-right party in huge numbers in regional elections.
Marcel Boloș, then Romania’s finance minister, said in March 2025 that his country had drawn more than 100 billion euros from the EU since joining in 2007, pointing out that Romania itself is still catching up, its income per head about 78 per cent of the EU average in 2024, well up from 26 per cent in 2000 but with a long way still to go (especially in poorer regions outside the prosperous capital). Moldova sits well below even that, being the poorest country in Europe, near 29 per cent of the EU average and roughly two-fifths of Romania’s income per head. The irony is that while a reunited Romania would need to bridge that gap with its own budget, a Moldova that is an EU candidate can draw on Brussels’ money instead, through a Growth Plan worth 1.9 billion euros for 2025 to 2027. The 100 billion euros that reached Romania came from the club Moldova is still queuing to join, not from a benevolent neighbour. Full incorporation into Romania would require sacrifices many Romanians might not be willing to pay. Would senior citizens on one side of the Prut be happy with lower monthly pensions in order to enable increases for those on the opposite bank?
Squaring the circle
Then there are Moldova’s troublesome regions to contend with. Transnistria, a small strip of land in the east of Moldova is, on paper at least, Moldovan. Never part of Romania (it was bolted on to Moldova by the Soviet Union), the territory is a Russian-backed statelet that not even Moscow recognises as independent, with its own president in Vadim Krasnoselsky and a flag that still proudly carries the Soviet hammer and sickle. Some 1,500 Russian soldiers still guard a Soviet-era arms dump at Cobasna. Any union of Romania and Moldova that does not resolve the issue would deposit a Russian garrison inside NATO.
Gagauzia is another potential trap, perhaps even more so given that its status is written into law. When Moldova granted the region (populated mainly by a Turkic but Orthodox Christian population) autonomy in December 1994, a clause was included that would allow the region (whose territory, to complicate matters further, is not contiguous) a referendum on independence should Moldova ever unite with Romania. Like Transnistria, the region leans heavily on Moscow and in a 2014 referendum all but a small number of its 135,000 people backed Russia’s customs union and, if Chișinău joined Romania, secession. The former leader of the region, Evghenia Guțul (jailed for seven years in 2025 for channelling Russian cash to a banned political party) told Vladimir Putin in 2024 that unification would force Gagauzia to break away and seek Moscow’s protection. The clause she would invoke to do so was written in Chișinău. Even if Gagauzia chose to stay and become part of Romania, it would at the very least want to preserve its autonomy. Given that autonomy is a dirty word in Bucharest (Romania’s Hungarian regions have been calling for autonomy for decades), squaring that particular circle would be a headache.
For now, despite Sandu’s perceived enthusiasm for unification, it is a headache that will likely be avoided. Vasile Tofan, a Harvard-trained investor, became Moldova’s prime minister in July on a promise to push the country’s EU bid forward and with no mention of unification with Romania. EU membership may not be likely before 2030 at the very earliest (2035 is a more likely target), but the slower route offers a clear path that contains obstacles no larger than the European Commission’s (albeit tough) negotiating chapters. Unification with Romania is a path littered with mines.
Photo: Dreamstime.