Patrick Lawrence for l'AntiDiplomatico

Another political mess in Romania, another case of apparent if not proven electoral corruption. The nation’s presidential election last Sunday is the second such occasion in six months. We cannot know, not yet and maybe never, how it came to be that a “centrist” by the prevailing definition of this term won at the polls after trailing the leading candidate by a very wide margin. But we can usefully surmise certain things and draw some just-short-of-definite conclusions.

It is just as well I note straightaway my tentative judgment about the results of Sunday’s elections in Romania. Assuming you were paying any attention, in all likelihood you have just witnessed another fixed election in a nation that has struggled and failed the whole of the post–Cold War era to institutionalize anything resembling a democratic process. This appears to be one more case of political malfeasance on the part of entrenched centrists, and when I say “centrists” I mean Europe’s neoliberal elites as well as those in Bucharest who are evidently as indifferent to voters’ preferences as they proved last December, when the Constitutional Court in Bucharest declared a perfectly valid election invalid because the winner was not a member of the ruling clique and did not partake of its various orthodoxies—paramount among these, in my view, its Russophobia.

There is some sound evidence to support this pessimistic assessment of the results Sunday, and there is a surfeit of circumstantial evidence to this same effect.

Nicu?or Dan’s declared victory last weekend will now disappear from the front pages of the mainstream Western press—a fait accompli in no need of further scrutiny. Let us not succumb to this deception-by-silence. The doubt that lingers as to the legitimacy of this outcome is a measure not only of the predicaments of Romanians as they struggle to find their way forward; it reflects gravely on the fragility of the trans–Atlantic world’s post-democracies altogether. To an extent we will do well to understand, we are all Romanians now.

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After the first round of the Romanian election, held on 4 May, the outcome of the just-completed second round was a more or less a foregone conclusion, as readers may recall. George Simion, who is identified in mainstream media across the West as a dangerous “ultranationalist,” took 41 percent of the first-round vote—this in a field of 10 candidates. The result seemed to stun everyone. Running second behind him was Dan, a Western-tilted centrist—always and everywhere this term—who identifies strongly with the European Union and its various projects, support for the war in Ukraine high among them. To Simion’s 41 percent, Dan took 21 percent.

The alarm in the West’s centers of power was immediately evident. Here is an opinion piece The New York Times ran 16 May under the headline, “Romania is about to experience disaster.” The writer, a Romanian scholar named Vladimir Bortun, who now professes at Oxford, compared this spring’s election with last December’s and looked at things this way:

[indent.]

Worse is perhaps to come…. This race is tighter, but barring a surge in turnout, Mr. Simion looks likely to become the country’s next president. That would give him, a self-described Trumpist, power to appoint a prime minister, direct foreign policy and command the armed forces. For Romania, a country of nearly 20 million people, it would be a very bad turn of events.

[end indent.]

That is mild compared with what read elsewhere. The Financial Times, in a 10 May piece headlined, “An ultranationalist vying to lead Romania,” marked Simion down as “a football hooligan,” a right-wing populist “exploiting voter disgust with Romania’s political establishment.” More to the point, the FT noted, “He has downplayed Russia’s threat to European security and called for a halt in aid to Kyiv.” These latter, of course, are (as Papists would put it), Simion’s mortal sins.

Haven’t we heard all this before? Haven’t we been here before?

C?lin Georgescu, whose election was disqualified by the high court in Bucharest last December on patently specious grounds, was an ultranationalist. Marine le Pen, recently barred from running for the French presidency on equally flimsy legal arguments, is also an ultranationalist. The leaders of Alternativ für Deutscheland, now rated Germany’s No. 1 party in various public opinion polls, cannot participate in the government in Berlin because the party is extremely ultranationalist.

I have just listed three out-and-out cases of corruption as Europe’s entrenched neoliberal authoritarians wage political war against their own electorates. Most certainly do I have these in mind as I consider the unexpected result in Bucharest last Sunday.

Simion bears a close resemblance to these other figures. He stood, indeed, as Georgescu’s political heir in Romania’s just-completed elections. He, Simion, has no great enthusiasm for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union, of which Romania has been a member since 2004 and 2007 respectively. But, being a realist, the 38–year-old Simion is on the record as unopposed to both. He is a vigorous defender of Romanian sovereignty—this is what makes him an “ultranationalist”—and favors balanced relations with the West and the Russian Federation. It is in the latter cause that he opposes Western support for the Kiev regime—this in recognition that the Western powers provoked the Russian intervention three years ago.

Nicu?or Dan, to put this briefly, is a mirror image: He is vigorously in favor of the E.U.’s expansive powers, concomitantly weak as a defender of national sovereignty, and a card-carrying Russophobe in the standard neoliberal mold. Support for the Western alliance’s proxy war in Ukraine, a function of his animosity toward Romania’s Cold War ally, is key to Dan’s political identity. He is, in short, wholly representative of the long-established elites Romanians have come to despise, notably but not only for their gross mismanagement of the economy and their dedication to foreign policies that in no wise serve the nation’s electorate.

It is against this backdrop that Simion was expected to carry the second round of the elections with little difficulty. And it is against this backdrop once again that the declared result arrived late Sunday evening as an abrupt surprise. Simion, having achieved double Dan’s share of the vote in the first round, finished (officially) with 46 Percent of the vote to Dan’s 54 percent.

To read this result properly—to suspect its validity, this is to say—one must briefly recall briefly the elections last December. They faced Romanians with this same choice. C?lin Georgescu, a Romania-for–Romanians candidate: He was not “anti–Western in any sense, but he favored balanced relations with the West and non–West—Russia, China, et al. He also promised to oust the much-resented cliques who have held power since the Ceau?escu regime fell in 1989.

Georgescu took a relative majority in the first round, 23 percent, and was heavily favored to win the presidency in the second round. It was then the Constitutional Court moved to nullify the elections on the preposterous argument that Georgescu may have benefited—note the conditional verb, as there is no evidence of this—from social media campaigns favorable to Russia. Simion, as noted a close political ally of Georgescu, called the court’s maneuver “a coup d’état.” In my mind it was a question merely whether it was one or resembled one—little more than a splitting of hairs.

With these events in mind, I simply do not see how one can take the outcome of last Sunday’s election at face value. It is plausible that Dan won the vote by a considerable margin: We must allow for this as a matter of intellectual integrity. But by the very same token it would be utterly illogical not to consider the very real possibility that Dan’s victory is a “victory”—another in a long, long line of apparent electoral frauds. These extend back at least as far as the mid–1990s.

Always the question has been the same: Which way will Romania tilt? This has obsessed the West since Ceau?escu’s downfall because the West is obsessed with its never-ending, never-relenting campaign to surround the Russian Federation with a view ultimately of subverting it. And not tilting either way—nonalignment in the lexicon of years gone by—has always been an unsatisfactory alternative for the Western powers, just as it was during the Cold War decades.

There is, to go to the particulars, the usual list of oddities and what look like irregularities as the voting proceeded. High among these are the raw numbers. Simion went into the second round with a 100 percent lead over Dan, and the latter defeated the former by a margin of more than 17 percent. What distance is there here between what is possible and what is plausible?

Simion did not initially concede to Dan as the vote count was completed last Sunday evening. Instead, he accused Moldova, which is well within the Western fold, of a massive fraud operation. Moldova has played this kind of role in the past, we must note. A third of Moldovia’s population hold dual Moldovan–Romanian citizenship and are eligible to vote. Simion, noting that turnout among these voters was nearly triple what is was during the first round, put a number on it: This was a fraud of 1.7 million votes. “By 1 p.m., more than 50,000 votes had been cast by the diaspora—an increase of almost 70 percent compared with the first round,” Simion’s party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians, posted on its website.

Simion’s refusal to concede was reported in an RT piece time-stamped 53 minutes past midnight Monday morning. At 10:16 p.m., roughly 10 hours later, RT reported again on the election, this time quoting Simion declaring, “It was the will of the Romanian people. We will go all the way, even if it is hard to bear the bitter taste of defeat.”

O.K., something happened in the intervening hours: There were some conversations, some arrangements or agreements were reached, there were some persuasions or coercions. There can be no other conclusion to draw. But we do not know what it is that happened.

At roughly the same time Simion leveled his charges of fraud in Moldova, Pavel Durov, the Russian-born, French-resident founder of the Telegram messaging platform, disclosed that French intelligence had approached him prior to the elections and asked him to “silence” the messages of Romanian nationalists and those who favored the Simion campaign. When the French Foreign Ministry denied any such request as “completely unfounded, Durov named a name and specified the occasion:

[indent.]

This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hotel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused. We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe.

[end indent.]

There was, finally—unless more is to come out—a peculiar pattern midway in the voting process. During the interim between the first and second rounds, 4 May to 16 May, when Simion was considered the obvious winner, we were treated to the by-now-familiar assertions of Russian interference. A massive disinformation operation was again afoot. And then came the upset victory of the E.U.–favored candidate. And since then silence—no further talk of Russian interference.

I cannot even speculate on this phenomenon. No, I can only wonder: Was there a vote-fixing operation assisted by Western intelligence—Durov confirms this much, indeed—alongside a propaganda campaign, and the former wrongfooted the latter? It is impossible to answer this question, but impossible not to pose it.

That familiar reek pervading Romanian politics persists: This we can conclude, even if it is among the few certainties attaching to last weekend’s elections. And let us not miss: This odor of corruption is strong in Romania but perfectly detectable in the West. The German case as noted above, the French case, Kier Starmer’s assumption of office after the disgracefully false demonization of Jeremy Corbyn as the British Labour Party’s leader: Are we not all Romanians now?