On December 6th, Romania’s constitutional court made an extraordinary decision to inexplicably overturn first-round results of the country’s November 24th presidential election. Conveniently, the ruling was made mere days before a runoff that, according to polls, would’ve seen upstart outsider Calin Georgescu win via landslide. In the process, citizens of all NATO member states were provided with a particularly pitiless real-time crash course on what could now happen in their own countries, should the ‘wrong’ candidates be elected fair and square.

Georgescu’s stunning victory in the first round caught Romania’s political elite and their Western sponsors off guard, while leaving him the most popular political figure in the country. Campaigning on a traditionalist, nationalist platform, he extolled views some might consider unsavoury, but also advocated nationalisation, and state investment in local industry. Perhaps predictably, the Western media has been quick to smear him as “far-right”, “pro-Putin” and a “conspiracy theorist”, among other now familiar sobriquets commonly levelled at political dissidents.

Georgescu’s greatest crime is to be determinedly opposed to continued Romanian involvement in and backing for the Ukraine proxy war. As Kiev’s Black Sea-facing neighbour, Bucharest has offered significant financial, material and political succour since February 2022, all along running the risk of getting caught in the crossfire. But in interviews with Western news outlets, Georgescu boldly proclaimed any and all “military or political support” would be reduced to “zero” under his watch:

“I have to take care of my people. I don't want to involve my people…Everything stops. I have to take care just about my people. We have a lot of problems ourselves.”

No official reason has been given for Romania’s constitutional court voiding November’s vote, despite days earlier signing off on the results. Nonetheless, in the intervening time, Bucharest’s security apparatus released declassified reports intimating - without making direct accusations or providing concrete evidence - Georgescu’s victory may have resulted from a wide-ranging, Moscow-sponsored influence campaign, delivered via TikTok. Details provided instead point to a rather mundane - albeit highly successful - social media marketing effort. Nonetheless, the narrative of Russian destabilisation powering Georgescu into power has since been irrefutably minted.

Bucharest’s sprawling territory is home to multiple US missile facilities, and a giant NATO military base, scheduled to soon be greatly expanded, explicitly in service of decisively changing the region’s “balance of power” in the West’s favour. Meanwhile, Romanian presidents wield significant power, effectively dictating foreign policy, serving as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and appointing prime ministers. All of which points to a far more likely rationale for the presidential election’s abrogation than “Russian meddling”.

‘Not War’

On December 10th, the BBC published a striking report on how Romanians were “stunned by the eleventh-hour cancellation of their presidential election.” The British state broadcaster was at pains throughout to justify the vote’s unprecedented, despotic annulment as proper, reasonably motivated by a “massive” and “aggressive” malign meddling campaign on TikTok - whether of Russian origin or not - improperly skewing the result. However, the BBC evidently had little choice but to admit Georgescu was enormously, and organically, popular.

For example, NATO veteran Mircea Geoana, Bucharest’s former foreign affairs minister who ran for president in November and finished sixth, was quoted as saying “Romania dodged a bullet” and “came very close” to an all-out coup. “If Moscow can do this in Romania, which is profoundly anti-Russian, it means they can do it anywhere,” he ominously cautioned. Still, Geoana conceded there was “a whole cocktail of grievances in our society,” and it would be “hugely mistaken to believe” Georgescu’s success “was just because of Russia.”

The BBC acknowledged immense “fatigue” with Romania’s doggedly pro-Western political establishment widely abounds among the local population, who harbour an ever-growing number of legitimate grievances, entirely unaddressed in the mainstream. By contrast, the British state broadcaster recorded, Georgescu not only spoke openly and passionately about these manifold problems, but offered concrete solutions for tackling them. And a great many average citizens “liked what he said.” Several Georgescu supporters were duly quoted in the article, issuing effusive praise. One evangelised:

“He’s like a preacher, with a Bible in his hand, and I thought he spoke only the truth…He talks about rights and dignity. Romanians go to other countries for work, but we have so many resources here. Wood, grain - and our soil is very rich. Why should we be vagrants in Italy?”

The BBC further noted Georgescu’s “pledge to Make Romania Great Again helped him perform particularly strongly among the vast Romanian diaspora.” Given Bucharest’s mass depopulation in recent years, significantly assisted by EU membership, this is hardly surprising. “Many who left because life was so tough are now getting by abroad rather than prospering,” the British state broadcaster observed. Meanwhile, in Bucharest, costs of basic goods are “climbing at the fastest rate in Europe.” An expat supporter of Georgescu forcefully declared:

“He’s corrupt? He’s with Putin? No, he’s not. He’s with the people. With Romania. Georgescu is a patriot. He wants peace, not war, and we want that, too. Someone wants something good for his country and they won’t allow him to do that…Maybe he’ll be in prison in months and for what? For nothing…We feel lost right now, without hope.”

‘Allied Solidarity’

To date, no concrete evidence directly implicating NATO powers in the invalidation of Romania’s presidential election has emerged. We do not - and may never - know what may have been said behind closed doors to members of Bucharest’s Western-bought political, judicial, security and military establishment, and by whom. But there is a clear precedent for such backroom conniving. In the final months of 1989, Communism began collapsing across the Warsaw Pact, the Cold War-era constellation of Central and Eastern European Soviet satellite states.

The sole exception was Romania, then led by Nicolae Ceausescu. On December 4th that year, he privately met with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, to discuss the fall of longstanding Communist governments in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Gorbachev, to all intents and purposes a Western puppet, assured Ceaucescu his position was secure, he would “survive”, and they would meet again in mere weeks. That summit never came to pass though, as on December 25th, Ceaucescu was executed by military firing squad.

This followed violent mass protests across Romania. Years later, it was revealed high-ranking US officials secretly met with Gorbachev that month, imploring him to deploy the Red Army to oust Ceaucescu. These entreaties were apparently rebuffed. Yet, subsequent research indicates that throughout December 1989, a profusion of KGB operatives were conducting uncertain, covert missions across the country, in coordination with Ion Iliescu, who succeeded Ceaucescu. Suspicions he personally ordered the very security service crackdowns that ignited the insurrectionary anti-Ceausescu demonstrations endure to this day.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Romania’s outsized geopolitical importance to the Empire then and now couldn’t be clearer. In the weeks since Georgescu’s victory was vetoed, it has been announced that further scores of foreign NATO troops will be dispatched to Bucharest, in explicit response to “the evolution of the security situation in the Black Sea region.” Meanwhile, Romanian officials talk a big game on “allied solidarity”, and look forward to “extensive joint training exercises” over the year ahead.

Furthermore, on December 12th, the Romanian government abruptly greenlit long-mooted, highly controversial legislation providing for the country’s military and all its “weapons, military devices and ammunition” to come under total foreign control and direction at any time, without a formal state declaration of emergency, siege, or war. In other words, NATO would have unilateral power to commandeer Bucharest’s armed forces, at its behest. A useful capability indeed, as the nearby Ukraine proxy war careens towards total collapse, and overt foreign involvement is openly mulled.

The aforementioned BBC article reported that local “suspicion” about whether unseen foreign forces may have swayed “the judges’ ruling to cancel the vote” is such, “even those who feared a president Georgescu - and believe Russia was backing him - now worry about the precedent just set for Romanian democracy.” We are left to ponder where next the illiberal coup of the kind that just went down in Bucharest might be replicated, as the West’s surging contempt for democracy and public will becomes writ ever-larger.

Nonetheless, one might draw some solace from the fact that even figures who endorsed the execution of the autocratic putsch are well-aware it was a blunt-force, short-term solution to a panoply of deeply complex, likely intractable socioeconomic and political problems. Former NATO high-ranker Mircea Geoana told the British state broadcaster that the nullification of Georgescu’s victory had delivered at best transitory reprieve to Western powers, and their chosen puppets in Romania. Moreover, he feared the move could spectacularly boomerang, should citizens’ concerns continue to be ignored:

“We bought ourselves some time. But there is real fury here. And if we don’t do something, we might have a repeat.”