A Troubling Escalation

Professor Thomas Fazi writes:

In an extraordinary and unprecedented move, Romania’s constitutional court announced last week the annulment of the results of the first round of the presidential elections held on Nov. 24, in which the independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu came out on top. The ruling, which restarted the entire electoral process, came just days before the scheduled runoff between Georgescu and the pro-EU candidate Elena Lasconi, which Georgescu was tipped to win by a large margin.

It’s the first time a European court has overturned the result of an election, signaling a troubling escalation in the EU-NATO establishment’s increasingly open war on democracy. The justification for this brazen act was a report by the Romanian intelligence services—“declassified” and published two days before the ruling—alleging that the country was the target of a “Russian hybrid attack” during the electoral campaign, involving a coordinated TikTok campaign to boost Georgescu’s candidacy.

The report was the culmination of a two-week-long campaign aimed at delegitimizing Georgescu’s victory, which shocked Romania’s ruling elites and the Western establishment at large. It was the first time since the fall of the Soviet-backed regime in 1989 that the two parties that have come to dominate Romanian politics since—the Social Democratic Party and the center-right National Liberal Party, which are united in their commitment to the European Union and NATO—both failed to make it past the first round of a presidential election.

Adding to elites’ dismay was Georgescu’s status as a political outsider. The candidate had consistently received negligible scores in polls throughout the campaign and avoided televised debates. He doesn’t even belong to a political party. Instead, he relied mostly on social media to get his message out, first and foremost TikTok, which is very popular in Romania. His campaign’s grassroots strategy starkly contrasted with other candidates’ reliance on mainstream media and established political machinery.

The establishment’s response to Georgescu’s first-round victory was swift and aggressive. The first step involved launching a media blitz—both in Romania and abroad—to paint him as a “pro-Russian far-right extremist,” all-around crackpot, and agent of the Kremlin. This has become the standard reaction of liberal establishments to electoral outcomes that deviate from the Euro-Atlantic consensus—especially in post-Soviet countries, as seen recently also in Georgia and Moldova. As in other cases, the evidence for such claims tends to be rather scant.

The first thing that stands out is that Georgescu doesn’t have the résumé of your typical populist. For most of his career, Georgescu, an agronomist, has been an establishment insider employed in a field not known for being rife with populist sentiment: sustainable development. His past positions include special rapporteur for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, president of the European Research Centre for the Club of Rome, and executive director of the UN Global Sustainable Index Institute. His political outlook reflects, it would seem, a longstanding focus on the importance of economic and especially agricultural self-sufficiency.

It is true that Georgescu has made some controversial claims in the past, including expressing support for the pro-Nazi leaders of the country during World War II, referring to the Covid-19 crisis as a “plandemic,” and speaking of the existence of a transhumanist pedophiliac cabal. But his campaign largely focused on concrete issues like the economy and Romania’s geopolitical position. Georgescu emphasizes national sovereignty and reducing Romania’s dependence on foreign powers and often critiques the influence of international bodies like the European Union and NATO on national affairs. His platform includes reducing Romania’s reliance on imports, supporting local farmers, and ramping up domestic production of food and energy.

What really sent the establishment into a frenzy, however, was Georgescu’s stance on the war in Ukraine. He has criticized NATO’s role in the conflict and expressed a desire for Romania to engage in dialogue, rather than confrontation. He rejects the framing of this position as “pro-Russian,” contending that it is simply pro-Romanian. His argument boils down to the fact that the war isn’t in Romania’s interest. As he put it during a talk show: Ukraine “is none of our business. We should worry only about Romania.”

Georgescu has also condemned NATO’s installation of a ballistic-missile shield in the south of the country. He has denied claims that he aims to withdraw Romania from the Western Alliance or from the European Union, arguing instead that membership shouldn’t involve automatically signing up to those organizations’ policies.

Georgescu’s call for self-determination increasingly resonates across Europe, where growing numbers of people are pushing back against the erosion of national sovereignty by the EU-NATO establishment. As the Romanian journalist Teodora Munteanu observed: “Georgescu focused on the call for peace and people’s fear that [the other candidates] would get us into war. He also addressed grassroots issues, like people with toilets in their yards, low wages, real problems that everyone understands.”

Astonishingly, the intelligence dossier against him provides no clear evidence of foreign interference or even electoral manipulation. It simply points to the existence of a social-media campaign supporting Georgescu that involved around 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers, and coordinated messaging.

It goes without saying that there is nothing out of the ordinary in using social-media platforms to promote a message. Indeed, this happens everywhere, and is simply the modern-day equivalent of old-school political ads. It’s unclear how exposing people to one’s message could be considered a form of electoral manipulation—except insofar as it obviously rewards the candidates with the greatest financial resources. But according to the intelligence report, Georgescu spent around $1.5 million on his TikTok campaign—far less than the roughly $17 million received in state subsidies by the two main parties. In any case, if spending money on a campaign were a guarantee of winning votes, Kamala Harris would have effortlessly clinched the recent US election, considering that the Democrats poured twice as much cash as Trump into advertising.

The intelligence report provides no concrete evidence of foreign state involvement or manipulation; it simply suggests that the campaign “correlates with a state actor’s operating mode” and draws parallels to alleged Russian operations in Ukraine and Moldova. Essentially, when all the layers are peeled back, Romania’s top court annulled an entire presidential election based on a TikTok social-media campaign, which the intelligence services claimed—without providing concrete evidence—bore similarities to Russian tactics allegedly used elsewhere. It’s hard to conclude that this was anything but an “institutional coup d’état,” as Georgescu put it. Even the pro-EU candidate who lost to Georgescu said the decision “crushes the very essence of democracy, voting.”

The ruling sets a terrifying precedent. If vague accusations of foreign interference can nullify election results, any future electoral outcome that threatens entrenched elites could similarly be overturned. Unfortunately, what happened in Romania isn’t an outlier. It is an escalation in an all-too-familiar trend now afflicting Western societies, whereby unpopular and delegitimized elites resort to increasingly brazen methods—such as media manipulation, cognitive warfare, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure, and surveillance and intelligence operations—to influence electoral outcomes and suppress challenges to the status quo. Consider that in the United States, the security apparatus and its media allies spent almost the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term attempting to undo the outcome of the 2016 election via the #Russiagate hoax.

In other words, actual disinformation and electoral interference tactics are deployed by the establishment to counter alleged (and often fabricated) disinformation and foreign interference campaigns, usually claimed to be coming from Russia to the benefit of domestic populist politicians and parties. However, such tactics are proving powerless to manufacture consensus and are, in fact, beginning to backfire, which is why even the formal elements of democracy—including elections—are now being called into question.

It is no coincidence that these measures are employed most aggressively in those countries with particular strategic value for NATO. Romania is a case in point. The country has been instrumental in providing military aid to Ukraine. Additionally, it is at Romania’s 86th Air Base where Ukrainian pilots receive training on F-16 fighter jets. This facility serves as a regional hub for NATO allies and partners. Moreover, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, on the Black Sea coast, is undergoing significant development to become the largest NATO base in Europe. This expansion aims to support NATO operations and strengthen the alliance’s presence in the Black Sea region and its control of Russia’s “near abroad.” The Western Alliance clearly can’t afford to allow mere popular sovereignty to jeopardize Romania’s role as a NATO garrison.

No wonder, then, that the US State Department supported the court decision on the grounds that “Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the democratic will of the Romanian people.” It’s also highly unlikely that the EU-NATO establishment wasn’t involved in some way or another in the judicial coup against Georgescu. The measures employed to undermine Georgescu are indicative of a broader willingness to erode democratic norms in pursuit of geopolitical objectives. For the same reason, the same powers are attempting to foment a Ukraine-style violent overthrow of the government in Georgia, where the pro-peace ruling party recently won the elections.

NATO’s aggressive military posture isn’t just destabilizing its official adversaries, but also its members, as well as those countries the alliance intends to draw into its sphere of influence. It’s only a matter of time before the tactics deployed against front-line states are turned against any core NATO country in Western Europe that stray from the alliance’s prescribed path. That scenario is likely just one “wrong” election away from becoming a reality.