The meeting of the EU-Moldova Parliamentary Cooperation Committee of October 8, 2008 ended with the declaration of Kalman Miszei, the EU Special Representative for Moldova, who announced about Brussels' intention to launch the mandate for negotiations to establish an updated legal framework for the relations between the European Coalition and the RM. In fact, European officials seemed to realize that this step could favour the communist government at the future parliamentary elections. However, the advantages of a possible new RM-EU agreement on the European neighbourhood policy seemed to dominate with the decision-makers from Brussels.

The problem of citizenships offered by foreign countries to the Moldovan population was the first matter that motivated the decision of European officials to discuss the possibility of starting negotiations on the new Agreement. By this document, which could be signed at most after the 2009 elections, the EU wants to begin simplifying the visa regime for the RM. According to the European plans, such facilities would make the Moldovan passport more attractive in the situation when Russia keeps making citizenship granting procedures more and more flexible. In order to reduce the probability of a repeated Georgian scenario (since Russia justified its military intervention in Georgia by the necessity to defend the holders of Russian citizenship concentrated in the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia), the Europeans decided to proceed to operationalization and simplification of visa regime for all Eastern European countries (a provision included also in the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and proposed for implementation through and within the Eastern Partnership). This is why any claim in this sense on the part of Chisinau government could not be treated as an exclusive success of the Moldovan diplomacy. In any case, this could turn into a potential hidden "battlefield" between the EU and Russia for the leadership on the foreign-oriented labour market of RM.

The Transnistrian Conflict also had an essential impact on the Brussels's decision to consider the possibility of accelerating negotiations on the EU-RM agreement, even if the recent report of the EU-Moldova Parliamentary Cooperation Committee had identified certain problems in the field of economy and justice, as well as corruption combating and human trafficking prevention. Previously, representative offices of European states in Chisinau, along with European officials, had pointed out irregularities, including in the field of democracy and human rights, etc., conditioning intensification of EU-RM relations by achieving certain progress in the affected fields. In this situation, the necessity of negotiating the new agreement could be part of the European strategy to keep RM in its influence zone (more likely from the political point of view), blocking Russia's attempts to influence the Transnistrian conflict settlement and to impose the "2+1" format (instead of "5+2"). The principle of competitiveness inserted in the EU policy towards its neighbours has been abandoned for the moment in order to balance the incoherent vector of Moldovan foreign policy, which still has the tendency to surrender to the will of Moscow (continuing participation in making the CIS activity more efficient; premeditated re-establishment of dependency from the Russian market by linking Moldovan wine producers to Russian consumers; semi-official discussions regarding the Transnistrian conflict; open neglect of the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development - GUAM, etc.). Also, Brussels' attitude may be a result of anxiety related to possible foreign re-orientation of the RM in the context of influencing the preferences of the electorate by Russia (through prices for energy, mobilization of the Russian-speaking electorate, etc.).

The parliamentary elections, better say the voting results, raise suspicions in European officials. The decline of the current ruling party, together with strengthening of the opposition, creates uncertainty regarding the future viability of governance (coherence and consistency of Moldova's foreign affairs). The uniform nature of the opposition's political formations, in correlation with reduced optimism with regard to obtaining the majority of votes by any of those parties, allows forecasting deficiencies in creation of a sustainable coalition in the new Parliament of the Republic of Moldova. These considerations have equally contributed to defining Brussels' position on the new PCA. In order not to compromise the negotiations and the signing of this agreement in the future, European officials have agreed to give "green light" to launching the mandate and initiate this process. However, EU representatives have divided the beginning of negotiations from a possible signing of the agreement both for technical reasons (the negotiations could extend beyond the initially established timeframe) and out of precautions against possible "cheating" of Chisinau in case of appropriately conducted democratic elections, but also respecting the guarantees by the Moldovan party in the Transnistrian settlement (these conditions have been also specified by Jean-Pierre Jouyet, the secretary of state for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, during his recent visit to Chisinau).

Within the period preceding the favourable decision on negotiations for the new RM-EU agreement, Moldovan officials expressed their intention "to hurry slowly to the EU", invoking the need to have clear prospects of the European cause for the RM, including signing of a document called the "Association Agreement" (views expressed by the Moldovan Foreign Minister, Andrei Stratan). Also, at the last meeting of the National Commission for European Integration, the head of state declared that a new legal framework with the EU could be obtained in case "Moldova accelerated the pace of reforms and there were records of a considerable progress in all the directions for the European modernization". Behind these apparently "responsible" allegations there are hidden realities disclosed at a recent meeting of the EU-Moldova Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, which have revealed a number of issues that the RM "delays" to solve (corruption, trafficking in human beings, reforms in economy and justice). Besides, lately there has been a constant increase in the overall number of cases of violation of human rights, freedom of expression and democracy (e.g. non-compliance with the current Law on freedom of assembly, press and harassment of opposition parties, etc.). Instead, the head of Moldovan Foreign Affairs has expressed his indignation over the fact that the EU would have not used all the possibilities to support the European aspirations of the RM (in an interview for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), making allusions to the assurances of Brussels with regard to Moldova's European future. All these show once again that Moldovan authorities continue to satisfy the European aspirations of the Moldovan population, hiding their failures in the process of European integration behind artificial "accusations" of Brussels.