Romania grapples with election rerun

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Romania’s shock decision to annul its presidential vote over alleged Russian meddling has divided the fledgling democracy, highlighting the risks of failing to prevent foreign interference in European elections.

Authorities said presidential candidate Călin Georgescu, who has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin and vowed to jail political opponents, benefited from a sophisticated social media campaign that could have only been orchestrated by Russia.

With Romanians having just celebrated 35 years since Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was toppled, citizens are now grappling with how to react to a far-right politician’s surprise win in the first round of the now cancelled poll. Families and friends have taken opposing sides on supporting Georgescu and seeing his victory being taken away.

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice democracy to save democracy,” said Igor Bergler, a bestselling Romanian novelist and political satirist. The constitutional court’s decision was needed to prevent a potential dictator from coming to power, he said. “But it is a clearly antidemocratic step that sets a very dangerous precedent.”

Georgescu denies having any links with Moscow and has labelled the court’s decision a “coup” aimed at keeping him out of office. He has called outgoing president Klaus Iohannis “illegitimate” and threatened him and his “equally illegitimate government” with “years and years of prison” for taking decisions “that are not in our people’s interest”.

Liberal opposition politicians and analysts also blame Iohannis and his government for ignoring warnings and failing to fire any officials over the fiasco.

“Things got out of control. Authorities, led by intelligence services, did not know what to do, they did not expect any of this,” said Sorin Ioniță, who leads Expert Forum, a Bucharest-based think-tank. “Now it’s paralysis. Everyone is waiting for someone else to fall first.”

The Bucharest think-tank Expert Forum warned on the eve of the election that Georgescu had become more popular on TikTok in two months than all the other presidential candidates had all year. It also flagged similarities with a pro-Russian campaign in Moldova’s presidential vote in November.

“We suspect it was Russia because we see a pattern used in Moldova,” said Ioniță. “The Georgescu TikTok operation was not improvised. They knew what they were doing, it was a whole team able to handle algorithms and agencies that hire influencers.”

“It’s a system that can be easily exploited elsewhere,” Ioniță said. “The first test will be Germany because the stakes are huge and we will see that everything that was tried here will be applied there.”

The head of the German intelligence service has also warned that the country’s elections on February 23 are at risk of Russian interference.

Germany’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who belongs to the Social Democrats along with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said on Friday that “external influence is a threat to democracy, whether covert, as is allegedly the case in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practised particularly intensively on X”. The X social media platform is owned by Elon Musk, who has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Romania is expected to hold its presidential rerun in March or April, which will be followed by Polish presidential elections in May and parliamentary elections in Moldova in July.

Iohannis warned fellow EU leaders at a summit earlier this month that their elections could be the next target in Russia’s hybrid warfare. He said it was “nearly impossible” to prove the link to Moscow and did not blame any Romanian officials for failing to act in time.

The Kremlin has denied meddling in Romania or any other European country’s elections.

Prior to the annulled vote, opinion polls had projected that Romania’s Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, who began his second term on Monday, would win any run-off against a far-right presidential candidate. But those estimates were proven wrong, as the Social Democrat premier came in third, behind liberal opposition politician Elena Lasconi and Georgescu. 

Lasconi plans to stand again in the spring despite saying that it was a “curse” that Iohannis and Ciolacu had not both resigned.

“We are about to lose our democracy,” she said on Sunday. “We are in a hybrid war, [we have to] be careful about Russia intervening in presidential elections. But based on that principle, we should also cancel the parliamentary elections.”

Romania’s constitutional court has currently not questioned the validity of the December 1 parliamentary poll, in which Ciolacu’s Social Democratic party came first, followed by the far right AUR party that backs Georgescu.

Ciolacu has vowed to hold the new presidential vote “in a normal climate, not in a hybrid reality built from outside by Romania’s enemies”.

Additional reporting by Laura Pitel in Berlin