If the vote in the first round goes the wrong way, cancel the second round. If the ‘wrong’ candidate is still likely to win the rescheduled election, then detain him before he can register to stand and then ban him. Then hold the election again, this time with a stronger ‘independent’ candidate who with media support can defeat the ally of the ‘wrong’ but more popular candidate you have banned. This is exactly what has happened in Romania.
If ‘democratic values’ trump democracy then you open the door to barring candidates who espouse the ‘wrong’ positions, according to the powers that be
Democratic? Well, if it happened in an ‘official enemy’ country, we can be sure ‘centrists’ would be falling over themselves to denounce it. But when it happens in an EU or Nato member state, in the immortal words of Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun, it’s a case of ‘Nothing to see here!’.
The hypocrisy is truly off the scale. The man who should be Romanian president now, if genuine democracy had been allowed to run its course, is Calin Georgescu. He was the winner of the first round of the original presidential elections and looked to be in a good position to win the second round too. He was popular for the reasons I outlined here.
But then in an unprecedented move, just two days before the December run-off, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the entire election, citing declassified intelligence which alleged foreign interference chiefly through Tik Tok videos. Now if you’re going to take the drastic step of cancelling an election 48 hours before it is going to be held, you better have cast-iron evidence and make that cast-iron evidence public. But that hasn’t been done. ‘Authorities still haven’t provided any concrete evidence of Russian interference in the election, frustrating many Romanians’, admitted Rowan Ings of the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit on 25April.
You don’t have to support or endorse all or even any of Georgescu’s policies or statements to acknowledge that what happened in December was outrageous. Cancelling the second round of a presidential election because the candidate likely to win is a critic of both the EU and Nato (which, let’s be honest, is the real reason it was scrapped) is the antithesis of democracy. To her credit Elena Lasconi, Georgescu’s pro-EU second round opponent thought so too. ‘The constitutional court’s decision is illegal, amoral and crushes the very essence of democracy, voting’, she declared.
Things got even worse in February. Georgescu was detained by police and indicted on his way to register his candidacy for the rescheduled presidential election. The most popular politician in Romania was forbidden to leave the country. There were huge street protests, but guess what, no condemnation from the EU. Instead it was left to US Vice President J.D. Vance to criticise the cancellation of the election – and even for that he was attacked.
And now, in May we finally get the result the bigwigs of Brussels wanted all along. The Romanian people have at last voted the ‘right’ way, for a nice, sensible, pro-EU, pro-Nato ‘centrist’ candidate, the ‘liberal’ mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, who defeated the boo-hiss, nasty nationalist-conservative and ally of Georgescu, George Simion. There’s no need to annul this election. The result can stand. Crisis over. Ursula von der Leyen and Guy Verhofstadt are ecstatic. Europe has won! Like the Irish who had to vote again after they first rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, the Romanians got there in the end. But what happened in Romania should concern us all. If we genuinely believe in democracy, then votes are everything. If voters want to elect a candidate labelled ‘far-right’ or ‘far-left’, it is entirely up to them.
But note how elite ‘liberal’ discourse has shifted to talking about ‘democratic values’, instead of ‘democracy’. There is a crucial difference. If ‘democratic values’ trump democracy then you open the door to barring candidates who espouse the ‘wrong’ positions, according to the powers that be.
And it’s not just Georgescu. Another populist-nationalist Eurosceptic Romanian politician, Diana Sosoaca, was barred from standing in both the original November presidential election and the re-run. She was banned in November, for making declarations – wait for it – ‘contrary to democratic values’.
Of course, Orwell would have a field day with all of this doublespeak. But it’s happening in real time, in front of our very eyes. In Europe. Today.
Ask yourself this question. Do you really believe that in 2025, a candidate who espouses anti-EU, anti-Nato views in a strategically important country in Europe will be allowed to win an election? Marine Le Pen? She’s been banned too. We routinely criticise other countries for sham elections where only officially ‘approved’ candidates can stand and win, but aren’t we, in the ‘democratic West’ at least halfway there already?
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