When Romania this month annulled the first round of a presidential election won by a Moscow-friendly ultranationalist candidate, many in the West applauded what they hailed as a “solution” to a democratic process gone awry.
By ordering a redo of the election, however, Romania’s constitutional court has handed a propaganda gift to Russia, which has long derided the West’s stated commitment to democracy as a sham that only applied so long as the “wrong” side did not win. Almost three weeks after the decision, a date for a new vote has yet to be set.
“I am sure that all these games are perfectly understandable to any more or less objective observer,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said after the Dec. 6 ruling by the Romanian court. Russia’s embassy in Bucharest posted Mr. Lavrov’s mocking comments on its website.
Elon Musk, who has echoed Russian talking points on the Ukraine war, also weighed in, misconstruing the unanimous decision by a 10-member Romanian tribunal as the diktat of a single judge: “How can a judge cancel an election and not be considered a dictator?” he said on social media last week.
Even though Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Musk are often accused of promoting far-fetched conspiracy theories, their comments raised a question that has also worried longtime critics of Russia: How can it be right to invalidate voters’ ballots halfway through an election?
The court ordered a new vote after Calin Georgescu, a previously little-known ultranationalist, stunned Romania’s mainstream political parties by winning the opening round of the presidential race on Oct. 24. The court intervened just two days before a runoff vote that Mr. Georgescu looked well positioned to win.
The court left choosing a date for a new election to the government, but that meant waiting for the formation of a new administration following a separate parliamentary election on Dec. 1. After weeks of haggling, mainstream parties looked set on Monday to finally form a coalition government that excluded nationalist forces.
Even centrists have criticized the constitutional court’s intervention.
Elena Lasconi, Mr. Georgescu’s centrist rival in the canceled runoff, called it “illegal” and said it “crushes the very essence of democracy — the vote.” A fierce critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, she warned in an angry statement that Romania risked becoming “the laughingstock of the Kremlin dictator. Enough!”
The constitutional court justified its surprising decision to restart Romania’s election from scratch largely on the basis of declassified intelligence reports pointing to possible meddling by Russia and evidence that a flood of TikTok videos supporting Mr. Georgescu, the ultranationalist candidate, “could have been coordinated by a state actor.”
The election, the court said, was marred “by numerous irregularities and violations of electoral legislation” that “distorted the free and fair nature of the vote cast by citizens” and “undermined the equal opportunities of electoral competitors.”
Richard Nash, a former British diplomat who works as a senior adviser to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a Washington research and advisory group, said the court had acted within its powers under Romania’s Constitution. But, he added, it “entered a gray area by stepping into the political realm.” Courts, he said, “don’t like to do this very often” because it opens them up to accusations of political bias.
The use of intelligence agency information as evidence, he added, “is very problematic” but has become common in recent years as Western governments work “to counter disinformation and hybrid threats” involving foreign powers like Russia.
The intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role, only the observation that “Russia has a history of interfering in the electoral processes of other states” and vague claims that what happened in Romania was “similar” to well-documented Russian election interference in neighboring Moldova.
Questions over whether Russia really had played a significant role intensified last week after a respected investigative news outlet reported that a TikTok campaign that ended up helping the ultranationalist candidate had initially been paid for by a centrist party, possibly in order to take votes away from another far-right candidate.
The paucity of solid evidence pointing to Moscow, said Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian political scientist who has studied and warned against Russia election meddling for years, suggested that the Romanian court’s decision “appears to have been motivated by the dissatisfaction that the ‘wrong’ candidate emerged victorious in the first round.”
That suspicion puts Romania in a small group of countries, mostly developing nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia, that have aborted elections in midstream.
Election results have rarely been nullified before in Europe, except in countries occupied by the Red Army after World War II like Hungary, where voters rejected communist candidates for Parliament in a 1945 election but then had their choice invalidated when many of the victors were arrested. (Communists in Romania avoided the “wrong” side winning their country’s first postwar election in 1946: they arrested their opponents before the vote.)
A rare recent case of a European election being annulled was in Austria in 2016. Austria’s constitutional court voided the result of a presidential vote that had been narrowly lost by a candidate from the far-right Freedom party, which challenged the defeat by arguing that mail-in ballots had been improperly counted. A swift redo of the vote with the same candidates confirmed the initial result.
Outside Europe, elections have been aborted far more frequently, often as a result of a military coup, as happened in Myanmar in 2021 and in Algeria in 1992.
The consequences have mostly been dire, often involving years of conflict, said Martin Evans, a history professor at Sussex University in Britain and co-author of a book on the turmoil provoked by Algeria’s canceled 1992 election, “Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed.”
“From a historical point of view, it is never a good idea to cancel an election,” Mr. Evans said.
Mr. Georgescu, who put Orthodox Christianity at the center of his election campaign, has accused the constitutional court of going against God’s will and last week warned that judges would face “long prison sentences” if they did not reverse their decision to annul the election.
Mr. Evans said that Romania, as a member of the European Union, was severely constrained in how far and how long it could deviate from democratic norms.
The E.U., Mr. Evans said, “plays an important role in anchoring democracy in Romania” and can ensure that that Romania delivers on promises to hold a new election swiftly.
Officials in Brussels, however, have so far mostly stayed silent on Romania’s annulled vote, insisting that how member states handle elections is their own responsibility. That contrasts with their vociferous criticism of what the European Union believes was a rigged October election in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in which pro-European forces lost to the increasingly Moscow-friendly governing party.
Individual European states have applauded Romania’s response to election irregularities.
Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radoslaw Sikorski, welcomed the court’s decision, saying on X that “democracy prevailed” because “a solution in line with the Romanian constitution was found.” Officials in German, the Baltic States and other countries voiced the same view.
Many in Romania, however, have been left feeling queasy.
Diana Mardarovici, a politician with Romania’s centrist National Liberal Party, said she was “relieved” that fears of an ultranationalist becoming president had been lifted. But she added: “I have real concerns about the precedent this sets.”
Voters, she said, gave victory in the first round of the presidential race to Mr. Georgescu, because “we lost trust.” Annulling his win, she added, means that “we have now lost even more trust. People feel disenfranchised.”
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