(CN) — A crisis over the Putin-like dark horse Romanian ultranationalist Călin Georgescu, who was close to seizing the presidency in Bucharest, is haunting Europe.
Romania, the European Union’s eighth largest country by size and one of its most enigmatic and problematic extensions in the east, has been on a political rollercoaster since Georgescu shocked the nation by triumphing in the opening round of presidential elections on Nov. 24.
Then, the election was annulled last Friday due to supposed online meddling by Russia which, in the eyes of Romania’s high court, unfairly favored Georgescu. Meanwhile, the would-be president, an agriculture professor who reported no campaign funds, is facing criminal charges over running a shadowy TikTok-driven campaign supported by Russians.
Millions of Romanians who voted for Georgescu are furious over what they see as the establishment’s attempt to steal the election and cart their candidate off to prison.
It’s an ugly affair exposing the EU’s failures to contend with Romania’s problems, including a corrupt political caste long nestled in the halls of power of an underdeveloped and largely working-class country struggling with its fascist and communist past.
“The tragedy of Romania since modern times, long before communism, is that it has never been effectively ruled,” said Tom Gallagher, an emeritus professor at University of Bradford in England and author of books on Romania.
“It has enabled Romanians to develop an affection for outlaws or Robin Hood-type people,” Gallagher said, speaking by telephone. “The outsider comes suddenly and overturns the corrupt system and tries to usher in something better. This is how Călin Georgescu was packaged online by his handlers, and it was a very seductive message for a lot of Romanians who felt they had been short-changed by thieving rulers.”
Romania has a semi-presidential system akin to France’s, where the president wields a lot of power. From the royal-era Cotroceni Palace in Bucharest, presidents run foreign affairs and the military.
A potential Georgescu presidency posed huge problems for both NATO and the EU: He wants to end funding for Ukraine, sees NATO bases as problematic and despises the EU’s free-market economic rules and liberal values.
Relying almost exclusively on TikTok videos, Georgescu stunned Romania and Europe by winning the opening round with 23% of the ballot, or about 2.1 million votes. He picked up huge support among disillusioned Romanians living in Western Europe, often doing poorly paid menial labor. Preelection polling missed his popularity, estimating he’d get under 10%.
After the vote, the freak-out began.
Executives with Chinese-owned TikTok were hauled before the European Parliament and blasted for allowing malign Russian actors free rein. Romania’s main political parties were outraged: For the first time in 35 years, their candidates didn’t make the runoff. Western columnists wrung their hands and Romania’s Constitutional Court ordered a recount.
At 62, Georgescu works as an agriculture professor at a college in Bucharest but he’s long been on the political scene, including stints as a Romanian representative to the United Nations and involvement in think tanks.
But he was a fringe figure touting Euro-Atlantic skepticism and conspiracy theories, praising alternative medicine and defending Romania’s fascist Iron Guard past.
No doubt, he’s made from the same illiberal hard-right populist cloth embodied by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, Javier Milei in Argentina and Giorgia Meloni in Italy.
But his favorite role model seems to be Russian President Vladimir Putin. Like Putin, Georgescu practices judo, gets photographed taking ice-cold baths, rides horses, wraps himself in the mysticism of the Orthodox Church and scorns liberal values.
His support among Romanians is genuine — not a fluke or simply the result of Russian meddling, political experts said.
“Some of them really cherish his understanding of non-mainstream medicine, non-mainstream economic types of development,” said Sorina Cristina Soare, an expert on Romanian politics at the University of Florence in Italy, speaking by telephone.
She said extreme-right ideas have long been part of Romania’s political culture and “pervaded mainstream parties since the ’90s.”
“It’s not that this guy created it,” she said. “It was there and it was probably also supported indirectly by Russia.”
Many people are seething about the election getting annulled.
“There is anger, and there is a lot of anger online,” she said.
Georgescu’s success exposes uncomfortable truths about an EU that stood passively by as Romania continued to marinate in a stew of dysfunction, corruption and inertia after it joined the bloc.
“Unfortunately, I think it confirms that Romania at the moment is a broken down democracy,” Gallagher said. “The country never really experienced deep-seated reform after 1989.”
After the toppling of communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania was taken under the bosom of the West in the 1990s, joining NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007.
Old communist functionaries simply glommed onto the newly formed center-left Social Democratic Party. They have run the country since not that differently from how it worked under Ceauşescu, experts said.
“Romania was very quickly hustled into the European Union,” Gallagher said, “and basically the [democratic] reforms were tick-box reforms.”
“The emphasis was on economic liberalization, not political liberalization or political democratization,” he said. “This meant creating the right conditions for transnational corporations — particularly from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy — to operate in Romania.”
A glaring example of the EU’s failings can be seen in the proliferation of illegal logging across Romania’s ancient forests, much of it to the benefit of big Western European firms.
“The things they have got away with by a supposedly environmentally conscious EU is completely unbelievable,” Gallagher said. “The EU, this green powerhouse, has basically soiled its copybook badly in Romania.”
At first, the country seemed to be going in the right direction after 2007, but then reform efforts sputtered out, he said.
“There was a remarkable period where more top Romanian officials and civil servants were sent down for corruption than any other country on earth,” he said. “But it was a very short period, a spasm.”
Mostly, he blamed the Social Democrats for today’s political train wreck.
“They were willing to allow their rivals to come into government to share the spoils of office as long as it was on their terms: ‘Let’s all be corrupt together and we’ll live happily ever after,’” Gallagher said.
“Idealistic people assumed that when the EU rushed in and provided external financial support, this would be a great stimulus for energetic reforming,” he said. “Instead, the parasitic element which basically go into politics to transfer state resources into their own private pockets” remained.
Naturally, many Romanians felt cheated as they watched their country get hollowed out. That anger was further stoked during the coronavirus pandemic when hospitals caught fire and the health system collapsed. About 186,000 Romanians died, one of the highest death rates in Europe.
Romanians by and large aren’t xenophobic, antisemitic or closet fascists, Gallagher said. They’re just fed up.
“They want to stand behind someone who is really going to make trouble for the disreputable people running the show,” he said. “People are disillusioned; they are suffering rootlessness, so they can easily be reached out to and mobilized by people on the fringes.”
Against this backdrop, Georgescu’s rise can be seen as part of a bigger whirlwind.
A week after his success in the presidential race, Romania held parliamentary elections and the anti-establishment turn was confirmed: The Social Democrats eked out a win, but three far-right parties combined to get nearly 32% of the vote, an unprecedented breakthrough.
The Constitutional Court on Dec. 2 declared the opening round of the presidential race valid, putting the race for the Cotroceni Palace back on track.
Georgescu was set to square off against Elena Lasconi, a little-known center-right small-town mayor from a minor party who billed herself as Romania’s pro-EU face.
Meanwhile, Romania’s state apparatus — under pressure no doubt from Brussels and Washington — put Georgescu in its sights. The Romanian Intelligence Service, the domestic spy agency, began probing Georgescu’s campaign. Georgescu faced scrutiny on many levels, initially because he declared receiving no campaign funds.
Meanwhile, Romanian journalists, such as those at a muckraker news site called Snoop, were digging into Georgescu’s life and revealed his ties to Russian individuals and the far-right milieu in Romania, where people glorify the 1930s fascist Legionary Movement, also known as the Iron Guard.
On Dec. 4, just four days before the runoff, the term-limited Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, a center-right pro-EU politician and head of the National Liberal Party, made public the intelligence agency’s classified findings.
Investigators said Georgescu’s sudden popularity was the result of “cyber guerilla warfare” by an unnamed outside “state actor.”
The declassified report said Russia-linked computers hit the election system more than 85,000 times in an operation lasting up to election night.
“The mode of operation, as well as the scale of the cyber campaign, lead to the conclusion that the attacker has considerable resources, correlated with a mode of operation specific to a state attacker,” intelligence officers said in the report, written in Romanian.
The next day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken quickly put a name to the “state attacker”: Russia.
“Romanian authorities are uncovering a Russian effort — large in scale and well-funded — to influence the recent presidential election,” Blinken said on a visit to Malta.
The report also said “the massive and accelerated growth” of Georgescu’s support came about by “a very well-organized promotion campaign” by numerous users from various locations that earned him “preferential treatment on the TikTok platform.”
Besides campaign finance misconduct, Georgescu faces far more serious accusations of treason and money laundering. In recent days, police raided the homes of people linked to his campaign and made arrests. Also under scrutiny are his lucrative real estate dealings.
Veronica Anghel, a Romania expert at the European University Institute outside Florence, Italy, said the report showed how extensive the Kremlin’s disruptive machinations were.
She faulted Romania’s intelligence service for failing to foresee and forestall “the scale of the attacks from Russia.”
Then the hammer came down.
On Dec. 6, the Friday before the Sunday runoff, the Constitutional Court annulled the entire presidential election, arguing it needed “to ensure the correctness and legality of the electoral process.” A new election will likely take place between February and March.
After the court’s ruling, Iohannis, the outgoing president, came out swinging and said he ordered the probe into Georgescu after learning from intelligence agents “that certain things were strange” about the election.
In a televised address, he accused Georgescu of violating election laws by declaring zero campaign expenses “even though he ran a very sophisticated campaign” and that he was illegally guided by “a foreign state,” an action that went against the interests of Romania.
Faced with such a threat to national security, Iohannis said he declassified the intelligence report.
“Romania is a stable country, a safe country and a solid country,” the president said. “I say this for the economy, for investors, for the financial markets. I say this for the European Union. Romania is and remains a safe, solid, pro-European country. I say this for NATO. Romania remains a safe, solid ally.”
Georgescu and his supporters called it a “coup d’etat” by a politically-appointed court that wanted to keep the Social Democrats and its allies in power.
He wasn’t alone in slamming it as undemocratic.
On social media, Donald Trump Jr. jeered the court decision as a “another Soros/Marxist attempt at rigging the outcome & denying the will of the people.”
Lasconi also blasted the court. She was rising in the polls and had even earned an indirect endorsement from the Romanian Orthodox Church after it called on people to vote for “European values.”
Soare said the court canceled the election because it felt democracy was at risk from outside influence.
But opinions among constitutional experts are polarized, she added. “Some say it is a major intrusion in the working of democracy and others say it is part of what the Constitutional Court is supposed to do.”
She said Georgescu may be declared ineligible for the do-over election if he is charged with a felony.
Gallagher said Romania’s ruling elite want to “get this over with as completely as possible” and try to convince Romanians they will put the ship of state right.
But he was dubious. He reckoned the political class will say, “’we’ve learned our lesson, we’re making amends, we’ll behave a little better in the future’” but not do much to correct “the abuses in the system.”
For Anghel, the entire mess is simply bad for Romania and the West.
“It does show the weakness of the state, and it’s a NATO state on the eastern flank, so it’s not just about Romania,” she said. “It’s a win-win for the Kremlin: It’s sowing more distrust in the institutions and manipulating the weaknesses of the state. It sows more problems and more turmoil, which is likely to channel into the next round of elections.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.