As Eastern Europe and the Balkans have stumbled from crisis to crisis, Romania was supposed to be an island of stability. It’s been spared the wars and national conflicts that have devastated neighbors like Ukraine and the former Yugoslav republics. In the face of growing authoritarianism, the country has maintained a functioning, multi-party democracy. As a proud member of NATO and the European Union (EU), the ruling class spent 2024 paving the way to join the Schengen area, “the final step” in its European integration. By the end of the year, however, Romania was thrust into its biggest political crisis since the overthrow of Ceaușescu in 1989.
The first shock came with the presidential election on 24 November, 2024. Defying expectations, the highest vote (22.94%) went to Călin Georgescu, a little-known far-right independent whose campaign was fueled by TikTok videos. Georgescu peddles all manner of conspiracy theories, from covid denialism, to suggesting the moon landing was a hoax, and that the government is putting nanochips in people’s soft drinks. He’s called Ukraine a “fictional state” and advocates dividing the country between Russia and Romania. He has also praised Ion Antonescu, Romania’s former dictator who helped Hitler carry out the Holocaust.
With no candidate having a majority of votes, a second round was supposed to be held on 8 December, where Georgescu would have faced off against the second place finisher, establishment conservative Elena Lasconi. But two days before it was due to take place, a second shock came when the Constitutional Court annulled the election, claiming that Georgescu’s initial victory was the product of Russian meddling.
New elections were scheduled for 4 May, but the crisis continued. Georgescu continued topping the opinion polls and Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau ultimately responded by blocking his candidacy altogether.
Now that the 4 May election has been held, the political establishment’s maneuvers have backfired spectacularly. Georgescu’s favoured candidate, George Simion of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), came out on top with 40.96% of the vote, nearly double Georgescu’s result in the original November election.
Georgescu’s and Simion’s politics are dangerous and the global rise of the far right is a threat to all workers and the oppressed. But the government annulling the election and blocking the front-runner from running in such a cavalier manner is no defense of democracy. Meanwhile the Trump administration which has broken its alliance with key European powers on a range of issues has defended Georgescu while Simion is an avowed Trump supporter. Georgescu and Simion are also vicious opponents of LGBTQ+ people, defending “traditional family values.” Simion’s party is closely aligned with the Romanian Orthodox Church.
The crisis in Romania makes it clear that the inter-imperialist rivalries in which the electoral standoff is enmeshed aren’t a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, as NATO and EU apologists argue. The Romanian working class can’t rely on their government, the EU, or NATO to defend democracy or to take on the far right. To stop the threat posed by Georgescu and his ilk requires an independent and internationalist struggle of the working class.
Crisis of Romanian Capitalism
The argument that Georgescu’s 24 November result was the product of Russian meddling stems from the funding of his TikTok videos, which weren’t reported as campaign finance. This is almost certainly true and definitely gave Georgescu an advantage. But that can’t explain why such a reactionary figure could get such a high vote, nor how he could continue polling so well after the election. That’s the product of a deeper crisis of Romanian capitalism.
Romania’s ruling parties are united in their push towards EU integration. Rather than lifting up living standards to that of the wealthier EU countries, the EU has turned Romania into a source of cheap labor for the rest of the bloc. Romania went into the 2024 election with the highest inflation rate of all EU states, as well as the highest income inequality. Capitalism’s promises of a bright future following the overthrow of Ceaușescu’s brutal dictatorship have resulted in disappointment.
Following the overthrow of Ceaușescu, Romanian politics were dominated by the National Liberal Party (PNL), which grew out of the anti-Ceaușescu protests, and the Social Democratic Party (PSD), dominated by last-minute defectors from Ceaușescu’s Romanian Communist Party. Both parties oversaw the implementation of neoliberal “shock therapy” that plunged most of Europe’s ex-Stalinist states into crisis in the 1990s.
For the three years leading up to the current election, the PNL and PSD led a coalition government through the National Coalition for Romania (CNR). This CNR also leans on support from the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, a right-wing Hungarian nationalist party close to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
As the neoliberal era has given way to an era of inter-imperialist conflict, this part of Europe has become one of the key theaters of that conflict. Romania’s ruling parties have lined up behind the EU and NATO, but this has exacerbated the country’s crisis.
Romania is the most agrarian country in the EU, with 23% of the labor force employed in agriculture. This meant Romania was particularly hard-hit when the EU lifted trade barriers for Ukrainian agricultural produce in the aftermath of Putin’s 2022 invasion. In the spring of 2023, Romania, alongside neighboring Poland and Bulgaria, was the center of farmer protests that spread across the continent. These protests were seized on by the growing right wing, with Hungary’s Orbán leaning on the protests to boost his challenges to the dominant powers in the EU. In the annulled 2024 election, Georgescu’s support came primarily from rural areas especially in Transylvania and along the Ukrainian border.
The Ukraine war has also seen a push by the ruling class across Europe to ramp up defense spending on the backs of working people. This push is strongest on NATO’s eastern flank. The ruling class in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have enthusiastically taken up Donald Trump’s call for NATO countries to spend 5% of GDP on defense. Romania is also on NATO’s eastern flank, but the rearmament drive is stretching the country’s precarious economy to its limits. Even staunch NATO supporters are forced to acknowledge this. For instance, Barna Tánczos, Romania’s Finance Minister, promised to keep defense spending above 2% but insisted that further increases exceed its budget capacity. This hasn’t prevented Tánczos from implementing a freeze on wages and pensions in January to meet EU fiscal targets.
Georgescu’s rise also has to be seen in the context of the global growth of the far right. The crisis of global capitalism, going back to the financial crash of 2008, saw a general rise in anti-establishment sentiment. This saw opportunities for the growth of both the far left and the far right. When left-wing forces, like Syriza in Greece or Bernie Sanders in the U.S., failed to deliver, the far right was able to make gains.
Before the current election, the title of “biggest crisis in Romanian politics since the overthrow of Ceaușescu” was held by the mass anti-corruption protests against the PSD government that shook the country from 2017–2019. This culminated in a strike wave in 2019. Without any mass working-class organization, these protests dissipated. But the crisis that fuelled those protests has continued, and the far-right has been able to fill the void. Russian disinformation campaigns on TikTok have been able to take advantage of this crisis, but didn’t create it.
Hypocrisy and “Democratic Backsliding”
The undemocratic maneuvers of the Romanian Constitutional Court and Central Electoral Bureau were able to fend off the immediate threat of a Georgescu presidency. But this was accomplished at the expense of the credibility of Romanian democracy. A poll conducted in January by Avangarde showed that 48% of the Romanian population opposed the annulling of the election, with 10% undecided and only 42% in favor. The same poll, conducted before Georgescu was barred from the May election, showed him topping both the first and second round polls.
Outside of Romania, Georgescu has become a cause celebre for the global right. In his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance used the annulling of the elections as the centerpiece of his denunciation of “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”. Any pretense that Vance and Trump genuinely care about democratic backsliding can be discarded given the wave of repression they’re unleashing on political dissent at home. Meanwhile Georgescu’s championing of Romania’s pro-Nazi wartime dictator Antonescu shows the threat he poses.
As rotten as Vance is, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The Center for European Policy Analysis, a pro-NATO think tank that likes to portray itself as a champion of democratic values attempted an unconvincing retort to Vance, asking: “But if elections are ‘infected’ by Russian trolls in a NATO country, should the results be validated regardless of a member states’ laws?”
Georgescu and the far right pose a serious threat to democratic rights. But empowering the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state isn’t the way to take them on. As the 4 May election results show, the government’s actions did more to promote the far right than any Russian-funded TikTok videos. Genuinely defeating the far right will require a sustained mass movement of the working class.
In the inter-imperialist conflict, centered on the U.S. and China, there has been a disingenuous attempt—by the U.S. under Biden and by the EU establishment—to portray the conflict as one between democracy and authoritarianism. Democratic backsliding is portrayed as the result of the “wrong” imperialist bloc getting the upper hand. But, as International Socialist Alternative has argued, the global trend towards creeping authoritarianism is engrained in the current era of capitalism, “because it is seen as necessary to avoid ‘democratic’ disruption of the agenda of the ruling class, discipline the population and prepare it for a harsher world of climate disaster, austerity, and militarism.”
Working-Class Challenge Needed
After canceling the election, Romania’s bad situation has only gotten worse. In spite of the attempts to portray Georgescu’s support as the product of Russian meddling, Georgescu and Simion continued topping opinion polls. Even those polls paled in comparison to the 40.96% result Simion ended up getting on 4 May. Meanwhile in fourth place, with 13.04% of the vote, was Victor Ponta, a Trumpian former social democrat independent who ran on a slogan of “Make Romania Great Again.” This means there’s now a serious chance that the far right will win the second round of the election.
The ruling CNR has been completely discredited. Their candidate, Crin Antonescu, came in third place and won’t advance to the second round election on 18 May. Instead, Simion will face off against Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan. Dan is also an anti-establishment independent but of a more technocratic bent. While Dan’s outsider status gives him a better chance than Antonescu, he has nothing to offer working people. He’s just as pro-EU and pro-NATO as the CNR, and he’s framing the second round of the election as “a debate between a pro-Western direction for Romania and an anti-Western one.”
Even if Simion loses in the second round it won’t do away with the far-right threat. The underlying political and economic crisis that propelled Georgescu into the public eye hasn’t gone away. The undemocratic measures used to block Georgescu have provided a rallying point for the right.
A small glimpse of what’s needed was seen in Germany, where the far-right AfD has been making electoral gains. The AfD threat has been accompanied by the growth of Die Linke (the Left Party), both electorally and in terms of an influx of youth. This shows the potential an independent working-class party could play in Romania to challenge both the far-right and the discredited political establishment.
Any left party, whether in Germany or Romania, will be immediately put to the test. To succeed, such a party needs to be genuinely independent. It would have to resist any “lesser evil” pressure to join or support the CNR coalition in the name of stopping the far-right. Rather than just functioning as an electoral vehicle, this party would need to be a launchpad for struggle in the streets and workplaces and act as a genuine opposition to the establishment. It would have to take a stand against the EU and NATO, Trumpist reactionary politics as well as Putin’s aggression in the region. By taking a stand against the rearmament drive, such a party could point the way towards solving Romania’s economic crisis.
In the face of creeping authoritarianism and a sharp reactionary turn by the ruling class, workers and students in Romania’s neighbors have been showing the way forward. Serbia and Turkey have seen mass protests take on the increasingly dictatorial governments of Aleksandar Vučić and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Linking these struggles through international working-class solidarity will pose a genuine threat to the corrupt political establishment and the squabbling imperialist masters they serve.
