The cancellation of Romanian democracy

The Romanian Supreme Court took the unprecedented and alarming step today of annulling the first round of last month’s presidential election. This means that this weekend’s run-off between the two rank-outsider candidates, TikTok ‘star’ Calin Georgescu and former TV journalist Elena Lasconi, has now been cancelled.

This is a dangerous and disgraceful move, but it has not come out of the blue. From the moment Georgescu, a Covid-denying, Russian-sympathising, ultra-nationalist, topped last month’s vote, just ahead of Lasconi, Romania’s political establishment has set about trying to overturn it.

The two defeated centrist parties, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL), have come to dominate Romanian politics since the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s hated, Soviet-backed regime in 1989. Last month’s election result was profoundly humiliating for them. As soon as it was clear that Georgescu was set to trounce the ‘centrist’ candidates – including current prime minister Marcel Ciolacu – the establishment started blaming outside, likely Russian interference in the election. It was a brazen attempt to delegitimise the result.

State agencies have been involved in all this from the outset. The Romanian Intelligence Service quickly compiled documents showing an attempt on the part of myriad paid influencers to drive votes Georgescu’s way. These documents were ‘declassified’ and published this week. And at the same time, the judiciary, under pressure from the political establishment, had been reportedly considering the possibility of annulment almost from the moment Georgescu triumphed. This elite pincer movement culminated in today’s Supreme Court decision to cancel the election.

Perhaps malign, allegedly Russian forces, did try to influence the election. But there is a big difference between intent to influence an election and actually succeeding in rigging a vote. After all, the idea that hundreds of thousands of Romanians voted for Georgescu purely on the basis of some foreign social-media postings is absurd on the face of it. It also ignores the fact that his prospective rival in the now-cancelled second round was nearly as much of an outsider as he was. And yet Lasconi also managed to beat out her establishment rivals without any hint of backing from an alleged Kremlin bot farm.

In truth, the story of last month’s election is far more prosaic than Georgescu’s establishment enemies would have people believe. Romanians are simply as fed up with the failed, elite consensus – on everything from Net Zero to the EU itself – as the rest of Europe seems to be. Voters turned away from the PSL and PSD because of these parties’ own failings, rather than because of some malign social-media shenanigans.

Furthermore, the fact Georgescu received the emphatic backing of Romanians in rural communities – many of whom have been involved in large-scale anti-government protests this year – is much more likely to be down to him making rural affairs a key campaigning issue, rather than because farmers are spending too much time on TikTok. Likewise, Georgescu’s talk of withdrawing support from Ukraine may sound callous to Western Europeans. But it understandably touched a nerve with Romanians. Living in a nation bordering Ukraine, many are fearful of the war spreading and want to bring the conflict to an end.

As Jacob Reynolds outlined on spiked earlier this week, Georgescu clearly has some troubling views, from his open support for Putin to his vaccine scepticism. Yet voters were clearly prepared to overlook these because key components of his platform resonated with them. Rather than reckon with the political arguments of their opponents, or the failure of their own policies and worldview, Romania’s political establishment has sought to overturn an election instead.

This is part of an all-too-familiar trend now afflicting Western societies. Our political and cultural elites happily support and celebrate ‘democracy’, but only insofar as it delivers the ‘right’ result. They view the ballot box as a means to rubber-stamp their rule. The moment voters fail to provide the governing class with a thumbs up, the political class and its media cheerleaders reveal their true anti-democratic colours.

We saw this happen in the US and the UK after 2016, when political and cultural elites tirelessly and tediously claimed that both Trump’s victory and Brexit were the products of Russian interference. And now we’re seeing it again in Romania. But this time, the establishment has succeeded in overturning a democratic result it didn’t like. As Lasconi, Georgescu’s rival in the now-cancelled presidential run-off, has said of the annulment: ‘Today is the moment when the Romanian state trampled over democracy.’

This is a dark day – not just for Romania, but also for the West, where elites are struggling to even pretend they give a damn about democracy.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.