No matter who wins Sunday’s first round of the Romanian presidential election, it is a crisis for the country, for the European Union and for the relations of both with the United States.
This is the second attempt to hold the election. The regularly scheduled one was annulled last December amid accusations of candidate and government corruption. Cǎlin Georgescu, a Romanian nationalist, populist admirer of Donald Trump, mystical Christian and opponent of the Ukraine war, came seemingly out of nowhere to win the first round. He took 23% of the vote on the strength of a charismatic TikTok campaign, advancing to the second round against the centrist Elena Lasconi. For the first time since Communism, the country’s invincible-looking political establishment seemed to have been shut out of the presidency.
That’s not so odd: Romania today is (by European standards) poor, unequal, corrupt and war-weary. Its population peaked in the last years of communism at almost 25 million. Today, through a combination of emigration and lost mojo, it is just 19. Sharing a longer border with Ukraine than either Poland or Hungary, it has become a hub for the Nato war effort. And for Ukrainian refugees, 180,000 of whom can claim temporary protections. These, of course, include housing, employment and social programmes for which natives aren’t eligible.
Like all members of the EU, Romania is prone to bitter clashes between Europhiles and so-called “sovereigntists”. The EU confers the prestigious status of being “Western”, along with membership in profitable trading networks. Big majorities of Romanians still back it. But the 1992 Maastricht treaty, which commits all member-states to an “ever closer union”, turned the EU into a machine for grinding up systems of national self-rule, whether newly regained (as in the case of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union) or ancient and hallowed (as in the case of the pre-Brexit United Kingdom). Sovereigntists tend to thrive where the responsibility for solving desperately important problems — like mass immigration — is taken out of national hands, and those problems go unsolved.
Romania has followed a different path. The decades-long dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu was particularly brutal, and the violent exit of Romania from communism unique. Ceaușescu was executed alongside his wife on Christmas Day 1989. Romanian sovereigntists have found it hard to rally citizens to the cause of winning back powers for their own democracy, the way the Kaczyński brothers’ Law and Justice party (PiS) managed to do in Poland until 2023, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Fidesz and Robert Fico’s Slovakian Smer continue to do today.
That has now changed. Georgescu is in some ways a thrilling political novelty: an accomplished civil servant and diplomat, a scientist of distinction, and a would-be policymaker of some sophistication. (He has called for Romania to be more “Hamiltonian”, referring to the first American treasury secretary’s aggressive, nation-based industrial policy. US supporters of Donald Trump’s trade policies often sound similar notes.) Georgescu is also religious in a way that swept many of his Orthodox co-religionists off their feet, promising to “trust in God with His power of love”. Romania is a society of relatively high church attendance (about a quarter) and trust in religious hierarchies. It is also a place where fascist movements of the Twenties and Thirties were tightly linked to Orthodoxy, and to mysticism too. Georgescu can come off as weird, conspiratorial and over-indulgent of his country’s fascist past. Covid, in his view, was a “plan-demic”.
How could such a candidate score as high as Georgescu did? The Constitutional Court was eager to find out. It called for a recount, which found no irregularities. On 6 December, though, with second-round voting already underway, the court cited material declassified by the country’s Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT) to annul the elections on the grounds of national security, not of election irregularity.
The “declassified” material actually consisted of assertions, not previously classified proofs. But the relevant authorities all winked at this deficiency. Weeks later, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, who had summoned CSAT in the first place, explained that election meddling was actually “nearly impossible” to prove. The actions “are so broad and complex that only state actors can do that… And here it was Russia.” We know it’s Russia, he assured us, because “they hide perfectly in cyber space”. The lack of evidence of meddling became the main evidence of meddling.
The EU didn’t fuss much, either. Romania and Bulgaria were due to be admitted to the EU’s Schengen open-borders regime this New Year’s Day, barely a month later. No one alluded to Romanians’ cancellation of elections — even if it was a step more serious than those for which the commission had sought to bring the less-Europhilic Hungarians and Poles to their knees. “Fully in Schengen,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted to Romanians, “where you belong.”
The Biden administration — barely three weeks after its own electoral ouster by Trump’s forces — issued a statement casting the election result in a dubious light. The ambassador in Bucharest signalled that remedial intervention might be welcomed: “Our hope,” she wrote, “is that whatever decisions might or might not be taken… Romania’s strong track record as a reliable democratic partner in Europe and in the Euro-Atlantic community will not be tarnished.”
In this context, one can understand why J.D. Vance alluded to the incident in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Were Romania’s authorities acting to prevent Russia from gaining influence within the European Union? Or to prevent the Trump-era United States from gaining influence within the European Union? Such suspicions would not be out of line. If Vance shares them, then his intervention in Munich would seem not overboard but restrained.
And that makes the present situation potentially grave. Since last December, there have been two loudly asserted contrary accounts of what happened in Romania’s halted presidential election: either Georgescu won the first round with the votes of actual Romanians or someone faked up such a result through the clever deployment of TikTok. Everything we have learned since December favours the first, more straightforward explanation. Early in the year, Georgescu announced he would run in the do-over election, and his polling numbers shot up even higher than they had been last year. He was beginning to flirt with an absolute majority.
In February, Georgescu was arrested on charges involving “incitement to actions against the constitutional order”. The Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu, still serving as prime minister after his third-place finish in the presidential election, had said authorities would show “extremely strong evidence” for a prosecution.
It has not been forthcoming. BBC 4’s Crossing Continents sympathetically interviewed a Romanian media researcher credited as an “important source of information for the authorities” on the Georgescu matter, and asked whether his “massive uptick” in social media traffic had come from Romania or abroad. “I think my subjective opinion is both”, she said. “It’s externally with internal help, but this is how the Kremlin playbook of propaganda works.” Her complaint about Georgescu’s campaign offers no proof of corruption or criminality beyond the “subjective”. She only finds Georgescu’s view of Romania’s history repugnant and inadmissible: “That’s a very, if I am allowed to say, MAGA narrative about the history of Romania, glorifying the past of Romania that was never in a state of glory, glorifying the sovereignty of Romania in a historical period, but we actually didn’t have it, glorifying history that for us just means torture, pain.” This is not necessarily wrong as a historical assessment. But it is wrong as a democratic modus operandi. Under present circumstances, it is unlikely to strike Georgescu’s followers as reasonable grounds for nullifying a presidential election.
The assertion that Georgescu’s rise somehow defies reality does not account for TikTok reality. In January, a month before Germany’s federal elections, the Left Party there was in low single digits and given little chance by most pundits of getting any seats at all in the Bundestag. But when Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic candidate for chancellor, cooperated on an anti-immigration bill with the hardline Alternative for Germany, the Left’s leader Heidi Reichinnek gave a barn-burning, reel-ready parliamentary speech. Watch it on TikTok. She warned that another Nazi wave was on its way, that Merz was its henchman and only the Left could stop it. It was a scenario implausible enough that, in Romania these days, it might count as “disinformation”. But in a mostly free country, Reichinnek had every right to say it. She obviously believed it. Her talk doubled the party’s membership in a matter of days and on election day the Left had 64 Bundestag members.
Whether Romania’s secret police has evidence against Georgescu is something unknowable except to them. That’s the problem.
“Whether Romania’s secret police has evidence against Georgescu is something unknowable except to them.”
But we do know enough about the state of Romanian voters’ minds to pass judgement on what happened with its democracy last autumn. Obviously there was a genuine wave of rebellion behind Georgescu. We can tell from the behaviour of voters and candidates in the months since. In Georgescu’s absence, George Simion, a member of the Right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians, is well ahead of the pack in the latest polls, at around 30%. (Georgescu once belonged to the AUR but was ousted for speaking sympathetically of the Legionaries, an interwar fascist group.)
Simion has risen primarily by consolidating his party’s base. More conventionally conservative than Georgescu, more sympathetic to the war in Ukraine, less a charismatic outsider, he has nonetheless tried to drape himself in Georgescu’s cause, showing up to Easter services with him. Simion even suggested he might make Georgescu his prime minister if elected. And he attended the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington. Victor Ponta, a savvy former Social Democratic prime minister, considered an ideological chameleon — he, too, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. The centrist candidate Crin Antonescu, former leader of the Liberal party, is probably the last, best chance for the decades-old Romanian establishment to hang on. Yet one Romanian political scientist told the French newspaper Libération that nowadays, in some of his rhetorical flights, Antonescu “could pass for a member of [Marine Le Pen’s] National Rally”. Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan, another tough-talking member of the establishment, has been trying to squeeze out Lasconi. Antonescu is thought to have the better chance of beating Simion in the second round. Shaken by the persistence of a disruptive war and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the Romanian political landscape is changing.
Again, there is much that is unknowable for those who are far from the backrooms of Bucharest. But among the candidates who are actually running and are betting their careers on an accurate diagnosis of the Romanian mind, there is a working assumption that the votes Georgescu won last autumn reflected a genuine uprising, not a bot-generated simulacrum. If they are right, then it is possible that we really did see an election brazenly stolen in a vital European Union country. The consequences will extend beyond these coming elections.
