The Bucharest Court of Appeal has ordered Călin Georgescu—who won the first round of Romania’s 2024 presidential election—into 30 days of preventive detention, overturning a lower-court ruling that had allowed the former frontrunner to remain free under judicial supervision.
The decision sends the figure at the center of Romania’s conservative, anti-globalist camp—and the most trusted politician in the country, according to some polls—back behind bars.
The move has further intensified accusations from his conservative Romanians that the country’s post-2024 establishment is using prosecutors and courts to contain a movement it has struggled, and even failed, to contain at the ballot box.
DIICOT prosecutors secured the reversal after challenging the Bucharest Tribunal’s refusal to imprison Georgescu while the €1.1 million fraud investigation proceeds. Businessman Ionel Rusen was also ordered into preventive detention, with the Court of Appeal’s ruling final.
Even the appellate panel was reportedly divided over whether detention was justified. Two judges disagreed, requiring a third to resolve the split in favor of incarceration—a detail Georgescu’s defenders have seized upon as evidence that the prosecution’s demand was hardly self-evident.
Georgescu’s lawyer, Mircea Sinescu, reacted with fury. “It is a hallucinatory solution!” he said, adding that “paper supports anything,” according to the Romanian account of the ruling.
