In a Democracy, Calin Georgescu should be Romania's President
On 24th November 2024, 9.5 million Romanians - nearly half of all registered voters - voted in the Eastern European country’s Presidential election.
It was only the fledgling democracy’s ninth ever Presidential election. And it came at a pivotal point in the development of civic society in the country - as pivotal as the United States’ ninth Presidential election, which returned Thomas Jefferson to power.
But in Romania, democracy seems to play by different rules. Nine working days after the vote, nine judges’ opinion overruled the voice of 9 million of their fellow countrymen, and the election result was annulled.
The reason? 2.2 million of those voters supported Calin Georgescu, a career diplomat and former Special Rapporteur in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Annulling an election in a democracy that is barely a generation old is risky. Doing so without explanation, and with the only justification being the pronouncements of the security services and the rubber stamping of unelected judges, is autocracy.
Georgescu’s enemies claim that he is a Putin asset, because he positioned Romania as neutral in the war in Ukraine. They say he is the beneficiary of Kremlin online influence operations, because he has viral support on Tiktok. And they believe he must have received secret funding from Moscow, because his electoral opponents have deeper pockets than him and still lost.
It should not be difficult to understand the instinct for non-alignment in a country that has a smaller military than Nepal. If going viral on TikTok is evidence of Kremlin influence operations, security services globally should be investigating beauty regimens. And if an underfunded insurgent candidate with an eclectic CV can only garner grass roots support with help from Moscow, Ukrainian President Zelensky has questions to answer.
There is a clear international consensus that Georgescu is the only figure in Romania with the credibility and capacity to navigate high-level global negotiations and be truly listened to on the world stage. This universal recognition of his leadership comes at a critical time, as Romania currently finds itself in a disastrous economic situation.
Most of my friends in Romania didn’t vote for Georgescu, but they did vote. And they want their votes to matter. They want to live in a democracy, and a democracy where it’s ok to vote for someone the elite doesn’t like. Romanians have dark memories of government officials relying on shadowy intelligence reports to shut down civil society. Those dark memories have resurfaced because of Brussels-sanctioned actions.
From the late 1940s, Romania’s ‘Securitate’ (one of the largest secret police forces in the Eastern Bloc, per capita) became the core instrument through which communist leaders eliminated political pluralism.
They almost always used secret intelligence reports as formal justification. Party and government leaders relied on Securitate “informative notes” to build cases for show trials against leaders of historical parties (such as the National Peasant Party and National Liberal Party), branding them “agents of imperialism” and “enemies of the people” based on closed, unverifiable evidence.
This only ended in 1989. Most Romanians were alive then, and they do not want to see their country go back to its dark past - even if that dark past is now supported by EU institutions.
Democracies are fragile, younger democracies even more so. Romanian democracy is barely a generation old. It needs to be supported through its adolescence by Europe’s institutions - even if, in their view, it makes some mistakes on the path to maturity.
Ironically, those deep state elements who claimed to be protecting Romania against Russian interference by discarding the vote for Georgescu, may have played right into Putin’s hands.
Russian-linked commentators quickly used the annulment of the Presidential election result as evidence that ‘democracy doesn’t work’. Even the most Russophobic amongst us must concede that this time, they have a point.
Democracy’s defenders, in Romania and elsewhere, whether they are journalists, judges or demonstrators should remember that a democracy is only a democracy if it is allowed to upset those who claim to defend it.
Sheridan Hanson is a London-based freelance writer on law and human rights.
