The Coup Against Romania’s Trumpian Turn

On November 24, the first round of voting in the Romanian presidential elections yielded the unforeseen victory of Călin Georgescu, a populist outsider who, ignored by legacy media and excluded from debates, campaigned on social media and podcasts. In his policies, campaign strategy, and class traitor status, his resemblance to Donald Trump is striking. His performance in the election even had some commenters worried about a “Trump effect” sweeping Europe.

But on December 6, two days before the runoff that seemed sure to make Georgescu president, the election was canceled by the Constitutional Court of Romania. The Court justified its unprecedented action on the grounds that Russia may have meddled in the election by amplifying Georgescu’s reach on TikTok, as alleged in a document released by the Romanian government on December 4. The U.S. State Department quickly issued a statement supporting the judicial coup.

TikTok released its own statement contradicting the Romanian government: “The networks we have detected specifically targeting the Romanian elections have so far been small scale operations coordinated on TikTok that operated domestically.” The one network specifically boosting Georgescu comprised only seventy-eight accounts with a mere 1,781 followers. 

Georgescu conducted his campaign without major funding, working primarily with volunteers, and almost entirely through YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. The major hashtags associated with Georgescu’s campaign earned a combined 145 million views in a country of 19 million people, less than half of whom are on TikTok. His three principal rivals had far higher numbers (for example, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu had 328 million views), yet those numbers didn’t translate into votes, as they did for Georgescu. 

The international press is framing the Court’s intervention as a last-second rescue of democracy. But even if the evidence of Russian social media interference wasn’t so thin, the Court has no constitutional authority to annul an election on such grounds. Article 146(f) of the Romanian Constitution, cited by the Court as authorizing its action, empowers the Court “to guard the observance of the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and to confirm the ballot returns.” The Romanian government has not claimed that voting procedure was tampered with. Why did the Court so baldly upend the constitutional order?

One answer is that Romania’s runoff election arrived at the crucial moment when it has become impossible to pretend that Ukraine can defeat Russia, as David Goldman has observed. Georgescu is running on a peace platform and has criticized NATO’s regime change efforts. Because Romania hosts American military bases, participates in the Aegis Ashore missile shield, and has a sizable army, it is vital to NATO’s eastern flank. A Georgescu victory could have an immediate impact on the war.

Romanian elites, on the other hand, are entirely pro-war. This has made them cozier than ever with their Western counterparts, but also places them in political danger. This duality is displayed in presidential candidate Elena Lasconi’s open letter to Donald Trump on X. In her letter, Lasconi bills herself as a populist voice of the people, while applying Russiagate clichés to Romania. But her countrymen are more likely to see her as a provincial pandering to the imperial center. No one in Romania fears a Russian invasion for the simple reason that Russia, after its incompetent performance in Ukraine, is ill-equipped to take on NATO. 

Surprisingly, Lasconi also protested the Court’s intervention; she was set to face Georgescu in the runoff election. “My campaign was fair and just,” she wrote. “No one in government said anything about any election fraud. And at the 11th hour, the election was canceled and polarized even more the Romanian society. I am afraid that in a short time we will have a larger Romania in the diaspora than here at home—and we will give to Russia the Romania we all love.”

Georgescu takes the opposite side in this political drama. He refuses to equate Putin with Hitler. He views NATO’s plans to build its largest base in Europe on Romania’s Black Sea coast as a provocation that endangers his country. At the same time, he has declared his commitment to NATO while demanding Romania be treated with more respect. A Georgescu presidency, alongside the premierships of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, would make NATO-skepticism more permissible. 

Populist politicians are so popular—and so hated—because they are caricatures of the national ethos. Trump embodies multiple American archetypes: business magnate, snake oil huckster, teetotaler, playboy, Las Vegas fight night announcer. It should be unsurprising that amidst national paralysis and fragmentation, many Americans look to so hyperbolically American a figure for reassurance that their nation still has an identifiable character—and a future.

Georgescu is the only figure in Romanian post-communist politics to fit that bill. His message is that Romanians should remember their pride, their history of resistance to imperial invasions, their faith (his reaction to his victory was to declare, “we are all part of a great work, among ourselves and also all of us with God”), the symbols and cultural figures that kept them together in bad times. He resurrected the economic slogan of the early twentieth-century Liberal party during the apex of the Romanian monarchy: “by ourselves”—also the motto of the Order of the Crown of Romania in the late nineteenth century. That moment of romantic nationalism still looms large in the public imagination (even the communists had to placate it), but until now received no formal representation. 

Georgescu is a curious mixture of the high and the low, making him a plausible bridge figure in Romanian politics. He has a doctorate, and was shaped within the very elite international institutions he now criticizes, having served in multiple governments and as a U.N. special rapporteur. His genteel formation is apparent in his blending of a demotic tone with older bourgeois manners (for instance, addressing his interlocutors with polite, formal pronouns). He’s a sharp dresser who spent his life trying to succeed in public affairs, but he’s also a family man who talks about ancient wisdom, the soul, and the divine within us. 

Like many Romanians, he’s also given to conspiracy theories, an understandable mindset for a people who endured forty years of communist horrors perpetrated by actual conspirators. Such conspiratorial thinking can be a liability—good political decision-making requires realism—but it is also part of Georgescu’s appeal, as it affronts elites’ claim to impersonal expertise.

Populists often say that elites need to be taught a lesson. But it’s more accurate to say that elites resolutely refuse to learn, and therefore should be replaced. America is now trying to accomplish just that and may inspire revolts against corrupt elites elsewhere. In the case of Romania, it would be a fitting feedback loop. Romanian democracy is a creature of American victory in the Cold War, while today’s Romanian populism is the creature of technological and economic transformations ushered in by that victory. 

The Trump effect on Europe has only begun to make itself felt and we can expect the major powers in Europe, especially Germany and France, to be rocked by populism and anti-elite sentiment. Romania’s Trumpian turn is only the prelude to the drama.

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