The commitment of Washington’s European allies to democracy is increasingly fragile, if not hypocritical, as Vice President J D Vance highlighted in his speech to the Munich Security Conference last month. That problem is most acute in Romania. In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party, unexpectedly led the field. In addition to having populist social views, Georgescu is an outspoken critic of NATO. His “apostasy” on that issue makes him especially unacceptable to Romania’s political establishment and its American supporters.
The United States was already busily expanding its Mihail Kogalniceanu military base at Constanta in southeastern Romania to eclipse even Washington’s long-time principal European base, Ramstein, in Germany. The expanded facility in Romania would be 50% larger than Ramstein, and it would bring a massive U.S. military presence much closer to Russia. U.S. and Romanian officials were not pleased about the prospect of having those plans aborted by a new, less friendly government in Bucharest.
To make matters even worse for the two parties in the current governing coalition, both the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) failed to place a candidate in the runoff round. Instead, Elena Lasconi, a reformer representing another “minor” party took the other runoff spot. Thus, the establishment parties would not be able to focus their fire exclusively on Georgescu in the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on the maverick. Instead, whichever outsider prevailed in the runoff would not be from the usual governing elite or be a reliable client of the United States and its NATO partners.
The response of the beleaguered establishment was to get the country’s election commission, which the PSD and PNL dominated, to nullify the first round election results. Romania’s Constitutional Court, which the PSD and PNL also dominated, ratified the election commission’s edict just two days before the runoff round was to be held. Instead, the Court rescheduled that round for May 4, 2025. Both the Commission and the Court alleged that the election had been tainted by “Russian interference.” However, neither body cited tangible evidence of such interference on Moscow’s part, much less established that the alleged meddling was sufficiently egregious to nullify the election results. As New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins concluded:
“The court’s intervention came after Romania’s security service released declassified intelligence reports that pointed to possible Russian interference in the election campaign but provided no solid evidence of that.”
Such an outcome creates severe doubts about Romania’s allegedly democratic political system. Subsequent developments have intensified those doubts. Georgescu has been subject to extensive harassment from the current government with the rather transparent objective of disqualifying him from the runoff round and likely sending him to jail.
Higgins described the most menacing incident to date:
“Mr. Georgescu was on his way to register as a candidate for the upcoming redo of the canceled election when police stopped his vehicle in traffic in Bucharest on Wednesday morning and said that they had started ‘criminal proceedings’ against him.” Police officers later visited his home “to check on his whereabouts and activities.”
The authorities’ explanation of the episode reads like something out of a George Orwell novel. Higgins notes that “Georgescu has not been arrested but placed under ‘judicial control,’ a status that bars him from leaving Romania and using social media.”
A country in which the outcome of a free election can be overturned on little more than the partisan whim of the losing side is not a genuine democracy. An overall erosion of democratic values is taking place throughout Europe. Efforts to discredit dissent by smearing unorthodox views as “hate speech” or “disinformation” and then criminalizing the expression of such views, are becoming rampant.
So, too, are campaigns to ban “extremist” right-wing parties. Perhaps the most significant and controversial of those initiatives is the growing campaign in Germany to outlaw the populist conservative party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), as supposedly fascist or neo-Nazi. That effort is especially important because the AfD finished in second place in the country’s February 2025 parliamentary elections. Outlawing the second largest political party in a major European democratic country is no small matter. Indeed, such a move might well signal an existential political and ideological crisis throughout the European Union.
Genuine democracy must mean something more than a guaranteed political monopoly for centrist and socialist factions. Yet that is the picture that seems to be emerging. Romania’s anti-democratic condition is more advanced than similar cases in its European neighbors. Romania is the canary in the coal mine that has fallen from its perch and collapsed unconscious onto the floor of the mine. Moreover, too many others also are now looking wobbly and disoriented.
