The Impact of Candidate Status in Georgia and Moldova
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a catalyst in transforming the EU’s enlargement agenda. What had long been treated as a slow-moving, technocratic process became a geopolitical instrument in response to armed aggression in the EU’s eastern neighborhood. On March 3, 2022, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine applied for membership. Since, their accession trajectories have diverged under distinct conditions. While Ukraine faces Russia’s war effort and the challenge of reconstruction, the other two countries are the target of Moscow’s hybrid pressure and have unresolved territorial conflicts involving occupation by Russian troops.
While Ukraine’s war circumstances are exceptional, Georgia and Moldova offer a case study to understand how in candidate countries the interaction of political choices, the ability of state institutions to implement reforms in line with the political leadership’s objectives, and the framing of EU incentives can accelerate or hinder reform momentum and progress toward membership. The different experiences of these two countries under the same EU accession framework and geopolitical pressure show whether and how candidate status can anchor domestic reform, offering lessons for other aspiring members navigating a challenging accession process and considerations for EU policymakers.
The Sources of Divergence
On June 23, 2022, the European Council granted candidate status to Moldova and asked Georgia to undertake further reforms before it could receive the same recognition. Georgia was eventually granted candidate status in December 2023. By early 2024, both countries were formally integrated into the accession framework and subject to EU conditionality, monitoring, and financial assistance. However, their domestic trajectories diverged sharply between 2022 and 2025, and their political dialogue with the EU took different paths.
Since 2022, under the leadership of President Maia Sandu and the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) government, Moldova accelerated justice reform, anti-corruption measures, and the restructuring of state institutions; completed the EU screening process; and advanced toward opening negotiating clusters. Meanwhile, Georgia, under the Georgian Dream government, suspended accession negotiations in November 2024 and entered a political crisis marked by democratic backsliding and sustained protests.
This divergence is striking given that both countries face acute Russian pressure. They have territories under Russian military occupation and have been targeted by Moscow’s hybrid tactics, including energy coercion, disinformation campaigns, illicit financing of political actors, electoral interference, and political destabilization.
Although Georgia and Moldova entered the EU accession framework under similar geopolitical pressure in 2022–2023, their domestic political environments were not identical. Moldova had a consolidated pro-EU parliamentary majority following the 2021 elections, giving Sandu and the PAS a clear reform mandate. Georgia, by contrast, was in the middle of deep political polarization, strained relations between Georgian Dream and the opposition and civil society, and growing tensions with the EU institutions over rule-of-law reforms.
This shaped how accession incentives were interpreted domestically, but the divergence did not originate in the sphere of domestic politics alone. The EU’s engagement with Georgia and Moldova also evolved in response to political signals from both governments. The trajectories that followed reflect how the two governments’ approaches to EU conditionality, dialogue, and incentives interacted with domestic political choices.
Political Leadership Commitment
In Moldova, Sandu and the PAS government treated EU accession as a state-building project. They publicly framed judicial vetting, anti-corruption reforms, and restructuring state institutions as necessary for strengthening the country’s sovereignty and credibility, rather than only as conditions imposed by Brussels. Despite resistance from entrenched elites and a political backlash, the government advanced reforms that constrained powerful actors. This enhanced its legitimacy and aligned its political incentives with EU integration.
The Georgian Dream government adopted a different political strategy. Rather than internalizing accession conditionality as a national objective, senior officials increasingly framed it as external pressure. By speaking of joining the EU on they “own terms”, they portrayed the membership conditions as negotiable rather than transformative. Meaningful reforms, particularly in the judiciary and anti-corruption sphere, risked limiting the government’s ability to act. As a result, their implementation became selective and politically contingent.
In short, in Moldova reform strengthened the authority of the political leadership, while in Georgia reform threatened it. The choices of the leaders in the two countries therefore shaped the credibility of the reform signals sent to Brussels.
Civil Society and State Capacity
The impact of the choices by the two countries’ political leadership was to a great extent shaped by the capacity of state institutions and civil society.
In Moldova, crucially, the government has tried to enable civil society rather than attempt to restrict it. Civil society organizations, investigative journalists, and election oversight bodies operated in relative alignment with reform-oriented state institutions. During the 2024 referendum to amend the constitution to include the goal of EU membership and in the subsequent presidential and parliamentary elections, civic actors—such as Promo-LEX (election monitoring), Ziarul de Garda (anti-corruption investigations), and the Institute for European Policies and Reforms (public debates)—worked alongside state institutions toward the same goals. They exposed disinformation, monitored illicit financing, and supported institutional transparency. This alignment between reform-oriented state institutions and civic actors reinforced political stability and the accession momentum.
Georgia’s civil society has long been one of the most vibrant in the region, but its watchdog role has increasingly conflicted with Georgian Dream’s strategy for consolidating its hold on power. The government has systematically tried to shrink civic space. Beginning in 2023 and intensifying in 2024, the parliament adopted legislation to tighten control over civil society organizations. In May 2024, it adopted a “foreign agents” law that requires those receiving more than 20% of their funding from outside the country to register as entities “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”. Enforcement of the law began in June 2025. Following the disputed October 2024 parliamentary elections, the authorities raised the penalties for taking part in protest activity, targeted civic leaders with investigations, and tightened restrictions on independent media. These measures reflected Georgian Dream’s broader effort to limit the influence of independent civic actors. As a result, the ability of civil society to promote accession-related reforms has been curtailed, compounding the effect of the limited willingness and capacity of state institutions under Georgian Dream’s control.
A key divergence between the two countries therefore is in how their political leaders structured the operating environment for civil society so that it could support the capacity of state institutions to implement accession reforms or to compensate for the shortcomings in this.
Responses to Russian Hybrid Pressure
The two countries have territories under Russian military occupation: Transnistria in Moldova, and Abkhazia and Samachablo (also known as the self-proclaimed independent region of South Ossetia) in Georgia. Russia has targeted both with energy coercion, disinformation campaigns, illicit networks financing political actors, and election interference. But, while they faced the same external hybrid pressure, their political leadership differed when it came to confronting or to accommodating it.
In Moldova, Sandu and the PAS government consistently framed Russian interference as a direct security threat and used it to justify deeper EU integration. The authorities publicly exposed disinformation campaigns, accelerated energy diversification away from Russian gas with support from Romania and the EU, and argued the hybrid attacks showed the need to reform state institutions. By clearly identifying Russia as the source of destabilization, the government reduced ambiguity in public debate and gained people’s trust. Russian pressure reinforced the case for integration with the EU.
The Georgian Dream government framed external pressure more ambiguously. While acknowledging Russia as a security threat, senior officials increasingly emphasized Western “interference” and sovereignty concerns. Rather than arguing that Moscow’s hybrid actions justified deeper EU integration, the government portrayed accession conditionality as external intrusion. This approach reflected Georgian Dream’s political incentives. Founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose business networks were built in Russia and who still has interests there, the party has practiced strategic ambiguity toward Moscow. At the same time, EU-driven reforms would have constrained the government and disrupted patronage networks. By blurring the external source of destabilization in the country, the political leadership weakened its ability to confront hybrid threats decisively. Russian pressure became embedded in Georgian Dream’s strategy of political consolidation rather than driving the country’s integration with the EU as in Moldova.
Domestic Framing of EU Conditionality
The EU’s engagement with the two countries did not unfold in isolation from their domestic politics. It adapted to political signals from their side and was reframed within each’s internal debate.
The visible reform commitment in Moldova encouraged key member states, particularly Germany and Romania, to invest political capital in supporting the country. High-level visits accelerated the EU’s macro-financial assistance and its adoption of the €1.9 billion Growth Plan in 2024. Steps in sectoral integration such as Moldova joining the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) in October 2025 and integrating the EU’s mobile-phone roaming area in January 2026 made the benefits of integration progress concrete for the public, reinforcing the perception that reforms produce immediate and practical gains. The political leadership framed these developments as partnership-based reinforcement of domestic reform efforts, and it presented EU conditionality as aligned with national interests.
The government of Georgia’s relations with the EU began deteriorating soon after the European Commission granted the country a candidacy perspective in 2022, conditional on the implementation of 12 reform priorities. For Georgian Dream, some of these—particularly in areas affecting judicial governance and institutional checks and balances—would have constrained the government and altered entrenched political networks, reducing its incentives for full implementation. As a result, reform promises did not lead to lasting institutional change, and trust between Tbilisi and Brussels weakened.
Tensions escalated further after the government suspended the accession negotiations in November 2024, prompting the EU to freeze the accession steps and to shift from reinforcement of reform to a more critical response, including restrictive measures. In January 2025, the EU suspended visa-free travel for holders of Georgian diplomatic passports, citing democratic backsliding and non-compliance with accession commitments. Although these measures were grounded in the accession rules, Georgian Dream portrayed them as politically motivated interference, reinforcing its sovereignty narratives and further politicizing the issue of EU conditionality in the country.
These two cases show that the impact of the EU’s accession conditionality operates to an important extent through domestic political interpretation. Where EU conditions were framed as central to sovereign state-building by the government, they incentivized and reinforced pro-reform actors. Where the government framed them as external imposition, they failed to do so and the EU’s leverage weakened (and its attempt at restrictive measures were fed into sovereigntist narratives).
The EU’s Differentiate Response
The EU’s differentiated engagement with Georgia and Moldova as candidates for membership has reflected differences in their reform credibility and alignment with the EU, as well as in member-state involvement.
Moldova benefited from structural factors. Romania with its geographic and cultural proximity presented a model of EU integration, while cross-border ties reinforced Moldova’s economic resilience and European identity. Bucharest has been a strong advocate for Chișinău in Brussels. Moldova’s leaders also built direct channels to EU policymakers, facilitated by Sandu’s Western education and World Bank experience, as well as by the professional background of officials like Nicu Popescu, who was foreign minister until 2024. Moldova had high-level backing in some member states by officials who saw it as a test case for the EU’s renewed enlargement policy, most notably from Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister until 2025. This made its success politically important for them.
Georgia did not benefit from similar structural factors or from connections and sustained political sponsorship within the EU. Growing tensions over judicial independence and institutional integrity, combined with the increasingly confrontational rhetoric from the Georgian Dream government, reduced trust between the two sides. President Salome Zourabichvili (2018–2024) once worked in the French diplomatic service and had strong networks in Europe, but she had few powers as head of state, limiting her ability to shape the direction of EU relations. As the country’s reform credibility weakened, the EU’s engagement shifted. In this context, Georgia did not generate comparable political support within key member states, limiting the potential for high-level advocacy or accelerated integration steps from the EU side.
Candidate–EU Interaction
The contrasting trajectories of Moldova and Georgia offer useful insights into how EU accession incentives can interact with domestic political conditions under geopolitical pressure. They illustrate how enlargement evolves through interaction: political choices in candidate countries shape EU responses, and EU responses in turn influence incentives there.
Candidate status alone does not anchor reforms in a country: it creates opportunity for them, but domestic actors determine whether they remain symbolic or superficial. Its effect is greatly influenced by whether the country’s leadership internalizes accession as a state-building objective. In Moldova, Sandu and the PAS government treated EU conditions as instruments to strengthen institutions and enhance their legitimacy, while in Georgia, the Georgian Dream government increasingly framed them as external pressure and viewed them as a political threat. This shows that EU leverage depends not only on formal accession benchmarks, but on political framing in the candidate countries. Where political leaders view conditionality as aligned with their governing strategy, accession can reinforce reform. Where they perceive it as constraining their power, it can generate resistance.
This underscores that enlargement policy does not operate in a political vacuum. Candidate status, accession conditionality, financial support, or criticism from Brussels are filtered through domestic power structures and political narratives in the accession country. The EU’s influence therefore depends not only on the design of its instruments, but on its ability to anticipate how they will be interpreted and instrumentalized domestically.
Policy Considerations for the EU
The Georgia–Moldova comparison suggests four considerations for the EU institutions and member states engaging with candidate countries that are under geopolitical pressure.
First, sustained engagement with civil society is particularly important in contexts where domestic political conditions mean the alignment of state institutions with the accession reform agenda is uncertain. Strengthening funding mechanisms for civil society—such as the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance and direct funds under the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument—and structured dialogue with independent media and watchdog organizations can help sustain reform-oriented constituencies even when relations with governments become strained. The narrowing of civic space in Georgia highlights the importance of preserving channels of support that are not mediated through the authorities.
Second, enlargement assessments would benefit from integrating political risk analysis more explicitly alongside technical benchmark evaluation. While the European Commission already evaluates rule-of-law reforms and progress in meeting accession benchmarks, the Georgia–Moldova divergence shows that domestic framing and political ownership in candidate countries influence the prospects of reform implementation. This does not imply replacing technical criteria but rather complementing them with closer monitoring of political narratives and institutional independence, particularly in pre-electoral periods.
Third, the sequencing of incentives influences how the EU’s engagement is perceived domestically. In Moldova, visible integration steps, such as joining SEPA and the roaming area as well as macro-financial assistance packages, reinforced pro-reform coalitions. In Georgia, the government instrumentalized the restrictive measures introduced by the EU in response to domestic developments. This suggests that enlargement policy would benefit from the EU calibrating its incentives, conditions, and restrictive measures in ways that minimize the risk of them being misrepresented in candidate countries while maintaining their credibility.
Fourth, ensuring the impact of candidate status requires clarity regarding progress and regression. Where reform momentum weakens, the EU institutions (including the European Commission, the European Council, and the European External Action Service) must signal consequences without disengaging from pro-reform actors. The Georgia–Moldova comparison illustrates that balancing conditionality with continued societal engagement is politically complex but central to enlargement’s credibility.
These considerations are particularly relevant for candidate countries navigating the accession process and for which external pressure, domestic polarization, and electoral volatility intersect. The divergence in the trajectories of Georgia and Moldova underscores that enlargement is shaped as much by domestic political interpretation in candidate countries as by EU institutional design.
The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.