Paula Erizanu

Romania’s Constitutional Court has annulled the first round of the presidential election on 24 November, won by the far-right nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu, with 23 per cent of the vote. The court decision follows the declassification of secret documents showing unprecedented Russian interference involving large-scale TikTok manipulation, vote buying, cyber-attacks and illegal financing, all in favour of Georgescu.

More than half of Romanians haven’t read a book in the past year, according to the National Statistics Institute. There are about 25 million Romanian speakers in the world, compared to ten million Hungarians, but the average print run for a Hungarian novel is three thousand, while for a Romanian novel it’s less than half that. Why don’t Romanians read more?

The recent arrest of Andrew Tate in Romania has shown how misogyny makes money. The former kickboxer, Big Brother contestant and social media influencer was detained on 29 December on charges of organised crime, human trafficking and rape. Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism started looking into the case in April last year, after the US Embassy was contacted by a friend of an American woman who said she had been abducted by the Tate brothers in Bucharest.

I arrived in Moldova in mid-April, just as the UK government announced it would be sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. I shared the news with friends from Moldova for Peace, a group of volunteers helping provide information, accommodation, transport and food to 77,000 of the 475,000 Ukrainian refugees that have crossed the Moldovan border since the start of the war. They were shocked by Britain’s callousness. Around 75,000 refugees are still in Moldova, 95 per cent of them hosted by individuals rather than refugee centres. But as the war drags on, Moldovans are looking for ways to make their hospitality efforts sustainable – while facing security risks and impoverishment themselves as a result of the war. Inflation has reached 27 per cent.

In 1990, twenty years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature’, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote an essay entitled How to Rebuild Russia? He argued that the USSR should splinter along ‘ethnic’ lines: the Baltic states, Moldova, the South Caucasus and most of the Central Asian republics should be let go, while a new Russian nation would include Ukraine, Belarus and the ethnic Russian parts of Kazakhstan. The essay overemphasised the similarities between the peoples who would live in this imagined country, and brushed off the repression they suffered under the tsarist and Soviet regimes.