Election of the Weekend III: Romania

This Sunday, Romania will hold the first round of their presidential election. If that sounds familiar to you, well, it should; I previewed their last attempt to hold a presidential election back in November and followed up a bit here in a post about the parliamentary election. Long story short: the first round winner with 23% was Calin Georgescu, a complete crackpot with no party affiliation who campaigned almost exclusively on tiktok and didn’t show up much in polling at all, and a more mainstream center-right candidate edged out the incumbent Social Democratic party’s candidate by a few thousand votes for second place (19%). But of course the run-off never happened. Just two days before it was scheduled, the Supreme Court reversed a decision a few days earlier upholding the election and voted unanimously to nullify it. The change was apparently motivated by the release of documents to the court by the outgoing president demonstrating foreign election interference. The first, second, and fourth place candidates all angrily denounced the decision and called for mass protest, while Ciolacu the 3rd place finisher from the social democratic party, supported the court.

In between the first round election and the decision to annul it, Romania held a separate parliamentary election. Right wing populists made gains but a pro-Western, pro-Europe coalition was formed with the social democrats at the helm, and they set the new election for May 4th. It’s been a turbulent six months; while outgoing president Iohannis had agreed to stay on until the new election, and had been authorized to do so by the Constitutional Court, he resigned in February ahead of a potential impeachment, a threat made credible by massive public pressure on parliament to do so.

So here we are. We now know quite a bit more about Mr. Georgescu, and yikes. The RFK Jr comparisons are apt in many ways, but they only begin to scratch the surface. I recommend Anne Appelbaum’s profile from January:

This gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

At first, he looked like a strong favorite; polling nearly 40%. But then, in February, he was pulled over on his way to register for the new election, arrested, and charged with an array of crimes:

Romanian prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Călin Georgescu, the far-right, Moscow-friendly populist who surged from almost nowhere to win the first round of the country’s cancelled presidential election last year.

The announcement of the investigation covering a number of separate accusations took place after Georgescu, 62, was stopped by police in Bucharest traffic on Wednesday, the day on which – according to his team on social media – he planned to submit his candidacy for a rerun of the election, which is scheduled for May.

Prosecutors said after questioning him for several hours that they were formally investigating him on suspicion of communicating false information, promoting war criminals and fascist organisations and forming an antisemitic organisation.

Prosecutors said earlier that they had raided 47 addresses of Georgescu’s associates as part of an investigation into alleged offences including “establishing an organisation with a fascist, racist or xenophobic character” and “false statements” regarding campaign financing.

Among other things, the raids turned up over 10 million USD and plane tickets to Moscow hidden at his bodyguard’s house. His application to run for president was rejected in early March, triggering more protests around the country.

If the goal of this process was to further reduce the electorate’s faith in existing Democratic institutions, it’s difficult to identify what would have been different. But here we are. Of the actual candidates, there are three who appear most likely to advance to the runoff. Simion, the right-populist who finished 4th, is leading in the polls, but his lead is declining, and two challengers are surging, currently in a tie for the second slot: Crin Anontescu and Nicusor Dan. Simion holds perhaps fewer boutique crackpot views than Georgescu, but on the big ones–anti-EU, anti-Immigrant, supporting Russia over Ukraine, repealing same sex marriage, and even a bit of irredentism (he’s a “restore 1940 borders” guy which means taking a sizeable chunk out of Bulgaria, as well as most/all of Moldova and a bit of Ukraine). Antonescu spent time leading the liberal party, before retiring from politics and moving to Brussels a decade ago. He’s also being backed by the Social Democrats and the party of Ethnic Hungarians; he’s socially liberal and pro-Ukraine/EU/NATO. Dan is a popular two term mayor of Bucharest, who is also pro-EU and Ukraine, moderate economic policies, and substantially increasing defense spending. Given the dreadful performance of last year’s polls, we shouldn’t be two confident this election will produce a Simion v Antonescu or Dan second round election. Two other candidates include Elena Lasconi, the second place finisher in the annulled election, representing the center-right Save Romania Union. (It is widely believed that Dan’s surprise entry into the race hurts her chances, as they appeal to a similar moderate urban base, and Dan is suing her for posting false campaign information, alleging a false connection between Dan and discraced former general and disgraced Romanian intelligence services deputy Florian Coldea. The 5th candidate of note (also suing Lasconi for the same reason as Dan), Victor Ponta, is a former left-wing Prime Minister, who has completed what we might call “the full Horowitz” and is now a candidate of the far right and avowed Trump enthusiast.

If polls are at all useful, which is a big if in this case, we’re likely to see a runoff between a less insane, younger version of Georgescu vs. a relatively normal candidate of the center or a relatively normal candidate of the center-left. But many other configurations remain possiblel We’ll know soon enough.