Romania, a testing ground for a European democracy in crisis

The far right is leading the electoral mobilization in Romania. The first round of the presidential elections, held this Sunday, gave 40% of the votes to the far-right candidate, George Simion, a defender of Greater Romania, an opponent of European aid to Ukraine, a declared Trumpist, and a supporter of the "melonization" of Europe. Simion will now face the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicu?or Dan, who finished twenty points behind but hopes to garner the support of the pro-European vote in the second round, scheduled for May 18.

The elections in Romania have become the testing ground for the dilemmas recently challenging European democracies. The judicial annulment of the first round held last November due to signs of foreign interference has ended up becoming the symbol of two completely contradictory visions of what it means to protect the democratic system. What's at stake is not only whether Romania will become the next European Union country to shift sharply to the right, but also what the limits are for internal and external interventions in electoral processes that are constantly under scrutiny.

The Romanian Constitutional Court has become a direct actor in these elections, both by annulling Calin Georgescu's victory in the fall and by banning him from running again. The Bucharest government denounced Russian interference in Georgescu's favor, and the courts accused him of lying about his campaign financing. Supporters of the far right called it a "constitutional coup," and a segment of the Romanian electorate believes the judicial intervention was an anti-democratic maneuver. For this reason, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen hailed Sunday's result as "a very nice boomerang" for Brussels. But, even if the European Commission simply says it does not comment on internal issues of the Member States, it is facing a European drift that impacts the democratic quality of the entire Union.

Last week in Germany, the equivalent of its Constitutional Court authorized the country's secret services to increase surveillance of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which includes police infiltration of the far-right party and access to its communications. The AfD is the second-largest party. It is not a minority group.

All of this raises questions, especially when viewed from Catalonia, about what role the justice system should play. But also about what legitimacy we give to the electorate of these political parties, because the risk of treating voters like little children who make mistakes when making their democratic choices leads to even greater disaffection and distrust in the system.

The disarray of the Romanian presidential elections also highlights the increasingly complicated relationship between democratic states and social media. The until-recently unknown Calin Georgescu built his electoral campaign on social media, artificially amplifying his disinformation messages, from the assumption that COVID-19 was not a real pandemic but a planned global attack to denying the existence of political repression prisons during the communist regime, or falsehoods made by Romanians. Georgescu leveraged not only the power of TikTok, but also Meta's failure to comply with the EU's restrictions on political advertising during election periods.

The electoral exploitation of social media has many precedents: from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to Brexit and Donald Trump, or the viral message strategies of Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini.

But Trumpism has used the Romanian elections as a symbol of the European Union's problems with freedom of expression.

Finally, Simion's victory also reinforces the power of attraction of Donald Trump's universe. The Romanian was one of the European far-right attendees at the US president's inauguration ceremony and declares himself an admirer of the MAGA ideology. Elon Musk has publicly supported him. And Donald Trump Junior included Bucharest in the tour he made at the end of April through Eastern Europe, with stops in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, a dinner with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade, and visits to Bulgaria and Romania to defend deregulated cryptocurrency markets.

Geopolitics has made Romania a strategic player for NATO and for a European Union that constantly needs to strengthen its unity in supporting Ukraine. But the country is also an example of all the political and economic weaknesses that EU membership has failed to reverse: there is a general discontent with the political class that has run the country since the end of communism; widespread corruption; and an explosion of the far right, which, along with the pandemic, has found a foothold in public debate. Inflation well above the European average, deep inequalities, and the threat of austerity measures that everyone is beginning to assume will be inevitable mean that, for a significant portion of the population, the EU has not provided the well-being they had hoped for. Now, moreover, doubts about the legitimacy of the system are worsening.