Democracy’s Funeral

Romania is one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the EU. One-third of the population either live in poverty or are at risk of poverty, particularly in rural areas. The average pension is around £360 a month. The gap in living standards and educational attainment between the urban middle class and the poor means they effectively live in separate worlds. The political class is widely despised by most sections of Romanian society. Established politicians, almost without exception, are seen as self-serving and corrupt, addicted to nepotism and theft, using the mechanisms of institutional patronage to maintain their grip on power.

The current group of politicians in power is a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party. The PSD and the PNL are pro-EU, pro-Nato and economically liberal insofar as that means committed to austerity. Many Romanians are sceptical of the EU, which they see as operating by diktat and hostile to the values of the Orthodox Church. They are also sceptical of Nato, seeing it as an instrument for securing US hegemony in Europe, which is currently sustaining an unwinnable war on Romania’s border.

Călin Georgescu won the first round of the presidential election last November (later annulled by the Constitutional Court) because he wants to make the problem of poverty into a significant political issue, is concerned about political corruption, and would like to make Romania agriculturally self-sufficient. (His background is in agronomy.) He wants to take back into Romanian ownership the foreign-owned assets that were bought for almost nothing during the privatisation craze that followed the collapse of communism. In the UK these policies would put him on the left, somewhere between Jeremy Corbyn and the Green Party. He is also a nationalist and a supporter of ‘traditional family values’ that would put him comfortably alongside Robert Jenrick.

Much Western coverage of Georgescu has focused on his alleged links to Vladimir Putin, his admiration for Romania’s fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s, and his weakness for conspiracy theories (he has said he doesn’t believe in Covid, the Moon landings or climate change). But these are not the reasons he appeals to many ordinary Romanians, for whom he represents an alternative to the corruption and incompetence of the PSD/PNL alliance.

The Constitutional Court of Romania was designed, in the words of Bianca Selejan-Guțan, a professor of constitutional law, to serve as ‘the guardian of the rule of law, by limiting the abuses of political power and by simultaneously maintaining [itself] within the constitutionally designed limits of competencies’. The events of the last few months show that the court has failed in every one of these respects.

All nine members of the CCR are appointed either by Parliament or by the president. Eight of the current judges were appointed by the PSD or the PNL. On 6 October 2024, Diana Șoșoacă, a right-wing populist, was barred by the CCR from standing in the presidential election, on the grounds that by wanting Romania to withdraw from the EU and Nato, Șoșoacă ‘aimed at undermining the constitutional foundations of the Romanian state and its guarantees, namely Romania’s membership in Euro-Atlantic structures’.

Even people who had no sympathy with Șoșoacă’s politics were appalled by the anti-democratic decision. It was the first time the CCR had excluded a candidate from a presidential election on the basis of their stated policies. In her dissenting opinion, one of the judges, Laura-Iuliana Scântei, wrote that the court should limit itself to examining the ‘objective conditions’ of the candidates: whether they submitted the correct forms on time, whether they had obtained the minimum number of supporters’ signatures and so on. The court, Scântei said, should ‘not concern the behaviour, opinions, statements or attitudes of the person who submits his candidacy for the election of the president of Romania’.

In the first round of the presidential election, on 24 November, Georgescu came from nowhere to top the ballot with 23 per cent (on a turnout of 53 per cent). Elena Lasconi of the USR, a pro-EU and pro-Nato party, came second with 19 per cent, narrowly beating the PSD candidate to a place in the run-off on 8 December.

After the results were announced, one of the candidates, Cristian-Vasile Terheș, who had received just 1 per cent of the vote, filed an objection with the CCR, claiming that some votes had been miscounted. He didn’t present much serious evidence of fraud. The court ordered a recount anyway. On 2 December, after a partial recount, the CCR accepted that the results of the first round were valid, and that the second round run-off between Georgescu and Lasconi could go ahead.

To everyone’s astonishment, four days later the CCR overturned its own decision and annulled the first round result. Voting had already begun among the diaspora in the second round. The indications were that Georgescu would become the next president of Romania. The CCR ordered that voting should cease immediately and the votes already cast should be discounted. Completely new elections would have to take place at some unspecified date in the future. Such a decision is without precedent in an EU country. Lasconi – a pro-EU, pro-Nato liberal – said that it ‘crushes the very essence of democracy’.

Despite having lost on 24 November, the PSD and the PNL will now get a second chance. It seems likely they will put forward a joint candidate, who they hope will attract all the voters alarmed at the prospect of a Georgescu presidency.

Liberalism and democracy are not inseparable. The liberals of the PSD and the PNL have shown that they are not democrats. And illiberal politicians like Georgescu can win democratic elections. If he were to prove a disappointment and fail to deliver on his promises, people could vote him out again.

There may have been some dark money behind Georgescu’s TikTok campaign, and it may have had links to pro-Russian computer activists. But the idea that Romanian voters were brainwashed into voting for Georgescu by a Putin-led disinformation campaign is not only ridiculous, it betrays the patronising assumptions that liberals are prone to make about people who do not share their view of the world. Romanians are fed up with poverty and failure. They are fed up with corrupt and incompetent politicians. They are tired of the politics of patronage and theft. The CCR is not part of the mechanism for protecting democracy. It is part of the mechanism that undermines it.

On Sunday, fifty thousand demonstrators marched through Bucharest. They carried a coffin and performed a funeral service to mourn the death of democracy. Romanians are already cynical about the ability of politicians to do anything to improve their lives. Only 30 per cent of voters bothered to turn out in the 2020 parliamentary elections. What has happened is likely to increase the levels of cynicism with regard to the established political parties. It would be unsurprising if the result were a turn towards right-wing nationalism. The long-term prospects for democracy in Romania look grim.