Foreign Affairs
Today, Romania; Tomorrow, the World
Conspiracy theories, history, and anti-establishment ferment collide in Bucharest. Is the Romanian election a preview of our political future?
“I think Georgescu is retarded,” says Alex, a young Romanian who doesn’t mince words on the subject of the recently-barred presidential candidate. “[But] even I voted for Georgescu. The other option was to vote for this mafia that has been killing Romania for 35 years.” Alex doesn’t fit the profile of a typical right-wing voter. He’s in his early 30s, works in Bucharest as an IT consultant for a multinational company, speaks fluent English, and even has a ponytail. His feelings on the election sum up the confused state of Romanian politics, which has suddenly emerged as an international flash point, attracting notice from the likes of Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Here are a few of the highlights from Romania’s turbulent election season. In November of last year, Călin Georgescu came out of nowhere to win the first round of the Romanian presidential election, powered by an unusual blend of Euroskepticism, nostalgia, nationalism, and a social media–savvy campaign that was particularly active on TikTok. In December, Romania’s top constitutional court annulled the results and scheduled a new election in May, citing evidence of Russian interference from the Serviciul Român de Informații (SRI), the Romanian domestic intelligence agency. In early March, six people, including a retired general, were arrested for plotting a coup, allegedly with Russian backing. On March 9, the constitutional court upheld a decision by Romania’s Central Election Bureau to bar Georgescu from the rescheduled election entirely. Bucharest has been mostly quiet since the ruling, but right after the decision was announced, pro-Georgescu protesters clashed violently with police. The Romanian mercenary boss Horaţiu Potra, best known for running military operations in sub-Saharan Africa, has called for an armed uprising to overturn the court’s decision.
Since the fall of communism, Romania and its Eastern European counterparts have occupied the awkward position of laggardly younger brothers, striving to catch up to the West’s wealthy, politically stable democracies. The transition to market liberalism and the accession to NATO and the EU of a swathe of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea were widely celebrated as mile markers on the road to progress. Constitutional crises, disreputable political candidates, and bizarre election cycles were minor bumps in the road.
But what if Romania’s tumultuous election cycle is not a lagging indicator, but a leading one? As voters grapple with the constitutional court’s decision to disqualify Georgescu, Romania’s heady political blend of conspiracism, anti-establishment sentiment, and allegations of foul play may be a preview of upheavals to come across the Western world.
Georgescu is often described as a populist conservative in the mold of Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of neighboring Hungary. While the anti-establishment message that fueled Georgescu’s sudden rise is similar to trends in other countries, the candidate’s appeal—and the political context in which he operates—isare unique to Romania.
I was introduced to Alex by Dragos Pichiu, another young, tech-savvy Romanian who works for a multinational company. Dragos says Alex is “like a brother,” but they don’t see eye-to-eye on political issues. Alex voted for Georgescu only reluctantly after the results from the November election were annulled. “I just voted for the person who brings the most chaos because I know he’ll bring pain to the establishment,” he says.
Despite averring that he’s “not big into politics,” Dragos was a more enthusiastic Georgescu backer. He believes Georgescu has been treated unfairly by the mainstream Romanian media and foreign journalists. “We are judging a book by its cover,” he says.
Georgescu, says Dragos, is “a person who dared to speak about the system in an open way.” He admires Georgescu’s willingness to give voice to hard truths about high energy prices, Russian relations, and the necessity of ending the war in Ukraine. These same issues have fueled speculation among anti-Georgescu voters that his candidacy was stage-managed by Russia.
Alex is less enamored with Georgescu’s rhetoric than Dragos. “Most of his statements are based on conspiracy theories,” he says, mentioning some of Georgescu’s more outlandish remarks on the dangers of 5G. He is also skeptical of Georgescu’s promises to hold a national referendum on EU membership: “He would worsen our relationship with the EU. We worked hard to get into the EU.” Alex doesn’t want to give this up; neither does Dragos, who says joining the EU was a “fantastic thing” for Romania, although he chafes at his country’s subordinate position within the federation.
Dragos and Alex don’t agree on every issue, but both think the constitutional court overstepped its bounds by disqualifying Georgescu. “If we are aligning with the Western vision, how can we allow the current system to dictate what candidates are eligible?” asks Dragos. He impassionately quotes the definition of democracy from Ion Rațiu, an exiled Romanian dissident who returned after the fall of communism to become an iconic figure in national politics: “I will fight until my last drop of blood so you have the right not to agree with me!” Alex concurs, saying that he didn’t see any credible evidence that Georgescu was manipulated by Russia. “This is democracy,” he says. “If half of Romanian people like his ideas, okay.”
Georgescu has long capitalized on older voters’ rural nostalgia, posting videos of himself bathing in mountain lakes and riding horses. But he also attracts support from younger Romanians like Dragos and Alex, who have no memory of the communist era and have grown up in a Romania that is increasingly wealthy, modern, and connected to the rest of Europe. From 2021 to early 2025, Romania was governed by a grand coalition that included the major center-right and center-left parties, a cumbersome arrangement that seems likely to continue after the spring elections. By running as an independent, without major party backing, Georgescu capitalized on younger voters’ discontent with the status quo.
What is the “system” that voters like Dragos so disdain? Anti-establishment feeling has lately upended Western politics, driven by an increasingly fragmented media landscape, the decline of traditional parties, and the gulf between voters and elected leaders on issues like immigration and the war in Ukraine. In Romania, however, anti-establishment feeling goes beyond dissatisfaction with the country’s unwieldy governing coalition. To understand voters’ attitudes, you have to understand the country’s recent history.
In the 1980s, Romanian communism under Nicolae Ceaușescu was harsh even by Eastern Bloc standards. At a time when many neighboring regimes were attempting to conciliate their restive subjects by subsidizing consumer goods and relaxing political censorship, Ceaușescu was doubling down on repression. Determined to make Romania self-sufficient, his government exported anything of value for ready cash, from domestically-produced electricity to the ethnic Germans of Transylvania, who were sold off to the West German government in a series of secret deals. Ceaușescu’s quest for self-sufficiency was so disastrous that Romania effectively deindustrialized. In 1986, the government implemented a horse-breeding program to make up for the lack of motorized transport. Mandatory Sunday labor programs were introduced across the country. Manpower and horsepower were made to compensate for the country’s deteriorating technical and industrial base.
Ceaușescu’s directives were enforced by the Securitate, Communist Romania’s feared secret police, which relied on a network of spies and informers to keep a harried populace in line. For Americans, the novel to read is Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, which follows a Chicago academic’s trip to Bucharest in the 1980s. Bellow’s second wife was Romanian, and he knew of what he wrote; the book effectively conveys the climate of fear and constant surveillance under Romanian communism.
Ironically, it was party insiders who first realized the dangers of Ceaușescu’s draconian rule (in 1989, high-ranking communists sent the dictator a secret letter warning him that he was taking Romania out of Europe). These warnings went unheeded, and the pot suddenly boiled over in 1989. While other Central and Eastern European communist parties saw the writing on the wall and relinquished power peacefully, Ceaușescu was toppled in a short but violent revolution that culminated in his trial and execution. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, dissidents and opposition leaders like Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa were waiting in the wings to help ease the transition to liberal democracy. In Romania, the brutality and thoroughness of the old regime’s security apparatus meant that there were no such figures to turn to. Instead, Romania’s first elected head of state was Ion Iliescu, a former communist official. He returned to the presidency in 2000 to help usher Romania into NATO.
Insider deal-making and opaque political maneuvers have plagued every post-communist country, but just as Romanian communism was uniquely brutal, the era that followed was especially corrupt and disorienting. Today, there is widespread feeling among Romanians that high-ranking Securitate officers and other regime insiders used their connections to enrich themselves during the country’s confused transition to market liberalism. In 2010, Jaap Scholten, a Dutch journalist who has written extensively on the destruction of the old Transylvanian aristocracy under communism, reported that the first generation of former communists have since been succeeded by their children, who have captured the commanding heights of Romanian society through nepotism and personal connections.
Emil Esanu, a retired banker in the Romanian city of Timișoara, grew up under the communist regime and agrees with Scholten’s diagnosis. “Some of the richest people in this country are the inheritors of the old system,” he says, a fact that explains widespread distrust of the ruling parties. “More or less the same politicians were in power. We will never get rid of corruption unless we make a real change.”
Despite these comments, Emil is no fan of Georgescu. “I would have never voted for this guy,” he says at the outset of our conversation. But he understands why some voters found him appealing. “They want to punish the political class in Romania. They want to retaliate.”
Georgescu, he adds, was able to capitalize on his status as an outsider. “It’s about creating an image of an honest person.”
Other anti-Georgescu voters have noted the potency of his anti-establishment message. Emese Vig is a Hungarian journalist from Cluj-Napoca, a city in Transylvania that is still home to a large Hungarian community. Vig is also skeptical of Georgescu; historically, candidates with his ideological profile have had a contentious relationship with Romania’s Hungarian minority. In 2000, the far-right presidential candidate Vadim Tudor, to whom Georgescu is often compared, threatened to institute martial law in Hungarian areas.
Nevertheless, Vig also understands the power of Georgescu’s messaging. “Romania is dominated by old networks, including former Securitate agents,” she explains. “The political elite just rebranded after the communist era.”
Both Vig and Esanu mention that Georgescu’s anti-establishment message was particularly popular on expatriate social media. Esanu says that many young Romanians working in service industry jobs in Western Europe thrilled at Georgescu’s candidacy. Vig, who has a teenaged son, noticed something similar online. “Many of the Romanians working outside of the country started following Georgescu on TikTok,” she says. “They started communicating with their relatives back in Romania and telling them to vote for Georgescu.”
In scenic provincial cities like Timișoara and Cluj-Napoca, it’s possible to forget the communist era. In Bucharest, however, even casual visitors can’t help but notice reminders of the old regime. In the heart of the city’s former historic district, Ceaușescu leveled 40,000 buildings to make way for a series of grand boulevards and his perversely named House of the People, a blocky, neoclassical hulk that now houses the Romanian parliament. Today, pedestrians approach the palace from the north through the solar panel–lined pathways of Izvor Park. It is an all-too-fitting symbol for a system that, in the eyes of many of its citizens, underwent only cosmetic changes after the fall of communism.
The shadow of the Securitate also looms over modern Romanian politics. The SRI, the domestic intelligence agency that provided the justification for disqualifying Georgescu, is no longer abducting dissidents, but its reach is still long. As of 2021, according to the journalist Paul Hockenos, the SRI had a larger budget than its German sister agency and employed more people than Dutch intelligence. These are striking figures for a country with a negligible military and, at least until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, few obvious foreign threats. When visiting Romania in 2010, Scholten reported that Romanian businessmen would still turn off their phones and remove the batteries during important meetings to avoid government eavesdropping.
Maybe this was misplaced paranoia, but the BTI Transformation Index, an impeccably-credentialed German think tank that tracks countries’ progress towards market democracy, has reached similar conclusions. BTI’s 2024 report on Romania makes for sobering reading. According to the report, media coverage is shaped by “undue influence” on the part of the “military-intelligence establishment.” Some of the report’s conclusions echo the most conspiratorial claims of Georgescu supporters: “Important decisions tend to be made in closed circles, where the president and intelligence services are thought to play an important role.”
The report is particularly worrying in light of the SRI’s unwillingness to publicly supply evidence of Georgescu’s connections to Russia. According to BTI, “the degree to which intelligence services have penetrated political parties and controlled various leaders remains a concern; the mechanisms for civilian control over the intelligence community are feeble, even more so than in the past.”
When Alex speaks of a mafia that has been killing Romania for 35 years, this is what he’s referring to. Distrust of establishment political parties and conventional politicians, a potent force in many democracies, is particularly powerful in post-communist Romania.
Despite the Romanian political establishment’s checkered history, the country’s post-communist transitional period has seen real progress. Since joining the European Union in 2007, Romania’s economy has boomed, which is evident in everything from the new office buildings dotting the Bucharest skyline to the traffic choking Ceaușescu’s stately (and once largely empty) boulevards. In January, Romania officially joined the EU’s Schengen Zone, allowing its citizens freedom of movement across Central and Western Europe. According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, Romania now enjoys a higher GDP per capita than Hungary, an astonishing accomplishment for a country that many doubted would ever be admitted to the EU in the first place.
In Timișoara, Emil Esanu has seen the benefits of this transformative period first hand. “Immediately after joining the EU,” he says, “Romania started flourishing.” The country, he continues, has benefited immensely from EU infrastructure funding, EU-enabled investment, and later, Covid relief funds. For most of the 2010s, there was a palpable sense of optimism among Romanians that things were getting better.
Timișoara, a former Habsburg city in Western Romania and ground zero for the 1989 revolution against Ceaușescu, is in many ways the poster child for European integration. Now the capital of one of Romania’s wealthier provinces, Timisoara’s current mayor is Dominic Fritz, a German citizen who volunteered in the city as a teenager and returned in 2019, becoming Romania’s only non-citizen mayor a year later.
Despite recent progress, Esanu still worries about the decision to bar Georgescu from running. “You cannot throw a guy from the competition simply because you don’t like him,” he says. “Democracy means people should decide, not the constitutional court.”
Critics of right-wing populism have coined the term “managed democracy” to describe the process by which conservative ruling parties limit the opposition’s opportunities to take power without formally ending elections. In neighboring Hungary, Viktor Orbán is often accused of pioneering this approach. By disqualifying Georgescu, Romania’s constitutional court seems to be experimenting with managed democracy from the center. Since the court issued its final decision, few concrete details have emerged about Georgescu’s alleged connections to Russia. At the time of the court’s original ruling in November, the New York Times concluded, “Intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role.”
For many Romanians, Georgescu and his supporters threaten the hard-won gains the country has made since the end of communism. Despite his avuncular persona and popularity on TikTok, Georgescu has indulged in conspiracy theories, spoken favorably of fascist politicians from the interwar era, and called for referendums on Romania’s membership in NATO and the European Union.
On Saturday, March 15, pro-EU and anti-Georgescu protesters rallied at the Piața Victoriei in downtown Bucharest. The demonstration was watched by a large contingent of local police and the Jandarmeria, Romania’s counter-terrorism force, probably because Georgescu supporters had clashed with police the previous weekend.
Despite the heavy police presence, the mood of the crowd was cheery. Families with young children bought EU and Romanian flags from circulating peddlers, who were drawn mainly from Romania’s large Roma minority and seemed uninterested in their customer’s political sympathies. In the background, speakers played local folk and rock music. A woman with a microphone briefly led the crowd in chants of “Yes Europe, no dictator!”
In the midst of the rally, a volunteer named Antonia Babeș kindly explained the meaning of a Romanian flag with a hole in the middle carried by one of the demonstrators. It’s a symbol of the 1989 revolution, she said, when anti-Ceaușescu protesters removed the emblem of the hated communist regime from the center of the flag.
Babeș was 8 years old when Ceaușescu was deposed and vividly remembers seeing blood on the streets from revolutionary violence. Now she has two young daughters and worries about their future in Romania, as well as more prosaic issues, like how much time they spend on their phones. Romania, she says, has been dealt a bad hand by geography and history. “It’s the East of the West,” she adds laughingly. Thi is is why she was so concerned about Georgescu’s promises to hold referendums on Romania’s NATO and EU membership.
Despite her strong desire to see Romania remain part of what she calls the “European family,” Babeș understands Georgescu’s appeal to certain voters. Georgescu, she explains, conveyed a message of respect to many Romanians. “He put us on a pedestal,” she says.
Like Esanu, Babeș also worries about the lack of evidence behind the constitutional court’s decision. “It was the right decision, but they weren’t transparent,” she says.
Elsewhere in the crowd, a group of younger protesters were more comfortable with the constitutional court’s ruling. “We all work for multinationals,” says a young woman named Elena, who speaks English with the easy fluency of someone who has grown up on Western news and pop culture. She was at the protest with her boyfriend Catalin, who honed his English skills by working as a lifeguard in Herndon, Virginia before returning to Bucharest.
Another protester named Julian carried an EU flag and was upset by the latest news from Washington, especially Vance’s decision to weigh in on Romanian politics. He was joined by his Dutch girlfriend Joyce, who has lived in Romania for years and speaks the language fluently. Earlier generations of left-wing protesters were typically skeptical of globalization and big corporations, but these marchers freely described themselves as “pro-corporate.” For Elena, Joyce, Catalin, and Julian, international investment enabled by EU integration has brought jobs, economic opportunities, and social progress to Romania. By promising referendums on EU and NATO membership, Georgescu threatens these hard-won gains. All four said they thought about leaving the country if Georgescu won.
In many ways, Romania’s problems are merely heightened versions of the same issues that confront other Western democracies. Just as Romania’s recent history has amplified anti-system politics, the country’s bumpy free market transition has intensified the problems of social and economic inequality. In modern Bucharest, hypercapitalism is in abundant evidence amid the remnants of the old regime. Casino and online gaming advertisements are ubiquitous—the Romanian-Canadian poker player Daniel Negreanu is a favored pitchman—and BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches seem to be everywhere. A gleaming new office building advertises a “Crypto ATM” next to a dilapidated apartment complex. Some surviving historic buildings have been beautifully renovated; others are falling apart at the seams. In what’s left of Bucharest’s historic old town, sad-eyed girls try to lure British stag parties to restaurants, bars, and strip clubs. A homeless man sleeps under a freshly-painted mural of Frida Kahlo, who seems to have achieved memetic fame throughout Eastern Europe for reasons that remain obscure.
The conflict between traditional political parties and anti-establishment figures is not unique to Romania. In the liberal West, establishment organs rely on softer methods to marginalize anti-establishment leaders and causes. In the 2020 American presidential election, 50 former senior intelligence officials tried to discredit material recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop as a ploy by Russian intelligence. In Germany, the old center-right and center-left cling to a “firewall” to prevent the hard right Alternativ für Deutschland party from joining a governing coalition. Despite securing record-setting vote totals in the 2024 French parliamentary elections, the conservative Rassemblement National party is still kept out of government by means of a “cordon sanitaire.” Just as Romania’s transition to market democracy has been characterized by extremes, its political establishment’s response to Georgescu is merely blunter than the methods used in other countries.
Meanwhile, life goes on in Bucharest. Despite brief clashes between angry Georgescu supporters and Romanian police and an abundance of heated rhetoric on social media, the chances of another 1989-style uprising are remote. For all its faults, modern Romania is undeniably more prosperous, more modern, and more open than a generation ago.
Below the surface, however, larger issues loom. After the election, “I stopped watching,” says Dragos. “My friends said they’re not going to vote anymore.” Alex also says he’s stopped paying attention to politics. While many Romanians are relieved to have Georgescu out of the picture, others are disillusioned by the constitutional court’s heavy-handed intervention.
Just after the constitutional court issued its ruling, Georgescu cryptically announced that his mission had been fulfilled. His ideological lane has since been filled by George Simion, a younger right-wing politician who espouses similar views but seems to lack Georgescu’s paternal charisma. Crin Antonescu, whose uninspiring visage is plastered on posters throughout downtown Bucharest, is the unity candidate for another unwieldy centrist coalition called the “Romania Forward Electoral Alliance.” To reach young voters, Antonescu recently announced his plans to launch a podcast.
Outsiders may scoff at Georgescu’s outrageous statements, but every 21st-century democracy has been roiled by growing skepticism of official pronouncements and distrust of key institutions. These trends are particularly evident in a country like Romania, where the past several decades have instilled a deep distrust in the political system. For years, this credibility crisis was assumed to be a distinctly Eastern European phenomenon, a lingering hangover from the Cold War that would eventually pass. Now, however, trust in institutions has eroded everywhere while social media continues to eat away at the credibility of politicians, experts, and other authority figures. Once an outlier relegated to Europe’s cultural and political periphery, Romania is no longer lagging behind its Western counterparts. Instead, it looks like a harbinger of political dysfunction to come.
The post Today, Romania; Tomorrow, the World appeared first on The American Conservative.
