Fractured Romania

The Romanian presidential election on 24 November 2024 was supposed to be a predictable affair. Marcel Ciolacu, the incumbent prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), was expected to win by a wide margin and keep the country on its current path, presiding over a Western-oriented, market-friendly government of the political centre. The only uncertainty was the identity of the runner-up, with a number of candidates vying for position: Nicolae Ciucă of the conservative National Liberal Party (PNL), George Simion of the reactionary Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), Elena Lasconi of ultraliberal Save Romania Union (USR), and the former NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoană. But something strange happened in the two weeks leading up to the first round of voting. A far-right independent, little-known throughout the country and polling at less than 1%, enjoyed a sudden surge of popularity, and seemed capable of overtaking his rivals. 

Călin Georgescu is a onetime diplomat and AUR politician who was banished from the party for supporting the Legionaries, Romania’s interwar fascist movement, whom he described as ‘heroes’. He has since remade himself as a prolific YouTuber and TikToker, sending live broadcasts from his living room in which he and his wife preach a combination of New Age wisdom and hardline nationalism. His campaign speeches were often plagiarized from Hollywood productions like The Newsroom and Lord of the Rings. His policies included achieving self-sufficiency in agriculture and energy, banning sex education in schools, defending Christianity from ‘multiculturalism’, strengthening ties with Israel and, perhaps most consequentially, pushing for peace in Ukraine.

On the day of the election, Georgescu’s support was at 10% and rising. The political class breathed a sigh of relief at the initial exit polls, which showed Ciolacu in first place and Lasconi in second. But later that night, as the count drew to a close, the results shifted dramatically: Ciolacu had fallen to third, with 19.1%, behind Lasconi on 19.2% and Georgescu on almost 23%, which meant that the latter two were set to advance to a final runoff. The next morning, the country’s most frequent Google searches were ‘Who is Călin Georgescu?’ and ‘What does Legionary mean?’ As Romanians tried to familiarize themselves with their would-be president, some of his more colourful pronouncements began to circulate online: that the Romanian language was the origin of Latin; that Romania must strive to dominate the global horse industry; that medical science is useless because only Christ can cure us; that nanotechnology is inserted into food in order to manipulate people, and so on.

The Constitutional Court of Romania immediately sought to cast doubt on Georgescu’s victory. It had already rejected the candidacy of Diana Șoșoacă, another AUR breakaway who had been polling over 5%, on the basis that her anti-EU and anti-NATO positions were unconstitutional. After the first round, it made the controversial decision to order a recount, citing possible irregularities. When none were found, the CCR was forced to certify the results. However, on 28 November the incumbent president Klaus Iohannis convened the national security body CSAT, which includes the heads of the army and intelligence agencies, and announced that documents had been uncovered which called the election into question. When he made them public some days later, they alleged that several Romanian individuals and companies had provided illegal funding to Georgescu’s campaign. Though there was no clear link to Russia, the media amplified suspicions that Moscow was involved. They were helped by the State Department, which expressed its ‘concern’ over the allegations.

An almost identical scandal had recently unfolded in Moldova, where pro-Western parties alleged that Russian propaganda had influenced the presidential election in late October – boosting the independent populist candidacy of Alexandr Stoianoglo, who was challenging the centrist incumbent Maia Sandu. This same narrative was replayed in Romania with even less evidence. From what we know so far, it appears that Georgescu did indeed skirt electoral laws by spending hundreds of thousands of euros on a last-minute TikTok campaign: paying around a hundred high-profile Romanian influencers to promote his candidacy and flooding the platform with videos, in violation of rules which outlaw political advertising the day before an election. But there was no evidence to suggest that this was the primary factor in swaying the outcome. Indeed, the sums were small-fry compared to the tens of millions that the major parties spent on mainstream media advertising over the course of the election, exploiting their access to state subsidies. Nor have ongoing investigations found any clear sign of Russian interference, though this did not stop a group of US senators denouncing ‘Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of Chinese Communist Party-controlled TikTok to undermine Romania’s democratic process’.

On 6 December, with the second round of voting already underway among the diaspora and scheduled to begin in less than 48 hours in Romania, the CCR announced that the election had been annulled. Georgescu voters denounced what they called a ‘state coup d’état’ and flooded the streets in protest. The police meanwhile set about detaining his alleged associates from neo-fascist groups and raiding properties linked to Bogdan Peschir, a 36-year-old cryptocurrency investor who was said to have donated $381,000 to the TikTok campaign. It took six weeks for the government to set a date for new elections, which are now scheduled for 4 May. Though Georgescu remains the most popular candidate, there is a strong chance that he will not be allowed to run if the state can find a strong enough reason to debar him.

How did Georgescu manage to secure 2.1 million votes? Clearly, it was not down to TikTok alone. Perhaps more decisive was his dissenting position on Ukraine. All other candidates either ignored the war or promised to escalate it by deepening involvement in NATO, which is now planning to use Romania as the site for its largest military base. Even the far-right nationalist Simion, running on an ostensibly Eurosceptic platform, was fully signed up to this hawkish consensus, styling himself as a Meloni-esque figure with whom the centrist parties could do business. Georgescu’s support for a diplomatic solution, by contrast, appealed to voters who were concerned by the economic fallout of the conflict and favoured more pragmatic relations with Russia. As his rivals branded him a stooge of the Kremlin, he quickly consolidated his reputation as a political outsider.

Yet the contours of the Ukraine debate were themselves determined by Romania’s particular economic position, caught between East and West. After the fall of Communism, the country’s two main political groupings were a phalanx of right-wing parties with the PNL at its forefront and the ostensibly centre-left PSD. They alternated in power over the following decades, each of them leading broad and unstable coalitions that presided over a series of devastating neoliberal reforms: selling off state assets, closing down domestic industries, winding down welfare programmes and amending the constitution to allow for EU accession. The only real disagreement between the two blocs was over the pace of marketization, with the right favouring a more rapid shock-therapy approach.

In 2021, however, the parties of the PNL-led government descended into acrimony over a state investment programme which was supposed to modernize rural areas, with the junior partners in the coalition claiming that the scheme was prone to corruption. When prime minister Florin Cîțu ignored their concerns, they tabled a motion of no confidence which brought down the government. In its wake, the PNL and PSD brokered a historic compromise, forming a big-tent coalition to preserve their power and support Iohannis’s centrist presidency. At that point, the political axis shifted away from left and right towards pro- and anti-EU. ‘Europeanism’ became the principal ideology of the establishment parties, while the far right claimed to represent a ‘sovereigntist’ alternative.

Throughout this period, Romania’s ideological climate has been highly constrained. Modest social-democratic proposals, from higher wages to public investment, are inevitably cast as attempts to restore the communist system. Opponents of the PSD have long accused it of being a crypto-socialist outfit that wanted to bring back ‘the red plague’. For today’s urban youth, the state has ceased to exist as anything more than a malign conspiracy. The pensions and housing benefits of the Ceaușescu era are a distant memory, and the government is no longer expected to provide a social safety net. In this vacuum, ultra-capitalism has gained a constituency among entrepreneurs and wage-earners alike, who have come to see ‘state corruption’ as their principal enemy. When the government tried to impose a modest tax on banks in 2017, for example, diverse social layers staged a series of protests which forced it to backtrack. This dynamic has turned Romania into a quasi-tax haven, where the state functions as little more than a welfare service for big business. Its economic model relies on attracting foreign investment in white-collar sectors, often to the detriment of local enterprises, which try to stay afloat by evading taxes and super-exploiting their informal workers.

During the Covid-19 crisis, the Romanian far right – whose three poles are Georgescu, the AUR and the even more radical S.O.S. Romania – made an effective appeal to these enterprises, styling themselves as defenders of domestic capital against the globalist elite. Over the past five years, they have used the standard right-populist playbook (nationalism, conspiracism, conservatism) to build a strong base among the tourism industry, resource exploitation sectors and small and medium traders, along with the police, army and intelligence agencies. The latter are highly militarized and have a far greater budget than in equivalent EU states, as well as ample business connections, which makes them a significant political actor. The Romanian Orthodox Church has also seen large parts of its membership gravitate towards the far right, so far with the tacit acceptance of its leadership.

Romanian sovereigntism can also draw strength from the diaspora. Out of a total population of 19 million, roughly 4 million Romanians have left the country for work, while 1 million regularly take seasonal jobs in foreign countries. Of the 820,000 who voted overseas in the presidential election, more than half supported Georgescu: enough to secure his victory. Their reasons for backing the far right are various. They are hostile to newer waves of migrants whom they accuse of ‘stealing’ their jobs, especially in Italy, Spain and Germany; they view the EU as responsible for their poor working conditions; and they are keen to take revenge on the traditional parties, whose mismanagement has exiled them from their home country. Many of them are also in relatively comfortable positions abroad, with stable incomes that they could not get in Romania, which lowers the stakes of a protest vote.  

All this adds up to a powerful cross-class coalition, which wants to ‘liberate’ Romanian capital from the pressures of foreign capital and rejects the endless warmongering of the establishment. After all, these two issues are closely intertwined. The Europeanists’ decision to deregulate the Romanian energy market helped to exacerbate the inflationary spiral that followed the Russian invasion. And the rerouting of Ukrainian exports through the Romanian market since 2022 has eroded prices for domestic producers. With the PNL and PSD refusing to address such problems, Georgescu’s message of economic autonomy and foreign diplomacy has cut through. To dismiss his success as the result of ‘Putinist’ meddling is to ignore its material bases.

What we are witnessing in Romania, then, is a conflict between different fractions of capital (foreign and domestic, large and small) which tends to manifest in ‘cultural’ issues: LGBT rights, ‘Russian influence’, etc. This also maps onto a demographic split between retirees, who generally support the traditional parties, and young people who are seduced by the sovereigntists. For now, the former still retain a legislative advantage. When parliamentary elections were held in December last year, the PSD came first with 22%, ahead of the AUR on 18% and the PNL on 13%. The USR came fourth with 12% and SOS fifth with 7%. Overall, Europeanists control more than 50% of parliamentary seats while the far right holds around 30%, although the first grouping is in a state of steady decline while the second continues to rise. The PSD and PNL have managed to form another fragile coalition, reelecting Ciolacu as prime minister, and are planning to put forward a single candidate to counter the far right in the upcoming presidential election. The far right is meanwhile hoping that Trump’s presidency will weaken the EU and its domestic allies therewith.

Beneath these fractures, though, the entire Romanian political scene remains committed to a ‘minimal state’, whose main role is to transfer wealth from working people to businesses and the security services. In their 2024 campaigns, the four leading presidential candidates – Georgescu, Ciolacu, Lasconi and Simion – all emphasized the heroism of entrepreneurs but said nothing about their employees. As long as this is the case, popular frustration will continue to simmer, and politicians like Georgescu will continue to harness it. By attempting to repress such discontent via the courts and the police, the Europeanists risk destroying whatever legitimacy they have left.

Translated by Ciprian Șiulea

Read on: Alexander Clapp, ‘Romania Redivivus’, NLR 108.