So this is what passes for democracy in Europe nowadays. The frontrunner in Romania’s presidential elections has been banned from participating. On Sunday, Romania’s election bureau decreed that favourite Calin Georgescu should be excluded from the ballot, alleging that he has been the beneficiary of foreign interference on social media.
Ever since Georgescu unexpectedly came top in the first round of Romania’s presidential elections last year, the Romanian political establishment, with the tacit backing of the EU, has set about trying to overturn the result.
November’s first-round election was a humiliation for the political mainstream – and not just because of the rapid rise of the ultra-nationalist Georgescu. Hot on his heels in second place was former TV journalist Elena Lasconi, another political outsider. These two anti-establishment figures beat the candidates of Romania’s centrist parties, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL), which have dominated Romanian politics since the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Soviet-backed dictatorship in 1989.
When the results came in, the Romanian intelligence service immediately sprang into action and, within weeks, published a dossier purporting to show foreign attempts to sway the elections. Then, in December, the Romanian Supreme Court took the unprecedented steps of annulling the first-round results, cancelling the second round and then ordering a rerun of the presidential elections. Now Georgescu cannot even take part in the rerun. He has branded the ban a ‘direct blow to the heart of democracy worldwide’.
To call Georgescu an oddball would be an understatement. He has stoked controversy by praising Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Romania’s past fascist leaders and, according to Politico, even the fictional Count Dracula. He is sceptical not only of vaccines, but also bottled water (apparently, the plastic interferes with the positive memories and vibrations that he believes are contained in untapped water). But you don’t have to endorse any of his views to find the decision to ban him alarming.
For the establishment, there can only be one explanation as to why voters would choose Georgescu over a sensible, centrist type – namely, Russian interference. In particular, Russia is alleged to have boosted his popularity on TikTok. But it is one thing for Russia to attempt to interfere in elections – it is quite another for it to actually succeed. Indeed, the idea that hundreds of thousands of Romanians voted for Georgescu purely on the basis of some foreign TikToks is absurd on the face of it.
A more plausible explanation is that Romanians, like voters the world over, are seeking an alternative to a failed establishment. In the past three years, the mainstream PSD and PNL have governed in a grand coalition. Changes of government are regular, but there has been a revolving door between the two main parties. Under their stewardship, economic growth has slowed significantly lately, and inflation has been some of the highest in the EU. It is not difficult to see why the establishment has fallen out of favour. These attempts to exclude alternative candidates will only add to the public’s disillusionment.
While no EU country has gone quite as far as to ban a presumed election victor from running, this anti-democratic coup in Romania speaks to a broader, worrying trend. Establishment national parties in Europe and the European Commission in Brussels have found plenty of ways to ride roughshod over the wishes of voters. In the past, the EU has succeeded in ousting supposedly bothersome governments in Greece and Italy. During the Euro crisis, Greek PM George Papandreou and Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi were replaced with unelected, Brussels-approved technocrats when they wavered over implementing harsh austerity measures. Inconvenient referundum results have also been cast aside. When the French and Dutch publics voted against a new European Constitution, the proposals were simply repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. Ireland was twice forced to hold second, do-over referendums when voters defied the commissioners.
It is therefore no surprise that other EU leaders have failed to condemn Romania’s democratic backsliding. On the contrary, back in January, one former EU official actually praised the Romanian elites for their anti-democratic manoeuvrings, suggesting that Germany could also rerun its elections in the event of a right-populist victory.
Romania’s turn against democracy is yet more proof that the real threat to democracy in Europe comes not from anti-establishment outsiders, but from the centrist, technocratic elites and their backers in Brussels.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
