Romania has been facing a political crisis marked by controversial court rulings, annulled elections, and the rise of far-right figures. Judicial overreach, social fragmentation, and foreign influence fueled public distrust, culminating in ultranationalist George Simion’s victory in the 2025 restaged presidential elections.
By Bogdan Iancu
Introduction: Militant Democracy in October 2024
In October 2024, the Romanian Constitutional Court started to engage in a dubious flirtation with “militant democracy.” This set in motion a grim saga that is still ongoing: the rise of a previously unknown ultranationalist candidate, Mr. Călin Georgescu in November, subsequent annulment of the elections in December, a do-over round in 2025, new invalidations in March 2025, the crushing victory of George Simion (the leader of the main far-right faction, Alliance for the Union of Romanians, or AUR) in the first round of the 2025 restaged elections, on May 4, 2025.
I argue that militancy processes and the unprecedented rise of illiberal figures have unfolded (potentialized one another) synergistically, both underpinned by deep patterns of social and economic fragmentation, complemented by institutional malfunctions.
The fact that Mr. Georgescu could win at all the November 2024 elections round was arguably the result of a previous Constitutional Court decision in October, whereby the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) disqualified another far-right candidate, Diana Iovanovici-Șoșoacă. Given the circumstances in which the October ruling was rendered, many read it as a coup meant to engineer a runoff between Mr. Ciolacu, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) candidate at that time, and Mr. George Simion, the leader of the ‘mainstream ultranationalist’ faction, AUR. Mr. Ciolacu could only be expected to win in this set-up.
Lending credence to such suspicions, five out of six judges in the majority were appointed to the bench by PSD-controlled majorities. Oddly, considering the stakes, only seven judges out of nine were present. Legally, the Court used a procedure that had, for thirty years, been understood to denote a basic verification of formal conditions for candidacies (signatures, age, clean criminal record, etc.) and turned it into a subjective verification of the democratic credentials of a candidate, as assessed by the Court, when notified. In essence, as the lone dissenting justice pointed out, the CCR inserted the militant democracy logic of the party ban procedure under Art. 146 (k) of the Constitution into the electoral verification procedure under Art. 146 (f). This happened in the absence of procedural guarantees. In essence, the Court engaged in a faux-militant democracy exercise.
The Court pretended and has continued to pretend that it was conducting constitutional review business as usual, albeit in ‘effervescent political’ circumstances.
The Annulment in December
The legal basis for Ruling 32/2024 was found in a canopy provision of Art. 142 of the Constitution, which describes the role of the Court as “guarantor” of the supremacy of the fundamental law. The Court’s decision was supported by generally cryptic reports by four intelligence services declassified on December 4th. Some intelligence briefs accuse algorithm manipulation on TikTok and possible Russian interference in the elections.
Instead of going to George Simion, the votes of Mrs. Iovanovici Șoșoacă migrated to Georgescu.
The latter ran on TikTok, was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media, and thus could not be factored into the main strategic equations.
Days before the cancellation ruling, the Court certified the ballot returns of the first round and greenlit the runoff. On December 6, on a Saturday, while the runoff vote had already started in the diaspora, the Court invalidated the election in its entirety, ordering a rerun to be held at a future date in 2025.
Until now, little hard evidence of foreign influence has come to light. The Tax Authority did, however, find that the mainstream National Liberal Party (PNL) had used public campaign contributions to fund a TikTok campaign that ended up supporting Mr. Georgescu. Whether the action was deliberately intended to bolster Mr. Georgescu or the campaign was ‘hijacked’ in his favor remains unknown. Incidentally, this was the campaign described in one of the intelligence briefs as indicating foreign influence, evidenced by alleged similarities with Russian operations in Ukraine.
A Venice Commission urgent report found a long list of due process shortcomings with the December 2024 annulment ruling, insisting on the need for a recognizably judicial process to apply in the future to disqualifications of candidates. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) downgraded Romania to the status of a hybrid democracy in its 2024 Democracy Index.
The 2025 Candidacy Invalidation in March
Georgescu filed a new presidential candidacy on March 7 for the do-over electoral cycle in May 2025. Candidacies are submitted for procedural verification to the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC), an electoral registration office legally comprising the president and the two vice-presidents of the Permanent Electoral Authority, five randomly selected Supreme Court judges, and up to ten representatives of the parliamentary parties. Under the presidential elections law, the BEC has 48 hours to make a decision. Next, petitions against the registration must be filed within 24 hours, after which the court has two days to pronounce. The Constitutional Court met (impromptu yet again) on March 8, to discuss petitions against a decision that had not yet been rendered and, in the event, declared them inadmissible. The following day, BEC decided against the registration of Georgescu’s candidacy, citing the CCR ruling of October 2024 and the annulment ruling of December 2024 as the reasons for its refusal.
Georgescu filed a petition against the BEC decision with the CCR, which the Court unanimously rejected on the 11th of March, rubberstamping the BEC decision (Ruling 7/2025). According to the Court, the BEC had allegedly received an implied delegation to “apply directly the Constitution” (this time only). Neither the BEC nor the CCR engaged in judicial-style reasoning as to how the supposed October and December standards applied specifically to Georgescu. According to the Court, BEC acted on its own “individualization” to Georgescu of the Șoșoacă ruling principles (Par. 124 in Ruling 7/2025). Yet, in reality BEC did nothing of the sort, simply reproducing-reciting the Court’s precedents and affirming, without particulars, that the October 2024 solution applied in March 2025, tale quale, to Georgescu.
Both institutions engaged therefore in what Romanian-American constitutional scholar Vlad Perju characterized as a “game of mirrors”,
meaning that both simply postulated axiomatically and apodictically that Ruling 2/2024 (which had referred to a different individual), and ruling 32/2024 (which did not formally refer to Georgescu), applied to him. Instead of individualizing the decision and the ruling, the two institutions cross-referenced and rubberstamped each other’s solutions in short form. The BEC decision is three pages long, mostly paraphrases. The eighteen-page text posted on the Court’s website consists primarily of summaries and recitals; the added-value reasoning straddles a handful of paragraphs.
This is not to say that there was no cause for concern. Georgescu surrounded himself with specious characters. For instance, he was linked to Horațiu Potra, former French Foreign Legion fighter, who now finds himself in Dubai. Searches in the latter’s house by counter-terrorism and organized crime prosecutors found a hidden, well-stocked cache of military-grade weapons. Mr. Potra had run a ‘private army’ operation in Congo, recruiting current and reserve members of the Romanian army, police, and intelligence structures. How Mr. Potra could bring machine guns and grenade launchers into the country and why he could leave the country while supposedly under surveillance remain mysteries of Romanian intelligence and law enforcement. Georgescu himself made a long line of statements that are at odds with liberal constitutionalism, expressing for example admiration for Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the interwar Romanian fascist Iron Guard (‘a hero’ who ‘fought for the morality of the human being’) and for Marshall Ion Antonescu, Axis ally during WWII and perpetrator of war crimes in occupied Ukraine (‘a martyr’). Georgescu now stands accused of several crimes, among them the attempt to overthrow the constitutional order and promoting war criminals and fascist organizations. These charges were brought after the election annulment.
The State of Play in May 2025
In the end, George Simion won almost double the percentage obtained by Georgescu in 2024, scoring very high in the Western European diaspora, which currently votes predominantly far-right. Until 2021,
it was convenient for Romanian right-of-center elites to romanticize their compatriots abroad wholesale, as a collective force for progress and European values.
This was done for external discourse manipulation mainly. By the same token, in an age of declining mainstream press and ensuing Western eagerness to consume prefabricated, research-light Orientalist tales, the task was relatively easy to accomplish.
The runner-up in the runoff on May 18, the mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, is essentially the captive champion of big-urban elites, the intelligentsia classes, and of a sliver of the wealthier, better educated diaspora. Mr. Dan ranked slightly above Crin Antonescu, the candidate of the now unravelling big-tent parliamentary majority. Dan has reduced chances of winning in the current configuration, as not all those who voted for Antonescu can be expected to shift allegiance.
Hope remains but,
to win now, if at all possible, Mr. Dan needs to break free from big-city enclosures and address angered majorities and first-round absentees.
Georgescu’s meteoric ascent was caused by deep mistrust in mainstream parties and state institutions. He was particularly popular in rural areas, small cities, and in the sizeable Romanian diaspora in Western Europe. Simion oddly inherited his mystique, collecting also the dividends of the annulment wrath. The annulment, in turn, has driven to paroxysm older discontents with mainstream arrangements, parties, institutions (in other words, with the status quo). Whereas far-right ideologies should not be discounted, let alone condoned, the main causes of the discontent are not ideological, but class-driven. The far-right’s demographically selective appeal can in good part be explained by unequal development, inequality, and chronic underinvestment in education, research, and general-use infrastructure.
The liberal-constitutionally recognizable causes of discontent (social ladder, infrastructure, a modicum of welfare state, meritocracy in the selection of elites) should have been addressed to abate mutually reinforcing negative cycles. Romanian centrist elites of all sorts bear the primary guilt for decades-long neglect and manipulation; crops are now gathered by the far right.
Relevant incentive structures have also shifted and morphed. After the collapse of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989, positive evolutions (social, economic, political) were for the most part tied to external incentive structures (NATO, Council of Europe, and EU accession). American troops stationed in the country have served as a vital guarantee of security. Now, with the exception of the Venice Commission’s nudge toward a modicum of rule of law rigor, positive external incentives are skewed. The Trump administration threw its full weight behind Călin Georgescu, implicitly or explicitly supported by many figures in the administration or associated with it (notably, Vice President Vance, but also DNI Gabbard, Ms. Lake, Mr. Musk, etc.). Conversely, European policy and intelligence elites and prominent member states have imparted unadulterated blank checks to the Romanian institutions.
Bogdan Iancu, SJD, LL.M. (CEU-LEGS) is an Associate Professor with the Department of Constitutional and Political History and Theory, Political Science Faculty, University of Bucharest. He held visiting researcher positions in Europe (Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Heidelberg, Berlin, Bremen) and North America (Yale Law School, McGill, University of Toronto). Iancu teaches and writes in the fields of comparative and Romanian constitutional law and EU constitutionalism.
