Election chaos is engulfing Romania and no one saw it coming

In the final days before Romania’s parliamentary elections this weekend, the governing parties’ leaders both quit, pollsters gave up on projecting the results and the nation’s top court cast serious doubt on the integrity of the voting process.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Sunday’s parliamentary contest pits the pro-European establishment against far-right insurgents and will help to determine whether a critical NATO member and Ukrainian ally lurches closer to Moscow. It takes place in an atmosphere of scarcely believable chaos and confusion.

Romania is in the middle of three consecutive weekend ballots for both a new parliament and a new president. Events spun off the rails in the first round of the presidential election on Nov. 24, when a Russia sympathizer with barely any public profile emerged as the shock winner.

Calin Georgescu reported zero spending on a campaign that was mainly driven by social media videos on TikTok recorded from his living room. His victory sparked fears that Romania’s democratic process had been hacked by the Kremlin.

In the country’s biggest political crisis since the communist regime collapsed over three decades ago, the constitutional court has ordered a recount of the presidential ballots, but it won’t have the fresh results until Sunday night and there is mounting speculation that it may order a rerun.

As voters prepare to return to the polls on Sunday, there are major questions hanging over the process that they simply do not have answers to.

The prospect of a far-right surge has sent hundreds to take the streets in freezing temperatures. In Bucharest, demonstrators chanted “We want freedom, not fascism.”

For all the concerns about Russian interference, there’s also deep frustration, especially outside the major cities, with the mainstream candidates who were ejected in the first presidential ballot. Romania’s two most established parties, the Social Democrats and the Liberals, have governed in coalition for the past three years and the country has suffered rising inequality and rampant inflation.

The vote puts 19 million Romanians at the heart of the struggle between the democratic institutions of the European Union and Russia’s expansionary ambitions.

To the north, Romania borders Ukraine, where the Russian army has been fighting for almost three years to restore what President Vladimir Putin says is his country’s historic territorial rights. To the east is Moldova, where a pro-Western president survived another election earlier this month amid widespread reports of Kremlin interference. Putin’s ally Viktor Orban governs Hungary to the west.

Romania, too, an EU member, could soon have a pro-Russian president and a far-right government, if the next two weeks of voting break in their favor.

Many Romanians only began to learn after the vote about 62-year-old Georgescu, the agricultural engineer who languished in the single digits in polls just weeks before the election. A one-time ally of ultranationalist Alliance for the Unity of Romanians, Georgescu has denounced military support for Ukraine, called for a quick end to the war and cast doubt on the benefits of the country’s NATO membership.

“I do not want to leave NATO, I do not want to leave the European Union,” he said on Tuesday, pushing back against his characterization by the local media. “I am a Romanian — I have no connection with Russia, I’m not a legionnaire, I’m not an antisemite.”

Some of the comments collide with previous statements, in which he laid blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with NATO — and raised the prospect of leaving the military alliance if it didn’t guarantee peace. In 2020, Georgescu praised Putin as one of the worlds few true leaders.

The alarm deepened after Georgescu said he had no campaign funding — and that supporter financing had been donated. The claim raised hackles from critics who pointed out that the candidate’s high-resolution videos, including some with sweeping landscape shots — featuring him on horseback, performing judo moves, dipping into a mountain lake — could only have been produced by professionals.

An investigation by local news website G4media suggested the effort was artificially amplified by foreign interference. Georgescu’s profile was heavily promoted by a volunteers who were prompted to spread posts in exchange for “undisclosed rewards,” the website reported.

A similar scheme took place during the vote in Moldova.

Romania’s Supreme Defense Council, which includes top government and intelligence officials, issued a statement Thursday saying that one candidate — it didn’t name Georgescu — benefited from “massive exposure and preferential treatment.”

The panel cited Russian influence operations that aimed to shift public opinion in Romania — and accused TikTok of failing to label the candidate’s videos as election material as required by Romanian law.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who has frequently misled the media over previous disinformation campaigns, said Friday that allegations of Russian interference in Romanian elections are unfounded and unsupported, according to the Interfax news agency. TikTok said it was “categorically false” to claim that it treated Georgescu’s account differently from other candidates.

Adding to the sense of a country spinning out of control, Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu resigned his party’s leadership while his coalition partners, the Liberals, ousted their leader.

After pollsters completely missed Georgescu’s victory last week, they’ve opted not to release any further surveys, so voters, candidates and officials are all essentially flying blind ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Before the voluntary polling blackout, the ultranationalists tied to another candidate George Simion, had been making steady gains and were running second place behind the Social Democrats. Now though, no one is really sure where they stand.

“The situation is very fluid,” said Remus Stefureac, the director of research firm INSCOP.

He predicted that Romania’s pro-European would still get between 50% and 60%, enabling them to form a government, but without much conviction.

“In a background of increased social tensions, a sovereign movement can get a temporary boost,” he said.

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(With assistance from Slav Okov and Demetrios Pogkas.)