The commitment of Washington’s European allies to democracy is increasingly fragile, if not hypocritical, as Vice President J D Vance highlighted in his speech to the Munich Security Conference last month. That problem is most acute in Romania. In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party, unexpectedly led the field. In addition to having populist social views, Georgescu is an outspoken critic of NATO. His “apostasy” on that issue makes him especially unacceptable to Romania’s political establishment and its U.S. supporters.
The United States was already busily expanding its Mihail Kogalniceanu military base at Constanta in southeastern Romania to eclipse even Washington’s long-time principal European base, Ramstein, in Germany. The expanded facility in Romania would be 50 percent larger than Ramstein, and it would bring a massive U.S. military presence much closer to Russia. U.S. and Romanian officials were not pleased about the prospect of having those plans aborted by a new, less friendly government in Bucharest.
To make matters even worse for the two parties in the current governing coalition, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL), both of them failed to place a candidate in the runoff round. Instead, Elena Lasconi, a reformer representing another “minor” party took the other runoff spot. Thus, the establishment parties would not be able to focus their fire exclusively on Georgescu in the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on the maverick. Instead, whichever outsider prevailed in the runoff would not be from the usual governing elite or be a reliable client of the United States and its NATO partners.
The response of the beleaguered establishment forces was to get the country’s election commission, which the PSD and PNL dominated, to nullify the first round election results. Romania’s Constitutional Court, which the PSD and PNL also dominated, ratified the election commission’s edict just two days before the runoff round was to be held. Instead, the Court rescheduled that round for May 4, 2025. Both the Commission and the Court alleged that the election had been tainted by “Russian interference.” However, neither body cited tangible evidence of such interference on Moscow’s part, much less established that the alleged meddling was sufficiently egregious to nullify the election results. As New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins concluded: “The court’s intervention came after Romania’s security service released declassified intelligence reports that pointed to possible Russian interference in the election campaign but provided no solid evidence of that.”
Hellbound and Down 