There have been four presidents of Romania since the 1989 revolution that terminated the brutal 20-year rule – and, indeed, the life – of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. Constantin listed them all.
“Iliescu, Constantinescu, Iliescu again,” the retired security guard said, counting on his fingers. “Băsescu, then Iohannis. And for what, exactly? Nothing has changed. Nothing, in 35 years. Pay and pensions are too low. Food and fuel cost too much. Something’s got to give.”
Nursing a beer outside a hole-in-the-wall bar in rural Drăgănești, an hour’s drive north of Bucharest, Constantin said one man might have been able to change things. “And now they’ve banned him,” he said. “So they can keep on robbing us.”
Constantin’s view is not unusual in this village. In November’s presidential elections, nearly 600 people here (37.2% of the electorate) voted for Călin Georgescu, an anti-EU, Moscow-friendly, Covid-denying ultranationalist who won the first round.
Since then, the election has been annulled over suspected Russian interference, and Georgescu has been placed under criminal investigation. Last week, Romania’s top court upheld a decision barring him from standing in the re-run of the vote in May.
Now even those who did not back Georgescu are disgusted.
“Millions voted for him; he should have been allowed to stand,” said Elena Preda, 64, a retired legal officer, outside the minimarket. “Nothing’s proven against him. The injustice makes me weep. Look at me, I’m buying candles. We’re mourning democracy.”
Beside his roadside greengrocer’s stand, Ionut, 55, was seething. “This isn’t normal,” he said. “It’s a corrupt, thieving dictatorship. A smart guy looked like winning, so they cancel the vote. Then they cancel him.”
Hours after the constitutional court confirmed Georgescu’s disqualification, saying his violation of electoral rules was “conduct contrary to the Romanian constitution”, Romania’s prime minister, the Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu, posted on his Facebook page.
He said that he hoped the ruling would “restore social tranquility in Romania”. He added that the judges’ decision closed “an extremely tense and dangerous episode” in the country, which could now return to “a normal social climate” and “civilised public debate”.
Listening to the voters of Drăgănești, that seems a tad optimistic. Legally, the decisions to annul the vote and pursue Georgescu may be sound. Politically – in a society feeling as fed up and as let down by its political class as Romania’s – they could be explosive.
The first-round ballot was annulled after the far-right candidate surged from less than 5% in the polls days before the vote to a triumphant 23%, and declassified intelligence documents revealed a campaign with the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation.
The documents, from Romania’s intelligence service and interior ministry, listed 85,000-odd cyber-attacks on the country’s election computer system and identified 25,000 largely dormant TikTok accounts that had suddenly begun amplifying Georgescu’s messages.
What has emerged so far strongly suggests a Russian campaign, but does not prove it. The files suggested social media influencers had been hired by intermediaries and paid to share videos promoting Georgescu’s campaign, and that some of his campaign workers were linked to organised crime gangs and neo-fascist groups.
The former soil scientist – who declared zero campaign spending - is now under investigation on six counts, including misreporting campaign finances, illegal use of digital technology and promoting fascist groups. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors are also investigating 21 others linked to Georgescu. They include Horaţiu Potra, a military contractor, who has called for insurrection “with scythes, pitchforks and axes”. Police raids on their homes have uncovered weapons and millions in cash, according to prosecutors.
Adina Marincea is a researcher at the Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. In her office in Bucharest, she said clean-cut 62-year-old Georgescu may have “an aura of legitimacy”, but there was little doubt he was “a very dangerous figure”.
Georgescu has hailed Romania’s 1930s fascist leaders as heroes. He recently gave an apparent Nazi-style salute. “We have enough evidence to place him in that tradition,” Marincea said. “Look at the ideology he promotes. The people he surrounds himself with.”
She added that Georgescu, who ran as an independent, “plays a game of calculated ambivalence”. Through his use of “dog whistles” he “signals to the radical right, which has this ideology, but he can also say: ‘I didn’t mean that.’ It’s not enough to call him populist or opportunist.”
For his supporters – many of whom see him almost as a messiah, with his unrealisable populist promises of huge tax cuts and jobs for all – none of it justifies his ousting. “I don’t believe a word of it,” said Alexandru Ioniță, 25. “They just made it all up.”
Watching one of his three children play in a park in Urziceni, half an hour east of Drăgănești, Ioniță said he had left home at 14 and, like millions of Romanians, worked abroad, on and off, ever since: France, Germany, Scotland; farms and factories.
“I don’t want that for my kids,” he said. “Georgescu was interested in this country, not in himself. He promised he’d put Romania back on its feet, rebuild what all the others broke, bring home the diaspora. If there’s got to be another revolution, so be it.”
Mihaela Măcelaru, 43, said Georgescu had “shown us how to fight for our our country, because we are all one people. He brought us all together. He was a good man for our country, a wise man. I believe he was sent by God. Now, who knows?”
Romania’s democracy is fragile. The median household income is about a third of the EU average. Food is 50% more expensive than five years ago. Almost a third of the country’s 19 million people are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Over the past 10 or 15 years, nearly 20% of the workforce has sought better opportunities abroad.
Public services are poor, and the social safety-net lacking. There is a general perception, in the words of one centre-left politician, that: “The state isn’t there to help. Just to punish people, to create difficulties – while enriching its own.”
Inequality, meanwhile, is high: at twice the national average, the per capita GDP of Bucharest exceeds that of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Stockholm. And a long history of corrupt and incompetent politicians has left public trust in MPs and ministers low.
Adding fuel to those flames is what many observers see as a calamitous lack of official or institutional transparency. “It’s simple: if the state leaves a void, people are only too eager to fill it,” said Ana Dragomir, communications director of the Romanian civic engagement NGO Funky Citizens.
“Our authorities are famous for not communicating or explaining their decisions,” she said. “That leaves a big hole that instantly gets filled by deep-state conspiracy theories [and] allegations of a coup.”
Such claims are not confined to Romania. The Trump administration has presented the whole episode as an attack on free speech. The US vice-president, JD Vance, asked in a recent speech whether the country “shares America’s values”. Elon Musk wondered how a judge can “end democracy in Romania”.
Dragomir cites the manner of Georgescu’s detention for questioning by police last month as an example of the authorities needlessly fanning the flames of such discourse.
“They didn’t make clear why,” she said. “No specifics, no proper explanation, bad updates. It’s about trust ... If we don’t trust our authorities, it’s because they don’t talk to us.”
Likewise, the electoral bureau’s decision to cancel the first round of the presidential ballot. “It was unprecedented – yet still they failed to communicate or explain,” Dragomir said. “It just fuels suspicions.”
A similar absence of clear, complete and – most importantly – public evidence surrounds the exclusion from May’s presidential re-run of both Georgescu and another far-right candidate, Diana Șoșoacă. Șoșoacă, of the ultranationalist SOS Romania party, had already been barred from standing in the first round.
The constitutional court pronounced Șoșoacă’s anti-EU, pro-Moscow diatribes “contrary to democratic values”. She would not be able to keep the presidential oath to respect Romania’s constitution and protect democracy if elected, it argued.
“Again, there’s just nothing really specific there,” said Dragomir. “No clear criteria, written in law … This may have been the right decision. But in this context, if it’s not completely clear, it just creates more tension and polarisation. That’s dangerous.”
The barrings left Romania’s populist far-right parties, which hold more than a third of parliamentary seats and had united behind Georgescu, scrambling to find a replacement candidate.
In the end, they fielded two – George Simion of Romania’s second-largest party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), and Anamaria Gavrilă, founder of the Party of Young People (POT) – before Gavrilă withdrew.
“We decided to support the one who has the most chance of winning,” she said on Wednesday. “We must go beyond parties and, as Mr Georgescu said, we must support this ultranationalist movement by giving it all the chances.”
Polls have suggested Simion would top the first round with about 30% of the national vote, but would likely be defeated in the second round runoff by the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, who is running as an independent.
Whatever the outcome, Georgescu’s campaign has been “an absolute wake-up call”, said Victoria Stoiciu, a Social Democrat senator and former progressive activist. “No one saw it coming, and he’s clearly a symptom of something deeper.”
With inequalities growing, the gap between voters and politicians widening and far-right populists stoking resentment, Stoiciu said, “It does remind me of the interwar rise of fascism. The same perceptions of a corrupt elite, the same disconnects.”
She added that there were external factors, too, including a “long-term, sustained investment by Russia in undermining trust”. But Romania’s mainstream politicians, she acknowledged, had to “be much more open, listen more, talk more” to voters.
Above all, they had to actually make a difference to people’s lives. That was a message that resonated back in Drăgănești. Ștefan, 78, a rare dissenting voice, said Georgescu “should just have been arrested, from the start … He’s clearly a shady character.”
But even if Georgescu was not the man to do it, Ștefan said, Romania still “absolutely and desperately needs change”.
With this, Ștefan’s wife, Jenica, 69, chipped in. “We just have to hope,” she said. “The only problem is, we don’t know what to hope for.”
