The ongoing constitutional coup in Romania escalated dramatically on Sunday when the country’s electoral commission announced that Călin Georgescu—the frontrunner in the upcoming presidential election and a staunch eurosceptic, NATO critic, and peace advocate—would be barred from running. This is the latest chapter in the Romanian state’s war on the independent populist candidate. It all began last November, when Georgescu emerged as the surprise winner of the first round of the presidential election. Shortly before the runoff, which Georgescu was tipped to win by a large margin, the country’s constitutional court, in an extraordinary and unprecedented move, declared the result invalid due to alleged Russian interference.
“His message appealed to voters facing economic hardship.”
However, the intelligence dossier presented against Georgescu—“declassified” and published by Romania’s then-president Klaus Iohannis two days before the ruling—provided no clear evidence of foreign interference or even electoral manipulation. It simply pointed to the existence of a media campaign supporting Georgescu that involved around 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers, and coordinated messaging. In other words, Romania’s top court annulled an entire election based on entirely unsubstantiated claims of foreign interference.
Even more incredibly, a Romanian investigative outlet subsequently revealed that the TikTok campaign used to justify the cancellation of the election was actually paid for by the ruling National Liberal Party—the very party that supported cancelling the elections, and from which the country’s former president, who played a key role in the whole affair until his resignation last month, originated. In other words, the whole operation was likely a deliberate ploy to give the intelligence services an excuse to overturn an election that the ruling establishment was set to lose for the first time since the fall of the Soviet-backed regime in 1989.
A new election date was set for May, but many questioned how the establishment could prevent a repeat of the November results—especially since the entire charade only strengthened support for Georgescu. The answer came with Sunday’s decision to bar Georgescu from running altogether. Particularly striking is the fact that the electoral commission’s ruling is based on the “foreign interference” allegations used by the constitutional court to annul the first round of the presidential election, even though these have been debunked. Unsurprisingly, on Tuesday, the constitutional court rejected Georgescu’s appeal against the electoral bureau’s ruling.