Romania is no longer a democracy

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.