Romania has shot into the news this past week with the announcement on 6 December by its Constitutional Court that it was annulling the Presidential Election which had taken place in late November and whose results it had, the previous day, declared valid. To explain this strange turn of events, I turn to 3 analysts -
Tom Gallagher – who has written 3 books about the country
Romania After Ceausescu: The Politics of Intolerance (1996),
Theft of a Nation: Romania Since Communism (2005),
Romania and the European Union: How the weak vanquished the strong (2013).
Vlad Mitev – a Bulgarian journalist with a strong interest in the country
Thomas Fazi – a German academic
Tom Gallagher sets the scene -
Mr. Tom Gallagher, in the 1990s, you wrote a book about nationhood and nationalism in
Romania. From the perspective of this phenomenon, and considering the significant
discussions today about the Neo-legionnaires and the Legionary movement in Romania,
how do you view Călin Georgescu’s qualification for the second round of the presidential
elections and the success of parties like AUR, SOS, and POT?
I don’t ascribe the shock result for Calin Georgescu to the strength of radical nationalism,
ongoing or revived anti-Semitism, or nostalgia for pre-war fascists.
Perhaps there is quite a lot of residual sympathy, or nostalgia, for the Ceausescu even
among some who clearly didn’t live through the late communist era.
Among diaspora voters, I could, instead, point to a sense of rootlessness or anomie.
A lot of ethnic Romanians have ended up sharing the sense of displacement.
Romania is merely a platform or a lodging house which one enters or leaves without any
drama. Being Romanian is an easy label to attach without possessing too much meaning.
I would add a note of caution that this is not the same for emigres who have preserved
Romanian culture, especially via the Orthodox church. But the loose identity fits those
who have left the country poorly-educated, and with no grounds for feeling respect for
the main symbols of the Romanian State either in terms of institutions or individuals.
Not knowing too much history, such voters are unlikely to be impressed by the argument
that in voting for Calin Georgescu they are endorsing someone backed by Russia, the
traditional enemy of Romanian nationality. This accusation directed at AUR has completely
failed to impede its rise. Using the technology of manipulation available in cyberspace, in my
view it isn’t too hard for adventurers to capture the emotions of alienated Romanians
(many of whom previously boycotted elections) and turn them into a powerful voting
resource. The Georgescu voters, in many cases, see him as a distant and enigmatic haiduk
ready to drive out n rulers unworthy of being taken seriously.
What are your thoughts on the Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the presidential
elections and the public reaction to this event?
The conduct of the Constitutional Court reflects how it has been selected on narrow
political criteria, not (except in a few cases) on the basis of professional integrity.
If the court was filled by people careful to preserve the dignity of the highest authority
in the state, it would have offered reasons for each of the highly significant decisions it
took at each stage of this problematic election.
Weighing up each of these decision, I am left in little doubt that safeguarding the political
interests of the forces that elevated them to the Court were never far from their minds.
If there is a consistent thread running through the Court’s various interventions, it has been
to avoid doing further harm to the PSD (and its subsidiary PNL partner) than they have
done to themselves already.
On 6 December, the court then annulled the entire election, the President announcing that
there had been a sophisticated attempt – involving a state actor – to rig the result through
unregulated social media platforms.
Neither the Court nor the President seems to have pondered how much this erratic and
opaque set of decisions would be received by the population at large.
I remain fascinated to see how the high organs of state justify allowing the parliamentary
elections to sand when there is no lack of evidence that they were subject to the same
cyber manipulation which led to the Presidential elections being cancelled. If a party like
POT, the party of youth dominated by greybeards with a background in the intelligence and
policing systems when they were both unreformed, becomes a noisy addition to the Parliament,
it will only confirm how problematic the decision-making in elections has been.
There has been considerable discussion about the role of intelligence services during
President Băsescu’s terms, and even more so during Iohannis’s decade.
Do you believe that, in Romania in 2024, there is still a legacy of the Securitate
influencing institutional culture and the relationship between intelligence services and
politics?
The irony is that it is the President who liked to identify as the person who best symbolises
Romania’s opening to the democratic West who has ensured that the image of the pre-1989
Securitate, that of a state within a state, still carries some weight one-third of a century
later.
The security institutions are bigger, better resourced, and wield more influence in
politics than in practically any other EU state. While he has weakened its party and
driven two successive Liberal leaders out, Iohannis has as surrounded himself with figures
from the military and intelligence world. They have not been figures of particular renown,
more like bumbling and self-important palace generals.
There is too much evidence that the sprawling intelligence sector is too absorbed with
protecting its own caste privileges than by meriting its high salaries in order to keep
Romania secure from threats from various state and non-state actors which, arguably,
have never been greater. The fiasco that has been exposed in recent weeks should prompt
NATO high command in Brussels to ponder how effective Romania is in guarding a key
second of the Alliance’s Eastern flank.
How do you view the Romanian media landscape and the role of social networks?
Has Romania become synchronised with other Western states, where there is a
conflict between traditional media narratives and political movements that primarily
develop through social media?
The media has fallen ever more deeply under the sway of powerful political interests.
The evidence is all too clear, and the rot has gone deepest arguably in the world of
television. There is no longer an authoritative and respectable television channel that
shapes public opinion in an informed way and provides reliable coverage of events big
and small.
There are several online news providers which are excellent despite operating on a slender
budget and sometimes encountering difficulties from the state.
Undeserved influence is wielded by a channel like Romania TV which broadcasts despite
its owner being a fugitive from justice.
I think the structure and composition of the media in Romania fully reflects the deeply
unsatisfactory political evolution the country has usually known during the past 35 years
and does not reflect any trends in the media landscape elsewhere to any significant
extent. Its uninspiring and worrying nature makes it difficult for forces committed to
genuine improvements in state and society to make significant headway.
Vlad Mitev runs the Friendship Bridge blog from which this interview with a
Romanian academic is taken
Mr. Borțun, the first round of the presidential elections took place two weeks
ago and surprised everyone. Then in the presidential elections the cumulative
result of the sovereignist parties was over 30%. And a few days ago, Romania’s
Constitutional Court intervened in the electoral process. It seems that serious
and systemic mistakes were made.
If we have to summarize and understand what happened, how do you interpret
all these events? What has happened in Romania in the last two weeks?
It is about the balance between the rule of law and democracy, which very few
governments or political regimes manage to get right. The rule of law means the
supremacy of law. And the application of the law, whatever the situation and whatever
the person. We are all equal before the law. Democracy means respect for the will
of the majority, made known through the authorized institutions, the main democratic
institution being Parliament.
The moment one of these two requirements is disregarded, the scales are tipped
and it is to everyone’s detriment. Not to the detriment of some or others. The
Romanian Government has been unable to prevent and correct the deviation. The
Romanian Government was created by a very strange, bizarre coalition, which people
say would have suited President Iohannis, to ensure a quiet mandate. His second
mandate was a mandate without political problems, without conflict, without tension.
But the result was what I am telling you.
The current party-state, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), has infiltrated all
public administration institutions – both central and local. Wherever you go, you find
the PSD. More recently, after the government alliance with the Liberals (PNL),
also the PNL, but less so. Everywhere there is this lid put over civil society, which
is called the PSD-PNL alliance, everywhere you bump into their people, their clients,
people who depend on them, people who vote with them and who form an oversized
administrative class. We have an oversized state apparatus because it is in the interest
of the party-state to increase its electorate.
VLAD MITEV If I understand correctly, there are different types of elites in
Romania, as in many other countries in the region. There are elites formed more
in socialist times, when education was better and it was more difficult to complete
your education. And on the other hand, there are also new elites, who have
graduated from “the school of transition”, so to speak. Are they better or worse?
Mr. Mitev, let’s not delude ourselves. The new elites are in the image of those who
select and raise them. There’s not much difference. It’s like a historical curse.
Unfortunately, we remain in a paradigm of Romanianism in which we are not dealing
with genuine reactions. Neither in terms of democratic reaction, nor in terms of
respect for tradition or…
Everything is a fake. That’s why people don’t trust anymore. That’s why 2 million
people were able to vote against the system. Unfortunately they didn’t choose the
right flag to march under. They have lined up under the banner of Călin Georgescu,
who proposes a step back in time. A return to Romanian history.
VLAD MITEV Isn’t this moment when Mr. Trump is coming to the White House
and when the government will soon change in Germany as well, a good time for
Romania to renew itself. Maybe politically, maybe in other senses. Maybe even
in terms of social or economic reforms and so on. Is it not a good time for
renewal, i.e. change?
No, it is not. The time is right, but I don’t know who to change. Because you see, this
is Romania’s big problem. That this balance between the elite and the people is not
always in favor of change. The people don’t want change. The people have this kind
of ideology, an autochthonist, sovereignist ideology, because the people are educated
by communist propaganda, by the historical movies made by the famous Sergiu
Nicolaescu – about Stefan the Great, Mircea the Elder, Mihai Viteazu, about the
Dacians and Romans, movies that have built a mythology of the genesis of the Romanian
people, a heroic ethnogenesis, all Romanians, educated or not, have seen with their
own eyes how the Dacians defeated the Romans, then the Romans conquered Dacia
and the wonderful Romanian people was born. This mythology is still in the minds of
many Romanians.
Finally, the German academic Thomas Fazi who has been a bit of a thorn in
the flesh of the EU
In an extraordinary and unprecedented move, Romania’s constitutional court announced
last week the annulment of the results of the first round of the presidential elections
held on Nov. 24, in which the independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu came
out on top. The ruling, which restarted the entire electoral process, came just days
before the scheduled runoff between Georgescu and the pro-EU candidate Elena
Lasconi, which Georgescu was tipped to win by a large margin.
It’s the first time a European court has overturned the result of an election,
signaling a troubling escalation in the EU-NATO establishment’s increasingly open
war on democracy. The justification for this brazen act was a report by the Romanian
intelligence services—“declassified” and published two days before the ruling —
alleging that the country was the target of a “Russian hybrid attack” during the
electoral campaign, involving a coordinated TikTok campaign to boost Georgescu’s
candidacy.
The report was the culmination of a two-week-long campaign aimed at delegitimizing
Georgescu’s victory, which shocked Romania’s ruling elites and the Western
establishment at large. It was the first time since the fall of the Soviet-backed
regime in 1989 that the two parties that have come to dominate Romanian politics
since—the Social Democratic Party and the center-right National Liberal Party,
which are united in their commitment to the European Union and NATO—both failed
to make it past the first round of a presidential election.
Adding to elites’ dismay was Georgescu’s status as a political outsider. The candidate
had consistently received negligible scores in polls throughout the campaign and
avoided televised debates. He doesn’t even belong to a political party. Instead, he
relied mostly on social media to get his message out, first and foremost TikTok,
which is very popular in Romania. His campaign’s grassroots strategy starkly contrasted
with other candidates’ reliance on mainstream media and established political
machinery.
The establishment’s response to Georgescu’s first-round victory was swift and
aggressive. The first step involved launching a media blitz—both in Romania and
abroad—to paint him as a “pro-Russian far-right extremist,” all-around crackpot,
and agent of the Kremlin. This has become the standard reaction of liberal
establishments to electoral outcomes that deviate from the Euro-Atlantic consensus
—especially in post-Soviet countries, as seen recently also in Georgia and Moldova.
As in other cases, the evidence for such claims tends to be rather scant.
The first thing that stands out is that Georgescu doesn’t have the résumé of your
typical populist. For most of his career, Georgescu, an agronomist, has been an
establishment insider employed in a field not known for being rife with populist
sentiment: sustainable development. His past positions include special rapporteur
for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, president of the European
Research Centre for the Club of Rome, and executive director of the UN Global
Sustainable Index Institute. His political outlook reflects, it would seem, a
longstanding focus on the importance of economic and especially agricultural
self-sufficiency.
It is true that Georgescu has made some controversial claims in the past, including
expressing support for the pro-Nazi leaders of the country during World War II,
referring to the Covid-19 crisis as a “plandemic,” and speaking of the existence of
a transhumanist pedophiliac cabal. But his campaign largely focused on concrete
issues like the economy and Romania’s geopolitical position.
Georgescu emphasizes national sovereignty and reducing Romania’s dependence on
foreign powers and often critiques the influence of international bodies like the
European Union and NATO on national affairs. His platform includes reducing
Romania’s reliance on imports, supporting local farmers, and ramping up domestic
production of food and energy.
What really sent the establishment into a frenzy, however, was Georgescu’s stance
on the war in Ukraine. He has criticized NATO’s role in the conflict and expressed
a desire for Romania to engage in dialogue, rather than confrontation. He rejects
the framing of this position as “pro-Russian,” contending that it is simply pro-
Romanian. His argument boils down to the fact that the war isn’t in Romania’s
interest. As he put it during a talk show: Ukraine “is none of our business. We
should worry only about Romania.”
Georgescu has also condemned NATO’s installation of a ballistic-missile shield in
the south of the country. He has denied claims that he aims to withdraw Romania
from the Western Alliance or from the European Union, arguing instead that
membership shouldn’t involve automatically signing up to those organizations’ policies.
“The establishment’s response to Georgescu’s first-round victory was swift and
aggressive.” “The ruling sets a terrifying precedent.”
Georgescu’s call for self-determination increasingly resonates across Europe,
where growing numbers of people are pushing back against the erosion of national
sovereignty by the EU-NATO establishment. As the Romanian journalist Teodora
Munteanu observed: “Georgescu focused on the call for peace and people’s fear
that [the other candidates] would get us into war. He also addressed grassroots
issues, like people with toilets in their yards, low wages, real problems that everyone
understands.”
Astonishingly, the intelligence dossier against him provides no clear evidence of
foreign interference or even electoral manipulation. It simply points to the existence
of a social-media campaign supporting Georgescu that involved around 25,000
TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers and
coordinated messaging.
It goes without saying that there is nothing out of the ordinary in using social-media
platforms to promote a message. Indeed, this happens everywhere, and is simply the
modern-day equivalent of old-school political ads. It’s unclear how exposing people
to one’s message could be considered a form of electoral manipulation—except
insofar as it obviously rewards the candidates with the greatest financial resources.
But according to the intelligence report, Georgescu spent around $1.5 million on his
TikTok campaign—far less than the roughly $17 million received in state subsidies by
the two main parties. In any case, if spending money on a campaign were a guarantee of
winning votes, Kamala Harris would have effortlessly clinched the recent US election,
considering that the Democrats poured twice as much cash as Trump into advertising.
The intelligence report provides no concrete evidence of foreign state involvement
or manipulation; it simply suggests that the campaign “correlates with a state actor’s
operating mode” and draws parallels to alleged Russian operations in Ukraine and
Moldova. Essentially, when all the layers are peeled back, Romania’s top court
annulled an entire presidential election based on a TikTok social-media campaign,
which the intelligence services claimed—without providing concrete evidence—bore
similarities to Russian tactics allegedly used elsewhere.
It’s hard to conclude that this was anything but an “institutional coup d’état,” as
Georgescu put it. Even the pro-EU candidate who lost to Georgescu said the
decision “crushes the very essence of democracy, voting.”
The ruling sets a terrifying precedent. If vague accusations of foreign interference
can nullify election results, any future electoral outcome that threatens entrenched
elites could similarly be overturned.
Unfortunately, what happened in Romania isn’t an outlier. It is an escalation
in an all-too-familiar trend now afflicting Western societies, whereby
unpopular and delegitimized elites resort to increasingly brazen methods —
such as media manipulation, cognitive warfare, censorship, lawfare, economic
pressure, and surveillance and intelligence operations—to influence electoral
outcomes and suppress challenges to the status quo.
Consider that in the United States, the security apparatus and its media allies
spent almost the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term attempting to undo the
outcome of the 2016 election via the #Russiagate hoax.
In other words, actual disinformation and electoral interference tactics are deployed
by the establishment to counter alleged (and often fabricated) disinformation and
foreign interference campaigns, usually claimed to be coming from Russia to the
benefit of domestic populist politicians and parties. However, such tactics are
proving powerless to manufacture consensus and are, in fact, beginning to backfire,
which is why even the formal elements of democracy—including elections—are now
being called into question.
It is no coincidence that these measures are employed most aggressively in those
countries with particular strategic value for NATO. Romania is a case in point.
The country has been instrumental in providing military aid to Ukraine.
Additionally, it is at Romania’s 86th Air Base where Ukrainian pilots receive training
on F-16 fighter jets. This facility serves as a regional hub for NATO allies and
partners. Moreover, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, on the Black Sea coast, is
undergoing significant development to become the largest NATO base in Europe.
This expansion aims to support NATO operations and strengthen the alliance’s
presence in the Black Sea region and its control of Russia’s “near abroad.”
The Western Alliance clearly can’t afford to allow mere popular sovereignty to
jeopardize Romania’s role as a NATO garrison.
No wonder, then, that the US State Department supported the court decision on
the grounds that “Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the
democratic will of the Romanian people.” It’s also highly unlikely that the EU-NATO
establishment wasn’t involved in some way or another in the judicial coup against
Georgescu. The measures employed to undermine Georgescu are indicative of a
broader willingness to erode democratic norms in pursuit of geopolitical objectives.
For the same reason, the same powers are attempting to foment a Ukraine-style
violent overthrow of the government in Georgia, where the pro-peace ruling party
recently won the elections.
NATO’s aggressive military posture isn’t just destabilizing its official adversaries,
but also its members, as well as those countries the alliance intends to draw into
its sphere of influence. It’s only a matter of time before the tactics deployed
against front-line states are turned against any core NATO country in Western
Europe that stray from the alliance’s prescribed path. That scenario is likely just
one “wrong” election away from becoming a reality.
