Feted by many fellow journalists and Western diplomats as a fearless scourge of corrupt oligarchs, Moldova’s most popular television host torched her soaring career and stellar image three years ago with a startling life choice.
She fell in love and had a child with one of her country’s most notorious and, according to prosecutors, most corrupt oligarchs.
Ostracized by many of her onetime friends and admirers, Natalia Morari, 40, has now caused yet more dismay by refashioning herself into a politician. She no longer works for the independent, award-winning television station she founded in 2006, and is running for president in an election on Sunday against the incumbent, Maia Sandu, the standard-bearer of a pro-European cause for which the journalist was for years a prominent champion.
Ms. Sandu, a former World Bank official, came to power four years ago to applause from Ms. Morari — and also the United States and Europe — on promises to root out corruption and malign Russian influence in Moldova.
Ms. Morari had encouraged Ms. Sandu to run for the presidency, and saw her for a time as Moldova’s best hope for a European future. Today, though, on the campaign trail, she echoes pro-Russian politicians by denouncing the president as “the top of a criminal pyramid” who must be ousted to ensure a secure and prosperous future.
“Life is complicated,” Ms. Morari said in an interview at her campaign headquarters in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, surrounded by stacks of election leaflets. “I understand that it’s easier in a black-and-white world to talk about that corrupted guy and the discredited journalist.”
But, she added, “sometimes it happens that those who are considered bad are not so bad,” a reference to her child’s father, Veaceslav Platon, a tycoon who lives in self-exile in London, far from a slew of what he says are politically motivated corruption cases against him in Moldova.
“And those who are considered good are not so good,” she added, referring to Ms. Sandu, whose promises to get Moldova into the European Union, according to Ms. Morari, have done nothing to improve people’s livelihoods or slow an exodus abroad of young people who see no future at home.
“It’s all just Euro-imitation,” she said.
As a television journalist, Ms. Morari railed against the ransacking of Moldova’s banking system a decade ago by a cabal of tycoons that, according to a 2017 court ruling, included Mr. Platon, a former member of Parliament.
He was sentenced to 18 years for his role in the bank heist. After four years in jail, he was retried and acquitted in 2021, which is when Ms. Morari said they started their relationship.
“Nothing changed in me,” she said. “I always spoke against those who are in power.” She said her denunciations of Ms. Sandu are driven by the same motives that led to her past battles with corrupt tycoons led by Vladimir Plahotniuc, Moldova’s most powerful figure until he fled abroad in 2019.
Her liaison with Mr. Platon, a sometimes ally turned enemy of Mr. Plahotniuc, however, has damaged her reputation for speaking truth to power and made her the object of disbelieving tittle-tattle and a comedy gag by Andrei Bolocan, a Moldovan comedian, who has incorporated digs at Ms. Morari into his performances. His wife is a political ally of Ms. Sandu.
Opinion polls give Ms. Morari no chance of winning in the election on Sunday. But she has added a frisson of glamour to a crowded field of 11, mostly stale veteran politicians — and grist to a gossip mill churning with talk that she is a Kremlin agent, an unprincipled gold-digger and a stalking horse for the political and financial ambitions of Mr. Platon.
Speculation that she is serving Russia is based largely on the fact that her mother once worked as a secretary for the K.G.B. in the 1970s, when Moldova was still part of the Soviet Union, and that she studied in Moscow, where she got her first job in journalism at New Times, a liberal Russian magazine.
Yevgeniya Albats, who hired Ms. Morari while serving as the magazine’s chief editor in Moscow, said the Moldovan journalist, who was barred from entering Russia in 2007 after she wrote a series of articles about high-level corruption, was being unfairly smeared because “she fell in love with the wrong guy.”
“I have never — never — had any reasons to suspect her of a double play. I’ve trusted her 100 percent,” said Ms. Albats, the author of “The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia — Past, Present and Future” and an outspoken critic of President Vladimir V. Putin. She left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and is now a fellow at Harvard University.
Ms. Morari dismissed talk of her having links to the Kremlin as a symptom of a political disorder in many former Soviet republics, where genuine Russian meddling is often exploited in domestic politics to malign rivals as traitors beholden to Moscow.
“This is one of the easiest ways to discredit someone who is your opponent,” Ms. Morari said, saying she was clearly “not a Russian asset because all my friends in Russia are now either in prison, or dead, or expelled to different countries.”
The war in Ukraine, she added, has reinforced a tendency to see all opposition as the result of Russian dirty tricks and skewed the West’s view of events in Moldova.
“We are put in a package together with Ukraine — as a small country with a beautiful heart that just wants to be European,” Ms. Morari said. “All they ever talk about is Putin, Russian propaganda and hybrid war” and Ms. Sandu “as this brave small woman who is trying to get us a European future.”
Mariana Rata, a former friend who worked for years with Ms. Morari at TV8, the independent station where she made her name, said she agreed that the current government should face close scrutiny over its policies.
“It needs healthy criticism,” she said, “but this must be objective, not just Russian propaganda.” She added that she would never vote for Ms. Morari, whom she described as “without principles.”
By getting involved with Mr. Platon and initially saying her pregnancy was the result of IVF treatment, Ms. Rata said, Ms. Morari “betrayed us all.”
Ms. Morari said that it was a mistake to deceive people about the father of her child, but that she did it only to protect the boy, now 3.
Alina Radu, the editor of Ziarul de Garda, an investigative newspaper in Chisinau, said she did not care about Ms. Morari’s personal life, but was angry that the talk about her had “damaged all independent media” by encouraging a belief that all journalists have hidden agendas.
“If you are sleeping with a politician or an oligarch, you don’t write about politics,” she said. “You write about flowers or chickens.”
On the campaign trail, Ms. Morari cuts a charismatic, no-nonsense figure as she denounces Ms. Sandu as a failure.
At a meeting last week with doctors and nurses at the Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery in Chisinau, Ms. Morari assailed health and other public services as a “total disaster” because of government neglect and brushed aside a question about how she was financing her campaign, saying the money came from donations.
That is a sensitive issue as her critics believe she is getting money from Mr. Platon, something she strenuously denies. Close scrutiny of her accounts by the election commission has found no evidence of that.
Her election platform, however, includes several proposals that would clearly benefit Mr. Platon, including a proposed amnesty to give people an “opportunity to legalize their capital” and a pledge that “declared assets should not be used as evidence in criminal and administrative cases.”
Viorel Maxton, a surgeon who attended the hospital meeting, said that he was bothered by Ms. Morari’s relationship with Mr. Platon, but that he would still vote for her because he was so disenchanted with Ms. Sandu’s governing party, of which he used to be a member, for failing to realize the country’s potential. “I was a big supporter,” he said. “But that was a mistake.”
The post ‘Life Is Complicated’: How a Scourge of Oligarchs Fell in Love With One appeared first on New York Times.
