OPINION:
Most Americans, focused on the goings-on in the U.S. since President Trump moved into the Oval Office, have paid little attention to the political goings-on in Romania until now. Vice President J.D. Vance thinks that might be a mistake.
Speaking in Munich on Valentine’s Day, Mr. Vance enraged European leaders by focusing not just on what was happening in Romania but also on what it might portend in other countries. He took particular aim at remarks of a former European commissioner who applauded the overturning of an election in Romania and suggested that the same thing could happen in Germany and elsewhere should the voters of those countries begin electing the “wrong” people.
Mr. Vance believes Romania’s decision, with European Union backing, to cancel an election because a presidential candidate Europe’s liberal elites cannot stomach could be the death knell for democracy in Romania and the rest of Europe.
Let’s look at what happened that so concerned Mr. Vance and should concern anyone else who believes in democracy as a process rather than a slogan.
A right-of-center presidential wannabe shocked Europe in November by coming from nowhere to win the first-round presidential election for president and was headed for the runoff after the results were recounted and certified. The candidate, Calin Georgescu, has been characterized by his opponents accurately or inaccurately as an extreme nationalist too sympathetic to Russia and hostile to NATO and the continuation of the war in Ukraine … a sort of Romanian Donald Trump.
Mr. Georgescu appeared headed for victory in a Dec. 8 runoff against an establishment candidate whose views were in line with those of the EU until two days before the vote, when Romania’s Constitutional Court stepped in to annul the election and order a do-over.
Since then, Romania has been in turmoil. Bucharest has been the scene of almost continuous demonstrations by voters who believe the decision amounted to little more than an anti-democratic coup and insult to the nation’s voters, who have been told in stark terms that they have the freedom to vote for the right candidates but not for the wrong ones.
According to the court, the election was annulled because of suspicions of Russian influence and because Mr. Georgescu and his supporters were trafficked in “misinformation.” Still, the intelligence reports backing up the court’s decision, when released, have proved as dependable as the fictional Steele report used to “prove” that Mr. Trump was running in 2016 as a Russian agent. Indeed, if Mr. Georgescu was a left-of-center candidate running in the U.S. and The Washington Post made such charges against him, The New York Times would repeatedly describe them as “without proof.”
Nonetheless, in January, the Romanian court scheduled a new election for May 4 with a second round on May 18 and then announced last week that Mr. Georgescu would not be allowed to run in this election. Banning him from the ballot was not based on any new evidence or verification of the old charges but may have been necessitated by poll reports suggesting he would win the do-over and end up as president.
To make certain they have him where they want him, Mr. Georgescu has been put under “judicial control,” which prohibits him from leaving Romania because, according to Romanian police, he is suspected of incitement to “actions against the constitutional order, the communication of false information, financial reporting irregularities” as well as fascist tendencies and a willingness to accept support from extremists.
Mr. Vance’s concern stems from the fact that canceling an election to prevent one’s opponent from winning is an attack on democracy. Indeed, as many are observing, the action taken in Romania and the acceptance of the action by European leaders as necessary and even admirable may signal the end of a democratic Europe.
Mr. Georgescu may be all his critics allege. Still, they have not proved it objectively or to Romania’s voters any more than this country’s liberal elites managed over nearly a decade with their unproven assaults on Mr. Trump. Failing to convince Americans, they spent years trying to imprison the man or find some other way to keep him off the ballot because they feared, rightly as it turned out, that he might win.
That failed here, but the technique has been adopted and toughened and is now deployed in a post-democratic Europe to keep the ruling elites in power. George Orwell understood this technique, as those in power inform everyone that democracy is no longer what they thought it was, but the opposite.
That is something that does matter.
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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