No election of the weekend this weekend, because…

…the Constitutional Court of Romania has annulled the first round of the presidential election:

Romania’s top court has annulled the results of the first round of the presidential election and says the process must be rerun after allegations that Russia ran a coordinated campaign to promote the far-right candidate who emerged as the frontrunner.

The Constitutional Court’s decision on Friday, which is final, came after President Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence this week that alleged Romania was the target of “aggressive hybrid Russian attacks” during the election period.

The alleged effort included thousands of social media accounts that promoted far-right populist Calin Georgescu across platforms such as TikTok and Telegram.

The court has decided “to annul the entire electoral process for the election of the President of Romania … to ensure the correctness and legality of the electoral process”, it said in Friday’s decision.

Georgescu, a pro-Russian candidate who wants to end Romania’s support for Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion, emerged as the frontrunner in the first-round vote on November 24 despite being a political outsider who declared zero campaign spending.

He was due to face pro-European Union centrist Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union party in a run-off on Sunday. Voting is already under way in polling stations abroad.

Georgescu described the court’s decision on Friday as a “coup” while Lasconi said it was “illegal, amoral and crushes the very essence of democracy: voting”.

George Simion, leader of the opposition hard-right Alliance for Uniting Romanians (AUR), also called the decision a “coup d’etat” but urged people not to take to the streets.

“Nine politically appointed judges, scared that a candidate outside the system had all chances to become Romania’s president, decided to annul Romanians’ will,” Simion said.

But Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu expressed support for the court’s ruling, saying it was “the only correct decision” after the declassified documents showed alleged Russian interference.

“The presidential elections must be held again,” Ciolacu said in a post on Facebook. “At the same time, investigations by the authorities must uncover who is responsible for the massive attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election.”

The intelligence files released on Wednesday were from the Romanian Intelligence Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Special Telecommunication Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

I’ve looked at a handful of stories and haven’t seen anyone getting too into the weeds about the nature of the electoral interference revealed in the declassified documents. Furthermore I am, to my great shame, not at all conversant in the details of what constitutes illegal electoral interference under Romanian election law, so I’ll refrain from offering any commentary on the decision itself. I do wonder if the anger about this from Lasconi, the (barely) second-place finisher, might make coalition-building difficult in Parliament. As expected, the parliamentary election resulted in gains for illiberal anti-Europe pro-Russia parties, and losses for the current ruling coalition, but there appears to be a path or two for the Social Democrats to go into the next parliament leading another, somewhat larger coalition of the sane. One of the possible coalition partners would be Lasconi’s center-right anti-corruption reformers party. It seems possible, at least, that anger over this decision might make such a coalition more difficult. We shall see. I expect the new election will be scheduled relatively quickly.