Moldova and Macedonia, although differing in many respects, share several critical structural factors that have impeded development, in general, and engendered an environment in which legislatures have not evolved into robust institutional supports for democratic governance. These two cases show the difficulty of consolidating democratic politics in newly established nation states that lack democratic traditions and are stranded on the periphery of the European Union (EU). The collective impact of these factors has been sufficiently detrimental to legislative performance as to overwhelm the importance of institutional arrangements per se. Although Macedonia may now be moving in a more positive direction as a consequence of its 2017 “colorful revolution,” there is little evidence that either the Macedonian or the Moldovan legislature has had the ability to hold their executive branches in check.

What are the factors that underlie this outcome? First, neither country enjoyed a history of democratic self-governance on which it could fall back. Moldova had no modern history of independent national government. Its interwar experience of rule from Bucharest as part of Romania provided little useful guidance in developing sovereign democratic institutions. Incorporated into the USSR in 1940, Moldova was ruled by a series of Communist Party First Secretaries dispatched from Moscow. Similarly, Macedonia did not exist as a sovereign political entity in the modern era before its emergence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991.

Second, neither Macedonia nor Moldova experienced clear breaks with their Soviet-era politics. Rather, numerous former Soviet and Yugoslav political elites survived the regime transition to become the first generation of democratic leaders. In Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov—a reformist leader in the former Yugoslavia—retained his dominant role in Macedonia for a decade following independence. Elections held in 1992 were won by the former communists—renamed the Social Democratic Party of Macedonia (SDSM)—which then governed the country until 1998. In Moldova, a similar pattern of leadership continuity occurred. Mircea Snegur, last chairman of the Soviet-era Supreme Soviet, became the country’s first president, followed in 1997 by former Communist Party First Secretary Petru Lucinschi. The leadership of nearly all major Moldovan parties was composed of Soviet-era elites. Thus, in both cases, post-communist state institutions were populated by personnel socialized in the habits of executive authority and authoritarian political parties.

Third, both Moldova and Macedonia have been stalled on the margins of the EU. In Moldova’s case, the “frozen conflict” with Transnistria following its 1992 civil war and the continued presence of Russian peacekeepers in the region effectively blocked Moldova’s path to joining the EU. In Macedonia, a conflict with neighboring Greece over national identity caused a similar outcome. Politicians in Skopje and Chişinău, who recognize that there is no practical path to accession in the foreseeable future, are less subject to conditionality than their neighbors. Leadership groups in both countries have become adept at raising the possibility of alternative (i.e., Russian) political alignments as leverage against Western pressure.

Fourth, both Moldova and Macedonia have experienced levels of corruption that in recent years has risen to the level of “state capture” by networks of corrupt elites. In Moldova, corruption has been endemic since the 1990s but significantly worsened following removal of the Communist Party of the Republic of Moldova from power in 2009. Rather than representing the interests of the population, hypothetically pro-EU parties served the interests of powerful oligarchs who assumed control of broad swaths of the Moldovan economy. Whereas these top leaders overshadow Moldovan politics, a much broader network of clientelistic relationships and informal alliances permeates the entire top level of society, linking networks of interest across private and public sectors (Ciurea Reference Ciurea, Leitner and Meissner2017). Similarly, in Macedonia, three charges of systemic corruption and abuse of office date back to the 1990s, when the SDSM allegedly used its political hegemony to enrich its leaders and supporters. Following the transition to the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization–Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO–DPME) government in 2006, criticism focused on a growing network of corrupt relationships around party leader and Prime Minister Gruevski until his party’s removal from power in 2017 (Cvetkovska and Holcova Reference Cvetkovska and Holcova2014). According to the report of an EU expert group convened to investigate the country’s 2015 wiretapping scandal, government officials were complicit in corruption, extortion, nepotism, and cronyism (Recommendations of the Senior Experts’ Group 2015, 6).

Thus, Moldova and Macedonia have both been stalled on the margins of the EU, where conditionality has been sufficient to restrain them from descending into full-blown authoritarianism but insufficient to restrain corruption that rises to the level of state capture. Clientelism and high levels of corruption played a key role in undermining legislative autonomy. Legislative candidates are placed on electoral lists and removed at the whim of top party leaders. On entering the legislature, they are obligated to party leaders who effectively control the legislative agenda. Oversight is fatally undermined by the power of party leaders, the lack of independence among Members of Parliaments (Bertelsmann Stiftung Transformation Index 2016, 10). As an Expert-Grup report concluded in Moldova, “[p]ower mostly lies not with public institutions, but with obscure special interests which have undermined and abused these institutions” (Expert-Grup 2011).