There is no overstating how insane this is, and in a normally-functioning media environment it would be a scandal of enormous proportions: after cancelling -based on a now-debunked lie - the presidential elections that Georgescu was winning, Romania has now barred him from even running at all.
Agree or disagree with his political ideas, I'm afraid Georgescu is right here
: this shows that Romania, and by extension the EU which fully supports what Romania is doing here, is now much closer to tyranny than democracy.
A small reminder of what happened.
First, Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round of Romania's presidential election in November through what appeared to be a highly effective social media campaign.
Then, Romania's Constitutional Court annulled his victory and cancelled the elections altogether, primarily citing alleged Russian influence, along with claims of "undeclared campaign financing and fraudulent use of digital technologies."
Yet it's now crystal clear that this cancellation was based on a complete fabrication. As I previously detailed (x.com/RnaudBertrand/…), the declassified Romanian intelligence documents that served as justification for cancelling the election contained no actual evidence of foreign interference or manipulation. They merely documented a social media campaign involving 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through Telegram channels - completely standard practice in political campaigning. In effect, an entire presidential election was cancelled on the grounds of the existence of a coordinated social media campaign on TikTok that the intelligence services claimed - without concrete evidence - resembled Russian tactics.
Even more insane, subsequent investigative reporting by Romanian journalists (which I also wrote about: x.com/RnaudBertrand/…) revealed that the TikTok campaign cited as "evidence" of Russian interference was actually funded by the ruling National Liberal Party (PNL) itself! The same party that supported cancelling the election paid over 1 million RON a marketing firm called Kensington Communication to run the very campaign later characterized as "foreign interference."
So this whole thing appears to have been a deliberate ploy to provide intelligence services with grounds for nullifying an election that the ruling party was losing.
And now, even as Georgescu leads in the polls ahead of the rerun, they've taken the extraordinary step of barring him from participating in the elections entirely.
What's even more disturbing is how this fabricated narrative of "Russian interference" continues to be propagated at the highest levels of European leadership. Just four days ago, on March 5th, in a televised address to the French people, Macron stated as fact: "President Putin's Russia violates our borders to assassinate opponents, manipulates elections in Romania and Moldova. It organizes digital attacks against our hospitals to block their operations." This casual repetition of a thoroughly debunked claim shows how deeply embedded this fiction has become in the European political establishment's narrative - a convenient bogeyman to justify overriding democratic processes when they produce "undesirable" results.
For all his faults, JD Vance was spot on on this topic in his Munich speech (and even though I was critical of the speech overall, I gave him credit for it in my commentary: x.com/RnaudBertrand/…). He specifically pointed to Romania as a prime example of Europe's retreat from its values, noting:
"I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. [...] For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy, but when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard."
Again, I'm under no illusions that Vance himself is hypocritical here. He conveniently failed to mention that the US State Department - his own country - was actually first to raise concerns about "Russian involvement" in Romania's elections on December 4th, essentially providing cover for what followed. Furthermore his support for Georgescu likely stems not from principled defense of democracy but from ideological alignment with that side of the Romanian political spectrum, and in this sense he's probably no better than the EU officials he criticizes. Yet on the face of it, his commentary on this specific situation was correct.
All in all, the Romanian situation exposes a terrifying truth at work in European politics today: democracy is celebrated only when it produces the "correct" results. When voters choose candidates deemed unacceptable by the political establishment, suddenly the democratic process itself becomes suspect, allegedly compromised by "foreign interference" or other conveniently vague threats.
As such what we're witnessing in Romania isn't merely a local political dispute - it's the canary in the coal mine for European democracy as a whole. If an EU member state can cancel a legitimate election and then bar the winning candidate from running again without meaningful consequences, what's to prevent this playbook from being deployed elsewhere?
The mask has slipped, and what lies beneath is very ugly.
Mike
SOROS-BACKED NGO BEHIND EU CENSORSHIP ALSO WORKING TO BLOCK ROMANIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE GEORGESCU
