In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, a candidate from a right-wing party, unexpectedly came out on top. In addition to his patriotic social views, Georgescu is a vocal critic of NATO. His “defection” on this issue makes him particularly unacceptable to the Romanian political establishment and its American backers.
The United States is already working on expanding the Mihail Kogalniceanu military base in Constanta, southeastern Romania, to surpass even Washington’s main European base, Ramstein, in Germany. It is estimated that the facility in Romania will be 50% larger than Ramstein and will therefore bring a massive American military presence much closer to Russia. American and Romanian officials were not happy about the prospect of these plans being thwarted by a new, less docile government in Bucharest.
Matters were made even worse by the fact that the two parties in the current governing coalition, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL), failed to field a candidate in the second round. Instead, Elena Lasconi, a reformist representing another “small” party, took the other seat in the second round. Thus, the establishment parties could not focus their attacks solely on Georgescu in the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on him. On the contrary, any candidate who prevailed in the second round would not be from the usual government elite nor would he be a reliable partner of the United States and its NATO allies.
In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, a candidate from a right-wing party, unexpectedly came out on top. In addition to his patriotic social views, Georgescu is a vocal critic of NATO (please read also the analysis titled “Romania: The front of intra-Western ideological confrontation (liberal-globalists Brussels) vs (populist-nationalists Washington)“) . His “defection” on this issue makes him particularly unacceptable to the Romanian political establishment and its American backers.
The United States is already working on expanding the Mihail Kogalniceanu military base in Constanta, southeastern Romania, to surpass even Washington’s main European base, Ramstein, in Germany. It is estimated that the facility in Romania will be 50% larger than Ramstein and will therefore bring a massive American military presence much closer to Russia. American and Romanian officials were not happy about the prospect of these plans being thwarted by a new, less docile government in Bucharest.
Matters were made even worse by the fact that the two parties in the current governing coalition, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL), failed to field a candidate in the second round. Instead, Elena Lasconi, a reformist representing another “small” party, took the other seat in the second round. Thus, the establishment parties would not be able to focus their attacks solely on Georgescu in the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on him. On the contrary, any candidate who prevailed in the second round would not be from the usual government elite nor would he be a reliable partner of the United States and its NATO allies.
The response of the beleaguered government forces was to pressure the country’s electoral commission, dominated by the PSD and PNL, to annul the results of the first round of the election!
Romania’s Constitutional Court, also dominated by the PSD and PNL, upheld the electoral commission’s decree just two days before the second round was scheduled to take place. The Court rescheduled the second round for May 4, 2025. Both the Commission and the Court claimed that the elections were tainted by “Russian interference”!
However, neither body provided any evidence of such interference, let alone that the alleged interference was serious enough to annul the election results. As New York Times journalist Andrew Higgins wrote: “The court’s intervention came after the release of declassified information from Romania’s security service that pointed to possible Russian interference in the campaign but provided no hard evidence of it.”
Such a phenomenon raises serious doubts about Romania’s supposedly democratic political system. Subsequent developments have only reinforced these doubts. Georgescu has been subjected to extensive harassment by the current government with the clear aim of excluding him from the second round and attempts to send him to prison.
Higgins also reported in his article: “Mr. Georgescu was on his way to register as a candidate for the annulled re-election when police stopped his vehicle in traffic in Bucharest on Wednesday morning and said that “criminal proceedings” had been opened against him. Officers later visited his home to check his whereabouts and activities.”
The authorities’ explanation for the incident reads like something out of a George Orwell novel. Higgins notes that “Georgescu has not been arrested, but is under “judicial control,” a situation that prohibits him from leaving Romania and using social media.”
A country in which the result of a free election can be overturned by the partisan whim of the losing side is of course not a democratic country, but most importantly, it is not a free country!
A general erosion of values is sweeping across Europe. Attempts to discredit dissent by labeling opposing views as “racist speech” or “disinformation” and then criminalizing the expression of such views are becoming more widespread, introducing a dangerous Stalinist logic into Europe.
The same is true of campaigns to ban “extremist” right-wing parties. Perhaps the most significant and controversial of these initiatives is the growing campaign in Germany to ban the conservative party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), as allegedly fascist or neo-Nazi. This effort is particularly significant because the AfD came in second place in Germany’s parliamentary elections in February 2025.
Banning the second largest political party in a major European country is no small matter. Indeed, such a move could signal an existential, political, and ideological crisis across the European Union.
Civil liberties must mean more than a guaranteed political monopoly for liberal and socialist parties. Yet that is the picture that seems to be emerging.
Romania’s situation is more advanced than similar cases in its European neighbors. Romania is the canary in the mine that has fallen from its branch and collapsed unconscious on the floor.
