Having barely survived an aggressive takeover from a rogue red-brown conspiracy at its presidential elections end 2024, Romania readies itself on May 4 for a repeat of its presidential elections. The cancelation of the first round of November 2024 has itself divided the country and world at large into two camps: those who decry the cancelation by The Constitutional Court due to their defrauding in every stage by the leading candidate, Calin Georgescu, and those who claim that regardless of Mr. Georgescu’s faults, since he convinced two million people to vote for him he should have stayed in the race.
The defrauding is amply documented: Georgescu filled in a fake statement of assets and interests (such documents are very detailed in Romania and published online for every official) to enter the race, had an army of rogues on Tik-tok and other platforms who bought and influenced votes using cryptocurrencies, used ‘bots’ to trick the algorithm of Tik-tok and campaign when and where the law did not allow it (Tik-tok confessed to the European Commission and pledged it will not happen again) and the vey last day of campaign filled a financial statement that he received and spent zero funds (illegal). Due to the nature of Tik-tok where accounts were erased the next day after elections it was harder to prove that Russia directly was behind all this, or just taking advantage, but the rogue conspirators (African mercenaries dealing in crypto) discussed among themselves that they are backed by the same companies which worked for Brexit. Eventually, Mr. Georgescu, who failed to mobilize mase protests, was banned a second time by the Electoral Court and changed by ordinary courts for breech of campaign funding law and antisemitic statements. His appeals to the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights against the ‘Soros conspiracy’ failed, too.
But Mr. Georgescu did not go far and his popularity spring 2025 even grew as he was perceived a victim of the ‘system’, which banned him from ruling as he had been against the European establishment. Mr. Georgescu’s voting base was the antivaccine movement, a strong one in Romania, the country in the EU with the smallest percentage of vaccinated adults. His charismatic wife has been the head and indeed his partner in politics, despite him declaring that women gave other roles to plan than politics. Mr. Georgescu made the Courts life easier through an abondance of antisemitic and revisionist remarks related to the Romanian interwar history and even against his supporters VP JD Vance and Donal Trump, when he labels as agents of Jerusalem.
Why the votes? He collected from two large areas: the rural vote in the most rural country in Europe, where the flooding by cheap Ukrainian grains has upset many, and the ‘lumpendiaspora’ as I called it some years ago, the over one million Romanians who live a precarious life between Western Europe and Romania doing seasonal works, not belonging anywhere, hurt in their self esteem as they had managed to enter Paradise only to become its toilet floor sweepers and garbage collectors. Their social media is only on anti-vaccine rage, conspiracy theories and the like.
The Romanian churches abroad, instead of civilizing this community is in the fact the main driver of superstition and played a negative role during the pandemics, openly opposing the official policies. The two populations together make Romania lead in domestic violence, children abuse, women traffic and the lot. An attempt by the Constitutional Court a few years back to remove religion as a mandatory subject from schools practically failed when 98% of the schools cooperated with the Church to have the Orthodox priests back teaching it as an ‘optional’ matter. Romania spends more of its public money to build churches than hospitals, despite leading in child mortality. Alongside the old Orthodox Church, conservative and no Ukrainian lover (the minority of Romanians in Ukraine had issues for many years due to Ukrainian nationalism, a battle fought largely in the churches), neo-Protestant sects have also collected marginals within the country and in diaspora. Georgescu had a network of pastors supporting him and he presented himself alternatively as a protestant pastor, a fundamentalist Orthodox and a Third Age character, all separate Tik-tok loops that he infiltrated successfully.
He is succeeded by a party which made its debut trying to change the Constitution to ban LGBT marriage a few years ago, then fought against vaccination – ‘AUR’, lead by younger but power savvy George Simion, a nationalist activist. They have managed, with Georgescu’s help to negotiate that Mr. Simion alone remains in the race, and therefore he tops the polls at about 25-30% with an antiestablishment, anticorruption and anti-EU discourse.
The grand coalition which rules Romanian for the past two years, the Liberals and the Social Democrats, who lost elections when they competed against each other last November due to defective choice of candidates have settled on a single one, Crin Antonescu, a retired politician, supported for the past ten years by his wife, former Commissioner Adina Valean. There is not much respect or traction for him either. Antonescu has no international experience for a job which has largely foreign affairs, security and justice competencies.
The alternative contender who rose from below and leads the pro-European camp is the independent mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan. Dan, who won a second mandate in Bucharest, is an activist who fought developers’ mafia in Bucharest and is supported by small parties and individuals. He lost long ago a party he created to a bunch of opportunists with ties to secret services, the Save Romania Union. A group inside this party tries these days to return to the support of Dan, but as they have started the campaign with another candidate, their own party head Elena Lasconi, they got caught in a legal nightmare and are unlikely to make much difference.
Finally, there is the former prime Minister Victor Ponta, a pure opportunist who flew to Mar el Lago to do a selfie (same with Mr. Simion, who was smuggled in with a tag of somebody from Georgia Melloni’s party just to take a shot of himself closer to the Trump family). Ponta, who has been charged on several counts corruption and escaped due to the changes in the law, has lived the past ten years between Belgrade (where he has the citizenship and a fugitive from justice friend, Sebastian Ghita, sometime the main IT contractor of Romanian service and still owner of the most influential TV channel), Turkey and the Emirates. Ponta tried to metamorphose from Matteo Renzi’s younger cousin into Georgescu’s brother in arms to create a grotesque, last minute anti-EU candidate who still has the loyalty of come former clients in the Social Democrat party and trims Antonescu’s vote.
What is unfortunately already clear is the failure of centrist parties, which ruled with the secret services (more often than not, the secret services ruled over them), and failed with them, too. Romania is the only country in Europe where a secret service officially computes the vote, organizes the pandemic, officially stores everybody’s private data and wins big IT contracts, including EU funds). There is no independent media or polling agency, despite the plurality of interests and secret services behind them (in the presidential race alone there are candidates associated with External Service, protection (bodyguards) service, etc). If Mr. Dan ,by a miracle, wins, he will have the right to appoint the head of these services, but not change their ways to much as their supervisory committees in the Parliament are notoriously subordinated, and cannot play any oversight role. This infiltration of politics and society also explains the rage on social media: the civil society, where Romania was doing very well 20 years ago had been replaced with official civil society- secret service invested ‘security’ groups or influencers. The budget of Romania’s secret services (there are about 7 of them) who are allowed to have private companies and can thus fund media and CSOs is larger than Germany’s, a country fourfold the population. And yet they lost the November elections, some day due to being infiltrated themselves. More likely because being monopolists for some they have lost their survival skills.
The lesson for Romanians is that they should change the Constitution to give up the direct elections for the President. It has always been a populist idea, and now with Tik-tok, it becomes suicidal, seeing that the President is so strong in the defense/foreign policy area, while people invest in him their social expectations. In the second round, Romanians will rally behind Dan or Antonescu as most public opinion is stanchly pro-EU and pro-NATO. Still, George Simion and his large group of anti-Ukraine populist followers will go nowhere even after that and will have to be dealt with so not to win the next legislative elections in 4 years, as they have meanwhile climbed on top of party popularity. If Antonescu wins, he prolongs the life of old parties. If Dan wins, he will need to create a pro-presidential party- a daunting task.
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*Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a Professor of Comparative Public Policy at LUISS Guido Carli in Roma (webpage www.corruptionrisk.org). She has lead for over twenty years Romania’s Coalition for a Clean Government.
References
Long Shadow: How Romania’s Securitate Turned the Revolution into Riches | Balkan Insight
Project MUSE – Explaining Eastern Europe: Romania’s Italian-Style Anticorruption Populism
