The Death of Romania's Democracy Delusion

War with Russia is too Important to be Left to Voters

“When the augurs were consulted, they announced that the dictator’s appointment appeared to be flawed. This matter was rendered suspect and of dubious validity by charges levelled by the tribunes…To whom was it not obvious, they asked, that what the augurs deemed a flaw was the fact that the dictator was a plebeian? These and other objections raised by the tribunes had no effect.” - Livy [VIII.23]

According to at least one poll, Calin Georgescu was favored to win the second round of the Romanian election before it was cancelled.

Western “liberal democracy” has been exposed as a farce. Bravely opening up a new frontier in shamelessness, the Constitutional Court of Romania has ruled that the first round of their Presidential Election was invalid after the surprise victory of the “relatively unknown” independent candidate Calin Georgescu, a man who is described as an “ultranationalist” and a “conspiracy theorist,” though who is perhaps more accurately described as a somewhat quirky guy who wants to avoid confrontation with Russia and made some indiscreet comments about disfavored former rulers of Romania. After our story’s plucky hero Georgescu got 22% in the first round they had a recount of the entire vote, hoping they could prove election fraud [an assumption which would make you a “fascist” if it was lodged at the victory of an anti-Russia politician.] When it was found that the vote count was valid, the Constitutional Court straight cancelled the entire election out of fear that Georgescu could win, after voting in the second round had already started for expatriates. A new election will supposedly be held at some point in the near future.

The justification for cancelling the election to save democracy? Of course, it is the claim that Russian launched a “hybrid attack” on the election by allegedly buying some TikTok ads or something. They have no proof, nor any explanation for how that would constitute an “attack,” but it’s similar to all the other times people made this baseless accusation when they didn’t like election results, so that’s good enough for government work. The commentary on this is a combination of hilarious and mind-numbingly stupid, with not a single mainstream media hack recognizing the irony of believing that only through a conspiracy could a “conspiracy theorist” be elected. What’s more, they say this with a straight face while themselves acknowledging the raft of institutional failures which would lead to protest voting. At the heart of the whole affair lies the clear admission that the public seeing Georgescu’s message would cause them to vote for him, which is to say that the public does want peace with Russia and it isn’t all a nefarious peace conspiracy by the dastardly Russkies. I, for one, thank our friends at the Constitutional Court of Romania for laying it bare for all to see that Western “liberal democracy” is [more or less literally] fake and gay: you can use the elections to decide the VAT on zacusca but you filthy peasants best leave matters of war and peace to your betters and the fancy ideas they got studying Retardology at places like Oxford and Columbia.

Calin Georgescu, who is a pretty normal and respectable looking guy.

For our purposes here no deep background of Romania is necessary, though there are a few quick points one should make. The first of which is that though in many ways Romania is typical of Eastern Europe, it has historically been a particularly brutal place [in fact, it is said that during WW2 when the SS showed up they shut down the Holocaust being committed by Romanian partisans so the SS could do it in a more humane fashion.] During the Cold War, under the notorious dictator Ceausescu, though it was a formal member of the Warsaw Pact, Romania expelled the Soviets and remained free of Soviet influence, something which was recognized by NATO countries. Some commentary on this election makes completely ahistorical claims about Romania’s “history of Russian domination” though a fair amount of mainstream coverage has also specifically noted this is not true. Romania was occupied by the USSR for a period after the war, but this is because they were in the Axis alliance and lost, so that is to be expected.

After the fall of Ceausescu the reformed Communist Party remained in power throughout the 1990s. The Communist Party ultimately became Social Democratic Party, and someone from a successor party to the Communists has made it to the final round in every Presidential election until this current one, where they narrowly came in third place. Romania is a deeply impoverished and corrupt country, in large part because the Communists never actually went away. In fact, their entire Parliament won the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s “Person of the Year” award in 2013, a satirical prize for furthering the cause of corruption [it must be noted that the OCCRP’s control by the US State Department blob has recently been highlighted by news sources in several languages, though this was not much of a secret.] Romanians are known as a superstitious people with an interest in mysticism, even more so than is common among Orthodox Eastern Europeans. That being said, Transylvania, a large mountainous region in Romania’s center, being the semi-mythical home of monsters in Anglophone culture was not well known within Romania until after the Cold War.¹

As to Georgescu’s background, he is what you would call a regime defector. An agronomist by trade, he worked for the government in this capacity during the ‘90s, and then got a PhD in soil science in 1999 at Bucharest’s main agriculture and veterinary science institute. As well as leading a sustainability institute for the government for over a decade, he has held high level positions for the Club of Rome and the UN in his capacity as a soil scientist. Further, he was a UN Special Rapporteur relating to human rights and hazardous waste, though I remain convinced those positions are broadly fake. I suppose his interest in soil makes it all the easier for his enemies to paint him as a Nazi, but its normal that an agricultural policy specialist should be interested in agriculture policy. The point is that he has held high level positions at top globalist institutions in the past, and one can assume he gained important insights leading him to his current views. You can see him talk about it here, though note that they play it fast and loose with his position titles and he held those posts as it relates to his specialty, not for the organizations as a whole:

Georgescu has been widely portrayed as a crackpot in Romanian media. I can’t claim any special insight into their media environment, but suffice to say they are probably as biased as ours and even less responsible. One solid piece of information is that he wrote the forward to the Romanian edition of a book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr- it stands to reason they would have known each other for many years given RFK’s work as an environmental lawyer specializing in contamination. It’s difficult to know what to take from some of the media’s claims though others seem plausible, for example, that he is a moonlanding skeptic, a widely held view given that they can’t go to the moon now. Another source of endless pearl clutching is that he is said to be a covid “pandemic” denier, which is the correct position because that in no way constituted a pandemic, though allegedly he doesn’t believe the virus exists at all. DW claimed in 2021 that Romania had a “pandemic of coronavirus deniers” so there is definitely an audience for such rhetoric. One way or another, it’s amusing that this professional scientist should make statements like “the only real science is Jesus Christ.” Regardless of possible media inaccuracy, it does seem clear that the Phd-holding Georgescu’s zany views are a perfect example of the IQ bell curve meme:

Georgescu is in every way the hooded guy from these memes.

A Wall Street Journal article which I use throughout this piece describes the situation as follows,

“Romanian media has painted him as an offbeat character, saying he claims to have consorted with aliens who resemble lizards, that the pyramids of Egypt are a hoax and that bottled water and Western soft drinks contain nano-components that control the thoughts of consumers.”

In short he sounds incredibly based. More seriously, it is hard to know what to take from the media saying this, especially seeing it translated into English by another party. I imagine the lizard claim is just that he made a joke about the people he knew from the UN and the Club of Rome being Reptilians, a conspiracy theory which is generally referred to facetiously. It is not clear what the pyramids being a “hoax” means because they exist and anyone can go see them. As far as bottled water and Western soft drinks containing “nano-components that control the thoughts of consumers” he probably didn’t mean that in the sense of having a chip in your brain but was explaining that food contamination has a deleterious impact on your mental capacity, which is his formal area of specialization. For all I know Georgescu is mentally ill and I am just being an apologist, but this all strikes me as the same as when Bolsonaro made the joke that the vaccine could turn you into a crocodile and the media acted as if that was a belief he was earnestly promoting. If the media doesn’t want me to make these assumptions, they should try being honest.

The one part I do find reasonably concerning is Georgescu’s alleged praise for Romania’s Nazi-allied leader Marshal Ion Antonescu as well as the founder of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard Corneliu Codreanu. Even so, the same WSJ article refers to him as having said such figures “embody” the Romanian nation. What does that even mean? Vlad the Impaler is a major national hero of Romania. Such characters do in fact embody Romania as a nation with a brutal history that has been overran by every people that ever exploded out of the Asian Steppes. Nothing else he actually says would indicate he is a fascist, except of course that he thinks peace is a good thing and elections should be decided by the voters.

More importantly, when Ukrainians praise equivalent World War II figures, most notably Stepan Bandera, they are called “heroes of democracy” and the United States gives them weapons, once again demonstrating that the globalist shitlibs hold no value above hostility to Russia. Among other things, the Romanian national prosecutors are investigating if during the campaign there “has been a breach of a ban on organizations and symbols of a fascist, racist or xenophobic nature.” This is somewhat funny as Ukraine’s refusal to take part in such prosecutions is one of Russia’s stated grievances, and people act as if it is impossible for Ukraine to satisfy it. In reality, most European countries have similar laws and Ukraine could quite easily set up an international commission of perhaps Romania, Poland, and Germany to oversee the enforcement of anti-Nazi statutes, but Nazis have too much power in the great Democracy™ of Ukraine to implement such a policy².

Some protesters in Bucharest. The “Euro-Atlanticists” always seem like such wise and well-balanced people.

Of course, the only thing that it comes down to is this: Georgescu’s desire to avoid conflict with Russia is unacceptable. We are meant to believe that NATO’s “Eastern Flank” is terrified of a loss in Ukraine but two of Ukraine’s neighbors, Slovakia and Hungary, are already done with all of this, while Moldova would have voted for better relations with Russia if their political establishment didn’t pull similar but less egregious moves during their recent elections, and Romanians had to be stopped from voting for peace. If the latter two were allowed to implement policies wanted by their voters Poland would become Ukraine’s only neighbor expressing hostility towards Russia and by extension justifying the entire Ukraine policy. Of course, the Baltic Chihuahuas are implacably hostile, but what Brussels really needs is the premise that Russian tanks will roll across Ukraine’s verdant plains and threaten Western Europe, not the deranged domination fantasies of Baltic statelets which serve no purpose in NATO but as hair-triggers for nuclear war.

For all of this, Georgescu’s hostility to NATO, Euroscepticism, affinity towards Russia, or whatever else you want to call it, isn’t that extreme. According to the BBC, he would not try to remove Romania from the EU or NATO, but would instead want to negotiate matters with a view towards Romania’s interests, which he feels do not include antagonizing Russia. In the view of the anti-democratic pantsuit mafia that runs the EU, this will make Romania more like Hungary and Slovakia [and perhaps soon enough Czechia,] two EU and NATO members in good standing, but nevertheless an unacceptable turn for Romania. Instead of having hostility towards Russia as a key policy goal he would focus on the well-being of his own people and seek to end aid and political support to Ukraine. It needs to be noted that most countries in Europe gave away all the equipment they could years ago, and though I don’t have numbers about Romania’s weapons stockpiles on hand it has increasingly become a real national security risk to continue to transfer armaments to Ukraine faster than they can be replaced. Georgescu further claims that NATO would not defend Romania if it was attacked and called the NATO missile shield an “embarrassment” that would drag them into a conflict they don’t need. He insists that NATO must be purely defensive, which of course NATO claims it is, making their apoplexy a bit revealing. All of this is going on while NATO has plans to expand an air force base in Romania until it is the largest NATO base in Europe in an effort to seriously confront Russian supremacy on the Black Sea³.

According to an exclusive from Reuters, Georgescu would go so far as to block exports of Ukrainian grain out of Black Sea ports. I believe from reading this shitty article that claim is intentionally misleading. It reads as follows,

“Since Russia attacked Ukraine, Romania has helped export millions of tons of Ukrainian grain through its Black Sea port of Constanta, trained Ukrainian fighter pilots and donated a Patriot air defence battery to Kyiv.

All of that will stop should he win, Georgescu said.

"How could I agree to that? It is impossible. Romania and the Romanian people come first."”

Note how many things they put in there, that he says would “all” end, but then within the article he makes no more specific claims about the grain. Regardless, if this is a serious policy position, this one I do disagree with. I know of no principle under international law or relating to Russia’s security interests which would justify disallowing Ukrainian grain exports [the US always sanctioning everyone notwithstanding.] In the past Russia has put forward the use of Romanian ports as a solution to the problem of the war shutting down Ukrainian ports, and I don’t believe this antagonizes Russia in any way nor do they have cause to claim it does. Further, of course, grain is a vital supply that is needed throughout the world and a legitimate part of Ukraine’s civilian economy. Blocking the exports would be totally unjustified, but once again I think he is referring to everything else in that statement and Reuters is just trying to scare people. I also don’t see doesn’t see how the President would have unilateral power to do such a thing regardless. I couldn’t tell you exactly how trade is regulated within Romania, but it is a port, shippers generally just pay to use it.

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The thread running throughout this is the thing we’re used to hearing about anyone who challenges the ancient Anglo anti-Russia consensus: Georgescu loves Putin. There is no evidence of this at all, and it is clearly more similar to Georgian Dream where he is just trying to stop everyone from getting killed. While some idiot named Dan Perry writing for Newsweek may be happy to blithely refer to Georgescu as “fanboying for Putin” the evidence of this is much more thin. The BBC gives us this quote:

“He denied that he was "Moscow's man", referring derisively to Romania's "un-intelligence agencies".

"They can't accept that the Romanian people finally said, 'we want our life back, our country, our dignity'," he said, portraying himself as battling against an unyielding establishment.

In a sometimes tetchy interview in which he praised Donald Trump and the Hungarian populist leader Viktor Orban, Georgescu referred to Vladimir Putin as a "patriot and a leader".

He then added: "But I am not a fan."

But when questioned about Russia's war on Ukraine, he first asked, "Are you sure of that?", appearing to deny the war's very existence.”

For starters, I love that they are trying to malign him by showing that he likes the President-Elect of the United States- the leader of NATO- and Viktor Orban, the European Union’s current President. This is a telling indication of the extent to which a Mandarin class and their brain-broken sycophants have specific demands about EU and NATO policies, as opposed to believing those should be decided by consensus among the elected governments of member states [of course, their claim is that he will harm the EU’s ability to form “consensus.”]

Further, it shouldn’t be controversial that Putin is a “patriot and a leader.” The issue is that he is a patriot and leader of Russia. The question, among the sane, should be to what extent Russian interests must be in conflict with Western interests. As to the last part of this, I yet again get the feeling that the either this was intentionally mistranslated or the interviewer is being deliberately obtuse. Notice the phrase: “war on Ukraine.” Russia is at war with Ukraine, and he is more likely denying the premise that Ukraine is an entirely innocent victim instead of denying that the war is happening at all. It’s fine to say that you believe Russia’s invasion was entirely unjustified, but the Russia-Ukraine War is the normal kind of war that you see throughout history: the interests of two powers abut in this location and having failed to come to an agreement Russia decided to take full control of a border region which happened to contain people of its ethnic group who had been oppressed due to their connection to Russia. You can call Putin “the new Hitler” all you want but this is the sort of thing people have wars about.

Despite, or more likely because of, all of this media opposition, Georgescu managed to pull out a surprise first place victory in the first round. Not bad for a guy who didn’t have a campaign office and according to him did not spend any money. A Politico article from the burgeoning “supposed to scare you about Georgescu but makes him sound super based” genre of writing describes his campaign, such as it was,

“Călin Georgescu barely registered in national opinion polls, didn’t take part in big TV debates, and doesn’t even belong to a political party. But he’s leading the race to become Romania’s next president…

He has also said he doesn’t have a political campaign but “a calling,” and that his political party is Romania.

Oddly for such a successful politician, Georgescu lacks a campaign headquarters. After his stunning first round victory on Sunday, reporters waited for him in front of his home.

He declared no campaign expenses, saying: “We are in God’s hands.”

A bar TV in Bucharest showing election results. In other news, it turns out that Romanians have heard of alcohol besides plum brandy.

We can appreciate their shock at least, as it wasn’t a result anyone expected and his results more than doubled the last and highest polls. In fact, I was considering writing about this topic anyway when I went to look it up to find out they had cancelled the election. One would have assumed that he would have been cordon sanitaire’d out of existence through the normal process as badly as Jean-Marie Le Pen back in 2002, but polling showed him in a position to win. Apparently his TikTok videos were that popular in Romania, which has the highest rate of TikTok users in Europe.

Seeing the nature of the situation, and despite fears that cancelling an election might create the “perception” of unfairness, on December 6th the Constitutional Court ended democracy in Romania, a decision the US State Department supported on the grounds that, “Romanians must have confidence that their elections reflect the democratic will of the Romanian people.” This was after they had ordered a recount of the entire election only to find out that Georgescu really had won and the results did reflect the will of the Romanian people. Expatriates had already started voting when they cancelled the election to hold a new election at a future date. Their justifications were as tiresome as ever, so I will limit my explanation because either readers will already understand or can’t be made to.

In short, their claim is that Russia launched a “hybrid attack” on a NATO member by promoting Georgescu’s videos; how perhaps promoting some videos constitutes an “attack” is never explained. No evidence for this claim is given besides “declassified” documents showing that what Georgescu bills the “un-intelligence” agencies believe it may be true and it matches other times these accusations were made up. In fact, they say the 25,000 involved accounts had individual IP addresses so couldn’t be shown to be any sort of network. To add insult to irony, the claim at hand is that these reached 50 million impressions, which is about 5 1/2 impressions per each of Romania’s more than 9 million TikTok users. There is contradictory information about if TikTok impressions get counted immediately or if you have to watch the video for 2 seconds, but regardless each user generates several impressions per video watched, meaning each TikTok user actually watched perhaps one video on average, at least of the videos considered to be promoted through nefarious means. Alternately, voters in American swing states are inundated with TV ads for months and may be individually contacted 20 times by campaigns and still won’t vote for Kamala Harris because she is a drunken imbecile and her message sucks. The fact of the matter is that seeing the videos got people to vote for Georgescu, meaning they prefer him and his platform.

To go further down the idiocy rabbit hole, they also mention that many unrelated videos had a hashtag “associated” with Georgescu, #equilibriumandverticality, which is not very catchy but seems like a really technical sounding way to say “A rising tide will lift all ships.” It’s not clear to me what that accomplishes. Regardless, in one of the somewhat less stupid articles about all of this from a website called Panorama, they were able to get this quote from the Romanian journalist Teodora Munteanu,

“There are hundreds of these accounts. They even have Telegram channels where they organize themselves. And what worked was that they used very much his specific hashtags and comments given to other clips. And the fact that a lot of people were coming to other candidates and typing ‘Călin Georgescu’ meant that whenever you looked at Simion or Lasconi, for example, TikTok would always suggest to search for Călin Georgescu…These profiles were real. They were people with normal posts. But there were people who were reposting videos from Călin Georgescu’s campaign on and on. They were reposting dozens of videos a day. You’d think this was their part-time job.”

That just is how social media works. This is what we all did for Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012, and it may not have got us close to winning an election but it was sufficiently prominent to annoy the hell out of the mainstream war party candidates and their supporters. Further, a big part of Georgescu’s message is how the economy is leaving ordinary Romanians behind, so perhaps these people are unemployed, marginally employed, or pensioners, and have nothing better to do? It is also pretty normal that when you look up a candidate the other candidates are a search suggestion. All of these things are how the internet works under normal circumstances. They are also claiming that 800 of the TikTok accounts were from 2016 and only became active right before the election, but TikTok wasn’t launched until 2017, so either that is genuinely really suspicious and TikTok is fully in on this, or, much more likely, the people making these accusations are outright morons.

Speaking of how the internet works, we are also told that Romania’s election systems were targeted over 85,000 times after credentials were posted on a Russian hacking website. That perhaps sounds scary, but every level of the internet faces various cyber attacks all the time. Your phone and service provider and the website you are on bat the vast majority of them down without you ever learning about it. The Pentagon receives 13 billion phishing emails per year, and that is just one kind of “attack.” No baseline was given for how many times such a thing would usually happen, but the number is non-trivial. It’s also not made clear what any of these attacks might have done if they were successful, but given as the electoral database contains quite a lot of personal information it is as likely as anything this was just carders trying to steal identities.

The one part of this which is, if not credible, is at least not obviously stupid, is the claim that a crypto billionaire named Bogdan Peschir spent $381,000 promoting Georgescu on TikTok. This is said to be part of $1,000,000 total he spent on the election. The government has now searched multiple properties belonging to Peschir, “in connection with an investigation into potential voter corruption, money laundering and computer forgery.” They further claim, “the use of sums of money that there are indications that they might be derived from the commission of crimes, being subsequently introduced in a money laundering process.” He denies all of this, but it could have happened. The thing is, without looking deeply into Romania’s election laws, this is nothing to cancel an election over and most likely in normal circumstances he would just get told to register his spending and maybe pay a fine of some sort. No one is denying that he is a Romanian who supports Georgescu. In the US such spending is unlimited so long as it does not coordinate with the campaign, which no one claims Peshchir did. More importantly, the two main parties got over $15 million just in state subsidies over two months prior to the election. The idea that $1 million in spending could throw an election is nonsense on stilts, just like with Trump and the Facebook ads back in 2016 when they first started telling these stories.

If you’re interested in a more thorough explanation of the technical aspects of this, the French tech entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand went into it at some depth on Twitter. The key takeaway though is that even if every one of their claims were true it would in no way be a justification for cancelling an election as all it did was share a candidate’s real message.

Throughout all of this, it has been consistently admitted that Georgescu capitalized on legitimate grievances of the public, and this is not just because in the recent Parliamentary elections parties of similar views got around 35% without accusations of cheating. Even Georgescu’s strongest opponents acknowledge a widespread “perception” that the politicians are all on the same team, a “perception” that is literally true given that the two main parties have been in a coalition since 2021. For a representative example, in an article by an over-educated loser who is now a professor in Ireland, we are treated to an extensive explanation of all of this in between his hand-wringing and calling the public stupid.

In the article, titled “Romania’s democracy is in real danger – and so is Eastern Europe’s peace and stability,” Roman-Gabriel Olar writes,

“The grand governmental coalition between the social democrats and the liberals of recent years, supported by the current president, only led to societal frustration due to increased bureaucratisation, corruption and nepotism. The contrast between the lavish lifestyles of the politicians and the struggles with inflation, and increased living costs of the rest of society, has only exacerbated the grievances of the population…

Calin Georgescu was able to capitalise on these legitimate grievances of the diaspora (but not only), through a message that appealed to their nostalgia and longing for home despite offering few solutions or alternatives to the system…

The chronic underfunding and generally under-performing educational system of the last three decades has also created a public lacking the elementary critical thinking skills to process the largely phantasmagoric messages of Georgescu.”

How long do you think Roman-Gabriel had been waiting to work “phantasmagoric” into a sentence? Anyway, the real problem, according to Olar, is that because the institutions have failed the Romanian public lacks the “elementary critical thinking skills” to know why they shouldn’t let the institutions having failed cause them to vote for an outsider candidate who promises something different. Also, if this is such a problem why doesn’t he teach “law and government” to Romanians in Romania instead of teaching it to the Irish? Like a New York Times reporter from Alabama, all he actually wants to do is be a sophisticate who tries to explain to other sophisticates why people from his hometown are backwards rubes.

My uncharitable commentary notwithstanding, Olar’s essay is not as bad as many others. The The Wall Street Journal article referenced above is a true showpiece of brain rot, and one filed in the straight news section at that. However, I am not going to go through it and translate it out of Retardese, which I would hope readers are fluent in after so many years of life in Clown World, but I do want to highlight one quote:

“The appearance of Georgescu as the leading candidate in the Romanian election offered Moscow a potential win-win situation. Either Georgescu, with his known sympathies for Russian President Vladimir Putin, would be elected, or the state would be forced to intervene in a suspected influence operation, casting doubt on the integrity of Romanian elections.”

They weren’t forced to do anything. This is, yet again, the same thing as in 2016 where they emphasized a bunch of shit Russia allegedly did, none of which would have had an impact if not for them going on and on about it and launching endless investigations into nonsense. If they want to undermine Putin’s message about how NATO countries are fake democracies that are implacably hostile to Russia maybe they should use these “institutions” and “norms” they always talk about to govern well and what they shouldn’t do is become election deniers- or cancelers!- every time the public wants better relations with Russia, but I’m just spitballing here.

A typical EU supporter in Bucharest. As I have said before, they must breed these women in the basement of the Columbia SIPA building.

It’s easy to forget what a dark head space these people actually live in. In most ways they are more conspiratorial than the “conspiracy theorists” like you or I or Georgescu whom they constantly denigrate, except that their conspiracies are much dumber and more irrational than our conspiracies which are constantly being proven true. I don’t mean to torment you, but an article by the incorrigible shitlib Simon Tisdall, one of the worst members of Britain’s scribbling class, provides a tour of this world view. In an article for The Guardian titled “Feeding off anger, fuelled by Russia… Enter Călin Georgescu, Europe’s latest radical populist,” Tisdall tells us the following tale of horror,

“No mere throwback, Georgescu is very much a man of our times – a radical, hard-right, pro-Russia populist-nationalist who wants to make Romania great again. His anti-globalisation, anti-Nato, Eurosceptic platform…

This unprecedented turmoil is dramatising another pan-European worry: Russian hybrid warfare and, specifically, election interference and disinformation campaigns via social media. Georgescu’s feat in coming from nowhere to win raised red flags about “preferential treatment” and under-the-radar influence operations…

Elections in Moldova, Romania’s neighbour, in November provided additional chilling insights into these shared challenges. Maia Sandu, the country’s pro-western president, narrowly won re-election in the teeth of a covert, Russian-inspired and funded campaign to oust her. Sandu defeated Moldova’s version of Georgescu, the Kremlin-friendly outsider Alexandr Stoianoglo. A referendum on EU integration in October was also illicitly targeted by Moscow.

Across the Black Sea, Georgia’s voters are embroiled in a political nightmare after the ruling party, Georgian Dream, stole October’s parliamentary elections. The EU has rejected the outcome, highlighting “significant irregularities”, bribery, impersonation and violence…

Even in France and Germany, heartlands of the European project, the rightist Russian-incited rot has set in. Where Angela Merkel once ruled, Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel now strut.

Nationalist-populist parties feeding off anger over cost of living, migration and cultural tensions, and encouraged and funded by a hostile Russia waging hybrid and cognitive warfare – these are the twinned foes disrupting, dividing and weakening European democracies. None is immune. None has yet worked out how to turn the tide.

And now a third negative force is at work. Romania’s are the first national elections to be held in a western democracy since Donald Trump triumphed in America. Is there a Trump effect? His cynical populism, me-first economics, pro-Russia stance and disdain for democratic norms and values exemplify – and spuriously validate – all that is going wrong across Europe today. Recalling the 1930s, some say Codreanu’s Iron Guard-style fascism is returning. Maybe, maybe not. Whatever name you give it, it’s frightening.”

This is sinister stuff, and entirely a fantasy to explain why post-WW2 systems are failing in a post-Cold War, or more accurately Cold War 2.0, world. I haven’t written about Moldova and don’t have space here, but suffice to say the “Russian interference” was primarily Moldovan citizens who live in Russia voting, or at least trying to. That description of Georgia is an outright lie. These people are all like Biden promising hope and unity and then spending his whole term going Dark Brandon. They talk about the dangers of conspiracy theorists and those who would divide and scare us and then this is their world view. It’s amazing the lengths they will go to in order to deny that people hate them because they’re shitty at government. At a certain point, which I would think they long since passed, living like this and trying to sell the public on their delusions must be more difficult than just governing well.

Regardless, Georgescu addressed his supporters after the election was cancelled. The notorious anti-democratic ultranationalist gigafascist appeared calm and explained that in a democracy sovereignty belongs with the people and that judges cancelling elections because they dislike the results is actually a bad thing. If this mild-mannered scientist is going to be the next Hitler he had better step up the theatrics:

It appears the man still has fight in him but he is powerless against Romania’s judges and the “Euro-Atlantic” ruling class which is determined “safeguard” this Black Sea nation’s “Euro-Atlantic traditions.” It is highly unlikely that he is allowed to stand in the new elections, because of course everything they have done could only make him more popular. I would vote for him after having done the research for this article, and I have a university degree and some people consider me to be moderately intelligent. For how these Mandarins fear “reactionaries” they sure are careless about the reactions they will provoke. From the start, it has been maddening to deal with the propaganda blare of the brainwashed and the brainwashers telling me I’m a victim of “Russian propaganda” because I understand things that they admit in bits and pieces all the time. Clearly many Romanians feel the same way.

At this point the type of “democracy” that Romania has is comparable to democracy in Iran. That is not a hyperbolic statement. In Iran there are fair and competitive elections, but the clerics of the Supreme Council get to choose who can run for President. That body and the Ayatollah also set policy at the highest level, especially about matters of war and peace as well as issues relating to the moral character of the nation. Much of the President’s role is implementing their policies, and the difference between the candidates relates to priority and approach, not deciding major policies. This is exactly what has happened in Romania to the applause of Mandarins and scribblers who spend all of their time haranguing us about “saving our democracy.” You better believe this precedent will spread now that all the women with Master’s Degrees in Social Sciences see that you can get away with it. The last thing they want is for the people to take power in a meaningful way, because the point of Democracy™ is to keep all of these countries open to Western capital as munitions get used and replaced. [Incidentally, Georgescu is hostile to the foreign ownership of Romanian assets, a cardinal sin to neoliberals, but this hasn’t come up much in all the panicking.]

Even for a self-described specialist in the irony of human affairs, I find this to be one of the most ironic stories I have ever covered, and I will end our tale with the greatest irony of all:

Volodymyr Zelensky was on a TV show where he played a teacher who made videos about government corruption that went viral and catapulted the character to the Presidency. People found this fictional story line so inspiring, that Zelenksy was made President in real life.

In real life Calin Georgescu made videos about government corruption that went viral and made him popular enough to become President, so they cancelled the election, because he doesn’t support Zelensky.

These people’s political views are informed by fantasies that they will not tolerate if they should happen in reality, but they lack the self-awareness to see the contradiction. As I said at the beginning, I thank our friends in Romania’s Constitutional Court for laying it out for all to see that Western “liberal democracy” is literally fake and gay.

Correction: The initial version of this article said that they believed the election machines had been hacked. I was informed that Romania hand counts paper ballots. I apologize for the mistake, but also have literally no idea what they then expected to discover by recounting the ballots.

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am a regular contributor at The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

1. I only know this anecdotally as I used to have a boss who was an ethnic Hungarian from Transylvania who did not know about that at all until she moved to America and found out people didn’t think Transylvania was a real place.

2. Of course as an American I consider such laws an egregious violation of freedom of speech and freedom of association, but regardless it is absurd to pretend it’s impossible for Ukraine implement such policies and clearly a belief in liberty is not the thing stopping them.

3. CLARIFICATION 12/15: This base expansion project is primarily funded by the Romanian government and will be considered a Romanian base, unlike Rammstein which is a US base. Regardless, the base expansion will make it the largest NATO base in Europe. I apologize for any confusion.