Romania’s Judicial Coup

As of Wednesday morning, three days post-publication, Călin Georgescu was detained by Romanian authorities en route to file for the spring re-election.

Romanian politics may seem a remote topic for a post. But the unprecedented annulment of the country’s presidential election, imposed by the Romanian Supreme Court on December 6th while the diaspora was voting for the second round and just two days before polling stations were due to open domestically, resembles such a full-fledged coup against democratic government that it should be of broader concern. The momentous move by the court effectively voids the national election, which will have to be re-run in the spring.

The real reason for the coup was that the political establishment was startled by the unexpected victory of an independent nationalist candidate, Călin Georgescu, in the first round of the presidential election. Concerned that he would go on to win the Presidency, the Constitutional Court decided – with the blessing of Romanian and EU political elites – to effectively suspend democracy by telling voters to go back and try again.

This striking escalation of the progressive party-state’s attack on democracy utilized two now familiar weapons to overrule the electorate: lawfare, and politicized charges of “disinformation”. As such it is a cautionary tale for the rest of us about where these tools of “managed democracy” can lead.

What Happened?

Romania scheduled elections across three consecutive weekends: the first round of the presidential election was held on 24 November, parliamentary elections on 1 December, and the second-round presidential runoff was supposed to take place on 8 December. However, the first-round result confounded expectations, with independent right wing candidate Călin Georgescu winning 22.9%, followed by the pro-EU Save Romania Union (USR) candidate Elena Lasconi (19.18%) and current Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu (19.15%) from the Social Democratic Party (PSD). Another hard-right candidate, George Simion, trailed in fourth with 13.86% support.

Just before the second-round run-off against Lasconi, the liberal conservative candidate, one poll had Georgescu leading with 58%. This was a political earthquake, and on December 8th he might well have been elected president of Romania. But two days earlier the country’s constitutional court annulled the election and instructed that it be run again.

Controversy mounted as the authorities, in a series of inconsistent and poorly justified decisions, approved a recount requested by a minor candidate, despite no evidence of fraud. The recount confirmed the initial results, which the constitutional court validated. However, the election’s annulment was triggered days later after a meeting of the Supreme Council of National Defence and the declassification of secret files in which Romanian intelligence services claimed that Georgescu’s campaign benefited from illegal campaign financing, illegal use of social media, and “Russian hybrid actions” against the country’s internet infrastructure.

The constitutional court, which on December 5th had given the go-ahead for the second round, reversed itself the next day. The justices said they were now annulling the election because voters were “misinformed” and that the candidate had benefited illegally from “the abusive exploitation of social-media platform algorithms”. His campaign materials were not properly labelled, and the will of the voters was “distorted”, though the court did not explicitly rule that Russia had interfered. There was no evidence the Russians had directly tampered with the vote totals, in other words, but because pro-Russian social media accounts may have influenced the minds of voters, their ballots should be disregarded.

Who is Călin Georgescu?

The candidate whose unexpected win elicited this extraordinary ruling is no rabble rouser. A former soil scientist who built a career as an international consultant on sustainable development, he worked for different United Nations organizations for more than a dozen years and served as the executive director of the UN Global Sustainability Index Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, and Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Somewhat unusually for a worldly academic, Georgescu ran as a religious traditionalist and a nationalist, and campaigned on reducing Romania’s reliance on imports, increasing the domestic production of food and energy, and supporting farmers. He has a longstanding interest in such matters as a graduate of the Nicolae Bălcescu Institute of Agronomy and holder of a PhD in soil sciences.

He has also argued that the EU and NATO do not properly represent Romanian interests and claimed the war in Ukraine, a Romanian neighbor, is being prolonged for the benefit of American defence contractors. In 2022, he claimed that the US anti-missile shield located in the southern Romanian village of Deveselu is a confrontational rather than a defensive measure, echoing complaints from Russian President Vladimir Putin. These criticisms of Western policy towards Russia led to him being dropped from his previously prominent positions in the nationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR).

He said at the time that he had no support from Russia but felt close to its culture, and described Putin as “a man who loves his country”. Unusually in Romania, which has a significant and sometimes restive Hungarian minority in Transylvania, Georgescu also said he admired Hungary because it knows how to negotiate internationally.

Considered a fringe candidate as a result, his presidential bid was quite deliberately ignored by the media and polling firms. As recently as October, pollster Inscop listed him under “other” with less than 0.4% support. Just before the first round, it ranked him 6th with 5.4%.

He took them by surprise after building his following almost entirely through TikTok, at almost no cost, and overwhelmingly among the young. Strikingly, he secured a huge 43% of the vote among Romania’s five million strong diaspora. The “mainstream” candidates also heavily targeted this vote, because it is large, young, affluent, and educated. Their mistake was to assume that it is also left leaning when, it reality, it seems they were more concerned about being forced to leave home by corrupt politicians’ failure to spread prosperity. The Social Democrat-Liberal ruling coalition, which has been in power since 2021, appears to have been blamed by them for halting anti-corruption efforts, presiding over the highest inflation rate in the EU, and failing to implement meaningful reforms.

The Romanian and EU establishment seem to have been particularly alarmed about his candidacy for two reasons. First, he has called for ending military aid to Ukraine’s government, expressed doubts about NATO’s reliability to defend its member states, and said that the election result shows that Romanians had “cried out for peace”. Given that the Ukraine war is unfolding so nearby that drone debris regularly falls on Romanian soil, and that Russia has declared NATO bases supplying the war from Romania fair game for attack, this made it a major issue in the election. 

Second, Georgescu’s lightning campaign is further evidence that the mainstream media no longer has an effective monopoly of information. The shift to social media for political information among the young was already evident in the right-wing youth-shift in EU elections in June and German elections in three eastern states in September, where the National Rally and the AfD respectively dwarfed all other parties combined on social media. The result from Romania is the latest to suggest this trend has continued, as the surprise winner’s effective campaigning on the platform (where he showed off his competitive edge in judo as well as his religiosity) allowed him to circumvent legacy media to sell a traditionalist message effectively with modern technology.

What Comes Next?

New presidential elections are now expected in the spring, with incumbent President Klaus Iohannis remaining in office until then. Pro-EU parties control 65% of the new parliament, with the center-right Save Romania Union (USR), Social Democrats, Liberals, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, and national minority representatives negotiating a pro-EU coalition. In a concerted attempt to head off the resurgent populist right, these parties have committed to fielding a single candidate for the country’s annulled presidential election when it is rerun. However, tensions between the traditional parties and the reformist USR (whose candidate Elena Lasconi came second in the first-round vote, and said the decision to cancel it was “illegal, amoral and crushes the very essence of democracy”) makes such a coalition fragile.

Meanwhile, the opposition is now dominated by hard right parties, with AUR, SOS Romania, and the Party of Young People controlling 35% of the parliament. The annulment’s aftermath is as such poised to reshape Romania’s future political landscape whatever the outcome of the new presidential election, with right wing populism gaining momentum and public trust in authorities at a breaking point. For the first time since Romania’s escape from communism in 1989, the parliamentary opposition now consists solely of hard-right parties.

Why Does This Matter?

The Romanian coup represents the most brazen assault on democracy in recent times in Europe. But less dramatic violations of democratic norms have become widespread across the West as the progressive elite seek to crush the growing influence of populism on the right and left. As Igor Bergler, a bestselling Romanian novelist and political satirist said approvingly of the court’s decision, “Sometimes you have to sacrifice democracy to save democracy”.

A comprehensive review of all the techniques involved in this endeavor would require a book, but the progressive party-state’s primary weapons to thwart or oust democratic populists are lawfare and censorship of supposed “disinformation”, especially of the Russian variety. Both techniques were on full display in the annulment of Romania’s election.

Broadly speaking, lawfare is the juridification of politics and the politicization of the Courts. It subjects democratically arrived-at decisions to the verdict of unelected judges who are often bitterly hostile to the aspirations of populist movements, especially of those on the right.

Such lawfare is typically used to prevent populist movements from gaining influence by keeping their candidates out of office or barring them from standing in elections altogether, as happened to Georgescu. For another obvious example consider the recent legal travails of Donald Trump. The left-wing effort to keep him out of the White House involved multiple impeachments and prosecutions at both the local and federal level for alleged crimes, ranging from improper use of campaign funds to mishandling of classified documents. The technical merits of the cases vary, but the common features are a disregard for precedent regarding prosecution of former presidents and a tendentious application of charging protocols. Fortunately, these attempts failed, but it was a close-run thing.

Or take the case of the French elite, who fear that the growing popularity of the Rassemblement National could lead to its leader, Marine Le Pen, winning the next Presidential election. The courts have duly been mobilized to prevent her from running for office. She is currently on trial for alleged embezzlement by paying national party functionaries from European parliament budgets. The judges will rule on guilt and penalty in March and the maximum sanction is three years in prison and disqualification from public office. As such it is entirely possible that the judges will rule that Le Pen should not be eligible to run at all in the 2027 election for which she is the current favorite. Prosecutors have even requested that any sentence barring Le Pen from public office be applied during any appeal she might bring.

When populists do make it into office, the courts are deployed to thwart their policy agenda, especially around border security.

In Italy, for instance, a series of court cases are preventing the Italian government from deporting illegal immigrants who continue to show up at the country’s shores in the hundreds of thousands. In October an Italian court ruled that a deal between Italy and Albania to send them to Albania to be processed and deported to their home countries was unlawful; the court then referred the case to the European Union’s Court of Justice, much to the indignation of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Short of leaving the European Union, however, there is little she can do if they rule against her. And even if she did, it wouldn’t necessarily put her beyond the reach of European kritarchs: even after Brexit, the UK government was told by the European Court of Human Rights – a separate institution not a part of the European Union – just a few years ago that it could not deport illegal migrants to be processed in Rwanda.

Worse yet, these judges are out to punish government officials who use their democratic mandates to try to stop them. A court case against former Italian Interior Minister and Northern League leader Matteo Salvini was finally decided in December in this vein. Salvini was being tried for criminally kidnapping 10 illegal aliens by ordering them to be detained onboard an NGO vessel rather than allowing them into Italy. Thankfully the courts found him not guilty on this occasion, but for exercising his democratically granted powers Salvini had this case and the prospect of jail time hanging over him since 2021.

Elected politicians have an inherent democratic right to determine who may or may not live in our countries, just as Western voters have a right to determine which politicians govern them. Overmighty exercises of judicial power of the sort we’ve seen in these cases threaten both.

In the Romanian case lawfare intersected with another tool of managed democracy: the use of politicized charges of disinformation. This was the pretext used by the constitutional court for annulling the presidential election result after the belated declassification of documents revealing that Georgescu was heavily promoted on TikTok through coordinated accounts, recommendation algorithms, and paid promotion. This led to charges of Russian interference: “We suspect it was Russia because we see a pattern used in Moldova”, said Sorin Ioniță, who leads Expert Forum, a Bucharest-based think-tank, to the Financial Times. “The Georgescu TikTok operation was not improvised. They knew what they were doing, it was a whole team able to handle algorithms and agencies that hire influencers.”

A political campaign hiring a social-media team hardly seems a disqualifying offence, even if some of their views overlap with those of the Russian government, but it was enough for European elites to immediately cast doubt on the result: “Reports by Romanian authorities that Russian disinformation is influencing the presidential elections in Romania show: Putin wants to divide us and to undermine the unity within the EU and NATO”, the German foreign ministry posted on X. Russia for its part has denied interfering, and TikTok said it did not give Georgescu any preferential treatment.

This will all sound suspiciously familiar to American readers. The original disinformation operation of the modern era, the Russia-collusion hoax, hijacked the American political system for years. The false claim that Donald Trump was a Kremlin agent and that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election was itself disinformation, injected into the nation’s political culture by Obama and Clinton officials, working with top U.S. intelligence figures, including former CIA chief John Brennan. It was Brennan who inserted the fabricated Steele Dossier into the official record by including it in an official CIA report. With the imprimatur of senior intelligence professionals, the Russiagate conspiracy was then spread by a credulous media apparatus and reinforced by biased think-tank and academic “experts”. Most significantly, it led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation of the Trump campaign’s purported collusion with Russia to sway the 2016 election, which found no evidence of such a conspiracy.

Having gotten a taste for it, the media made increasingly widespread use of this technique anyway. In 2020, the fact-checkers falsely declared Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian disinformation, while “debunking” speculation that Covid-19 might have leaked from a laboratory. More recently, an armada of fact-checkers decried speculation about Biden’s mental acuity, with headlines like “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead.” That headline ran on a Washington Post “fact checker” feature published less than two weeks before Biden’s faltering debate performance helped end his reelection campaign. His administration also got into the business of directly monitoring domestic speech for “disinformation” until the backlash against the now-abolished Disinformation Governance Board showed them that Americans will not support agencies they believe are seeking to silence them.

The abuse of charges of disinformation by the media and the executive branch is bad enough, but its use by the courts to overturn an election marks a dangerous escalation. It is intensely divisive, threatens trust in Romania’s judiciary and the intelligence community, and undermines the possibility of any sort of consensus around national security. Above all it is an intolerable intrusion upon the political rights of the disfavored candidate and his voters.

The root of the problem is that “disinformation” as weaponized by the progressive party-state invites a focus on the message instead of the messenger. This is tricky terrain for security agencies across the West: citizens and candidates have a right to speak freely about foreign policy, even if their speech aligns with the views of foreign governments deemed hostile. Foreign intelligence services, by contrast, have no right to covertly propagandize inside our countries. Fortunately, the solution is simple enough: we should turn away from the amorphous and politically fraught concept of “disinformation” altogether and back towards the familiar mission of combating clandestine activity directed or controlled by foreign intelligence services. When foreign states or their agents spread propaganda in our countries – for example, the CCP’s use of educational programs and paid media to advance its goals – we should use all lawful tools to monitor, expose, or stop them. What our intelligence agencies should not do is target “narratives” or speech that merely align with the aims and messages of foreign actors, such as dovish views about the war in Ukraine. Unlike “disinformation”, this approach does not depend on subjective assessments by state operatives of a message’s truth, loyalty, or harm, but upon proving that a citizen has knowingly aided foreign spies. Keeping to that objective will best safeguard their core missions and our liberties; unfortunately, the Romanian authorities have strayed far beyond it. We should hope they see sense and allow Călin Georgescu to run again when the election is rerun in the spring.