During the Eurozone crisis, the European Central Bank overrode the will of national governments. Whether it was imposing austerity measures on Greece and Ireland or stoking a bond crisis to drive Eurosceptic Italian ministers from office, the ECB showed that stability mattered more than respecting the wishes of the electorate. These actions were often outrageous and sometimes illegal. Yet the politicians and technocrats, along with their media supporters, never really hid their priorities. When Mario Draghi said that the ECB would “do whatever it takes to preserve the Euro,” he meant it. Since the end of World War II, Europeans assumed that their national governments had the power to set monetary and fiscal policy. The Eurozone crisis showed that wasn’t true.
Something similar has just happened in Romania. On Nov. 24, the nationalist presidential candidate Calin Georgescu upset political predictions in an otherwise reliably boring Eastern European country and won the first round. The second round was due to take place on Dec. 8, but two days before, after voting had already started, Romania’s constitutional court canceled the planned election and annulled the results of the first one. In an action also approved by the court, the outgoing president will remain in office after his term ends.
“Other Western governments praised the Romanian court.”
The court did this not because of evidence of ballot fraud or electoral illegalities, but because Romania’s intelligence agencies released a statement alleging Russia had interfered in the election and helped run a nebulous TikTok messaging campaign. It’s on those terms—the threat of false information spreading over social media—that other Western governments praised the Romanian court and the country’s president. Reports that “Russian information is influencing the presidential elections,” as the German Foreign office put it, were good enough to suspend the election and the constitution.
Extreme as this might seem, this move is a direct application of the anti-disinformation paradigm that politicians and technocrats have promoted for years. The anti-disinformation paradigm started making major headlines in early 2016, when Barack Obama tasked the Global Engagement Center, a quasi-interdepartmental agency run out of the State Department, with fighting disinformation. It’s preoccupied elites ever since. At the beginning of 2024, Ursula von der Leyen reaffirmed at Davos that the top concern of the European community is “disinformation and misinformation.” She meant it. The Romanian crisis shows that the anti-disinformation paradigm is incompatible with the tenets of postwar liberal democracy. The two cannot coexist.