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The EU's Quiet Coup in Romania
A country cannot defend democracy by destroying it. Nor can it combat interference by becoming the chief saboteur. These are not paradoxes. They are the political reality of post-election Romania in 2025, where the will of the people has been trampled by a union of technocrats, foreign intelligence pressure, and judicial fiat. This is not democracy. It is an imitation of democracy, engineered for optics and controlled outcomes.
Let us consider the facts with care.
On November 24, 2024, Romanian voters chose Călin Georgescu, an independent conservative and nationalist, as the leading candidate for the presidency. He won the first round of voting with a plurality, 23 percent, in a multi-candidate race. In any normal republic, this would constitute a mandate to advance to a second round. Instead, the Constitutional Court, under intense pressure from the European Union, annulled the result two weeks later, citing supposed "Russian interference" for which no persuasive evidence has been offered.
This annulment was not merely a legal technicality. It was a political decapitation. Georgescu, the popular choice, was then banned from running in the re-held election, scheduled for March 2025, on the basis of criminal investigations conveniently filed in the interim. The charges, including "incitement to actions against the constitutional order", read like a parody of authoritarian pretexts. To speak out against the EU, to question the wisdom of supranational control, to speak in the voice of national sovereignty, is now, in some corners of Europe, criminal. One wonders what speech remains protected.
George Simion, leader of the conservative Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), stepped in as Georgescu's replacement. His candidacy was lawful, validated by both the Central Electoral Bureau and the Constitutional Court. He campaigned openly, and in the first round of the rescheduled election held on May 4, 2025, he secured nearly 41 percent of the vote. His nearest opponent, Nicușor Dan, the favored son of the EU, an apostle of bureaucratic centralism, open borders, and transnational compliance, received just 21 percent. Simion led by nearly double digits in pre-runoff polls. On the ground, the energy was his. The crowds, his. The momentum, unmistakable.
Then came the result. According to Romania's electoral authorities, Dan miraculously won the runoff with 54 percent of the vote to Simion's 46 percent. From a 20-point deficit to an 8-point win, with near-identical vote shares reported from every district. The statistical uniformity of the outcome itself raises questions that no serious democracy can afford to ignore. Is it plausible that every voting precinct, across a nation as diverse and divided as modern Romania, would return nearly identical margins?
Worse still, the information ecosystem surrounding the election had been deliberately manipulated. In the weeks before the vote, European authorities pressured private platforms to censor speech unfavorable to Dan and the EU agenda. The most damning revelation came not from a partisan actor, but from Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, who testified publicly that French intelligence had approached him to suppress Romanian conservatives ahead of the election. He refused. Others, we may surmise, did not.
So the question emerges, sharp and urgent: can a country still be said to possess a functioning democracy if the people's vote is annulled, their leading candidate criminalized, their speech suppressed, and their elections surveilled and censored by foreign powers? We recoil from such questions only when we fear the answer.
The EU presents itself as a guardian of liberal democracy. Yet its actions here mimic those of precisely the regimes it claims to oppose. To criminalize dissent, to nullify elections, to control discourse by bureaucratic pressure rather than open argument—this is not the rule of law, it is the rule of managers. It is not liberty, but administration. It is not democratic sovereignty, but foreign oversight enforced by judges and technocrats.
Let us not pretend this is a uniquely Romanian problem. It is a case study of a broader malaise: the hollowing out of democratic forms by globalist elites who find the messiness of national self-rule inconvenient. When the outcomes do not align with the preferences of Brussels, Berlin, or Paris, the institutions creak into motion to "correct" the error. This is governance by correction, not consent.
Some will say that the annulment and the censorship were necessary to defend against the specter of foreign interference. But what is more invasive, a bot campaign or a state court nullifying an election? What is more anti-democratic, misinformation online or banning a candidate from speaking in his own country? The paradox is this: in attempting to prevent interference, the EU became the interfering force. In attempting to save democracy, it destroyed it.
One need not agree with every plank of Georgescu or Simion's platform to recognize the deeper problem. Democracy does not mean getting the "right" result. It means permitting the people to choose freely, to deliberate in the open, to campaign and criticize and vote and speak without fear of censorship or criminal sanction. When you remove those freedoms, what remains is only the theater of democracy, with its ballot boxes and televised debates concealing the fact that the decisions have already been made elsewhere.
Elections should not be overturned by men in robes at the prompting of men in suits. The voice of the Romanian people was clear in November. It was clear again in May. Only through extraordinary interference, both judicial and informational, was that voice drowned out. This is not how legitimate power is won. It is how trust is lost.
The lesson is clear: democracy, to survive, must be defended against its self-proclaimed defenders. Courts cannot annul elections on pretexts. Intelligence agencies cannot instruct media platforms to silence opposition. Foreign officials cannot veto national outcomes. If these actions are tolerated, the term "democracy" becomes a slogan, not a structure.
The Romanian people deserve better. They deserve the truth. They deserve elections where the results reflect their votes, not the anxieties of Eurocrats. They deserve a republic where speech is not a crime and patriotism not a liability.
And if they are to regain that republic, it will not be through further appeals to those who undermined it, but through courage, vigilance, and memory. For democracy, once replaced by spectacle, does not return easily.
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