The European Political Establishment’s Tainted Victory in Romania

Europe’s increasingly stodgy and intolerant political establishment continues to celebrate an unexpected electoral triumph in Romania. It was a badly needed victory for the beleaguered elite, but it remains surrounded by more than a few suspicious circumstances.

Worse still, a pseudo-democratic model for retaining political control through less-than-savory means appears to be gaining strength throughout the continent.

European Political Landscape

The European Union (EU) and its staunchest supporters were shaken to their core in multiple countries during late 2024 and early 2025.

Populist conservative factions surged in popularity, a development that to some extent reflected Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. In the first round of Romania’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party, unexpectedly led the field. In addition to his populist social views, Georgescu was an outspoken critic of NATO. His apostasy on that issue made him especially unpalatable to Romania’s political establishment and its supporters in both the United States and Europe.  

Election results and political trends in other European countries were equally disconcerting to entrenched centrist and center-left factions. The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party vastly improved on its previous election performances in the country’s February 2025 parliamentary balloting. The AfD finished in second place, just a few percentage points behind the Christian Democrats, who would be the leading party in Germany’s new governing coalition.

Polls regarding France’s forthcoming presidential election in 2027 also contained bad news for both left-wing and centrist political forces. Those polls showed Marine Le Pen, a longtime conservative populist leader, as the leading candidate and probable winner.  

One worrisome response of center and center-left political factions to such unsettling developments has been the intensification of their efforts to ban “extremist” right-wing parties and candidates. French authorities convicted Le Pen of violating campaign finance laws and imposed as one of the penalties a 5-year prohibition on her running for office. In late June 2025, Le Pen called on her political protégé, Jordan Bardella, to prepare for the 2027 presidential election. “I accept that I cannot run. Jordan accepts that he must step in.” In yet another “democratic” European country, the strongest, most popular conservative candidate has been forced aside.

Perhaps the most significant and controversial of the punitive electoral restraints is the growing campaign in Germany to outlaw the AfD as supposedly fascist or neo-Nazi. That effort is significant given the party’s performance in the latest parliamentary elections. Outlawing the second-largest political party in a major European democratic country would be a considerable change.  

Understanding Romania

Matters involving the adoption of undemocratic measures in the name of protecting democracy first came to a head in Romania.

The country’s governing duopoly—the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL)—did not react well to Georgescu’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of the presidential balloting. They used their dominant positions on both Romania’s election commission and Constitutional Court to invalidate the election result and reschedule the first round for May 4, 2025. Subsequently, those bodies disqualified Georgescu from the rerun and threatened him with criminal prosecution. The official justification was illicit “foreign (i.e., Russian) interference.” The evidence authorities cited for that allegation was extraordinarily weak and inconclusive, but Georgescu was nevertheless removed from the ballot.

Much to the dismay of the establishment parties, though, another conservative nationalist, George Simion, led the new first round with 41 percent of the vote after receiving Georgescu’s endorsement. A supposed political “independent” Bucharest mayor, Nicusor Dan, edged out the joint PSD and PNL candidate, Crin Antonescu, to take second place and win the other spot in the May 18, 2025, runoff.

Simion was widely expected to win the runoff, given the extent of widespread disgust with the governing parties and, in many circles, with the EU as well. Instead, Dan scored a modestly decisive victory (53.6 percent to 46.4 percent) that was greeted with wild enthusiasm by most European Union governments and Western NGOs. The circumstances surrounding that victory, though, have fueled more than a few suspicions and complaints. 

One notable feature is that Dan’s victory margin apparently was heavily dependent on votes from individuals who held dual Romanian and Hungarian citizenship or Romanian and Moldovan citizenship. The latter might have been especially significant since “pro-democracy” groups in the United States, such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as similar factions in the EU, had subsidized favored groups in both Romania and Moldova for years as part of a campaign to thwart Moscow’s influence. Indeed, an especially hypocritical element of Romania’s original decision to void Georgescu’s victory in the presidential election’s first round was that even if Russian interference had taken place, it amounted at most to a few hundred thousand dollars—a sum dwarfed by Washington’s financial involvement. 

There are growing indications that Europe’s establishment parties intend to use the methods that ultimately prevailed in Romania as a model strategy to defeat populist electoral challenges in other countries, even if the Trump administration is unsympathetic to that approach. Cynics have long contended that unethical insurance companies frequently resort to a shameful but effective approach when dealing with troublesome claims: “delay, deny, and wait for the policyholder to die.” The political variant that Europe’s establishment factions use when confronting troublesome populist parties seems to be “smear, disqualify, and overwhelm the weakened survivors.”

There is little reason to celebrate the outcome of Romania’s political battle. Nicosur Dan’s election falls far short of being a victory for genuine democracy. It is a tainted triumph at best. Real democracy must mean something more than guaranteed political dominance for centrist and socialist factions. Yet that is what took place in Romania and threatens to become the norm throughout the European continent. It is a cynical façade—a Potemkin structure concealing rule by a corrupt oligarchy that pretends to revere democratic norms even as the members make a mockery of those values.  

About the Author: Ted Galen Carpenter 

Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at 19FortyFive.  He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and US Foreign Policy (2022).