How the Far Right Almost Destroyed Romanian Democracy

Romania’s democracy just survived a near-death experience, but it may be more vulnerable going forward. How far can leaders go in defending democracy without compromising their claim to represent the people?

By Veronica Anghel

May 2025

On 18 May 2025, Romania narrowly avoided a collapse into illiberal rule. After a campaign marked by disinformation, legal brinkmanship, and mass mobilization, centrist candidate Nicușor Dan defeated far-right leader George Simion with 53.6 percent of the vote. The margin was narrower than the threat warranted. While the outcome preserved Romania’s European orientation, it also exposed the breadth of far-right support and the fragility of the institutions meant to contain it.

The crisis began months earlier. In December 2024, the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of presidential elections after extremist candidate Călin Georgescu — an open admirer of Romania’s fascist past and Vladimir Putin, and a proponent of fringe conspiracy theories — finished first. Intelligence findings revealed extensive foreign interference and irregular campaign financing. The decision, though legally grounded, came just as votes were being cast abroad. It triggered political chaos, sowed mistrust, and offered the far right the perfect narrative: democracy, stolen by elites.

U.S. vice-president J.D. Vance called the annulment “flimsy,” claiming it showed that Romania no longer shared American values. Elon Musk labeled Romania’s top judge overseeing the Constitutional Court a “tyrant.” Their attacks echoed Kremlin talking points and fueled domestic suspicions of institutional overreach. In trying to avert an authoritarian lurch, Romania’s democratic institutions risked undermining their own legitimacy.

Yet the emergency brake held. In the rescheduled vote, Dan, the independent mayor of Bucharest, defeated Simion, a more politically disciplined successor to Georgescu, whom the Court had barred from running. The electoral system survived, but barely — and not without cost.

The episode spotlighted an enduring democratic dilemma: How far can the leaders of democratic institutions go to protect the constitutional order without compromising their claim to represent the people? In Romania, where disillusionment with elites runs deep, the decision to cancel elections and then disqualify Georgescu — however justified — appeared to confirm long-held suspicions that power is unaccountable and democracy conditional.

For Romania, this moment of reckoning carries regional significance. A member of both NATO and the EU, Romania sits on the alliance’s eastern flank, bordering Ukraine and Moldova. It hosts key NATO infrastructure and plays a central role in deterring Russian influence in the Black Sea. Economically, it is a rising EU power. Since accession in 2007, its GDP has more than tripled to €350 billion, and its GDP per capita has caught up to Poland’s while overtaking the economies of Hungary and Croatia.

Yet its democratic development has lagged. Even as successive governments aligned with Euro-Atlantic political institutions, corruption, clientelism, and weak rule of law persisted. Media capture and institutional opacity eroded public trust. The current crisis lays bare a deeper fragility: When liberal institutions act forcefully to uphold constitutional norms, those institutions can be cast as illegitimate — especially in a context of pervasive public cynicism and poor elite communication with the public.

Russia has exploited that cynicism. Kremlin-backed voices portrayed the disqualification of Georgescu as proof that Western democracies betray their own principles. That line found fertile ground, and the danger for the West is not just Romanian instability — it is the erosion of democratic credibility within.

Until now, Romania had been buoyed by a foundational consensus: Euro-Atlantic integration as the nation’s postcommunist civilizational choice. Anchoring the country in NATO and the EU was seen as a guarantee against regression and a path to modernity. That consensus is enshrined in the constitution. Yet beneath this alignment, tensions simmered. Successive governments professed loyalty to the West while tolerating nationalist tropes and social conservatism at home. In rejecting communism, much of Romania’s postrevolutionary elite romanticized its interwar past, downplaying fascist legacies and antisemitism. As inequality widened, elites promised modernization abroad while preserving dysfunction at home.

This disconnect bred disillusionment. More than 90 percent of Romanians support EU and NATO membership, yet few trust the domestic institutions meant to uphold these commitments. Anti-elite narratives have filled the gap, positioning Western alignment not as a democratic choice, but as an imposition by corrupt elites serving foreign interests.

It is in this atmosphere that the Romanian far right rose. In 2024, it won nearly a third of parliamentary seats. The ascent had been building for years, accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic, when far-right leaders rejected vaccines, stoked conspiracy theories, and vilified public-health officials. Romania ended up with the EU’s lowest vaccination rate — around 35 percent.

The narrative soon shifted to opposition to aid for Ukraine. By 2024, Romanians were among the most skeptical EU publics regarding military and financial support to Kyiv. Survey data from the European University Institute and YouGov found that many saw NATO, not Russia, as the primary threat to peace. Far-right leaders capitalized on this, gaining ground especially among the young and disenfranchised.

Social media — especially TikTok — proved instrumental. Shunned by mainstream media, far-right influencers turned to digital platforms to bypass traditional gatekeepers. Their message resonated in underdeveloped rural regions, where poverty, youth unemployment, and school dropout rates remain among the highest in the EU. Disconnected from urban opportunity, many young Romanians found in far-right populism an outlet for anger and a narrative of lost national sovereignty.

Georgescu and Simion emerged from this ecosystem. Both espoused antisemitic, anti-Western, and pro-Putin views. Both praised Ion Antonescu, Romania’s wartime fascist leader, while Georgescu romanticized Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist dictatorship and claimed that NATO was an occupying force, dismissed feminism and vaccines, and promised to restore national pride through a “Christian economy.” Despite this — and despite a track record of hate speech and opaque campaign financing — he was initially allowed to run.

Georgescu’s candidacy stunned observers, not least because Romanian authorities had previously disqualified other similar antidemocratic figures from the ballot. The Constitutional Court had interpreted Euro-Atlantic integration and commitment to political pluralism as constitutional imperatives. A separate candidate who, like Georgescu, pledged to ban political parties if elected had already been disqualified in the same race. The Court did not treat such statements as mere rhetorical excess, but as declarations of intent that were incompatible with the presidency. In the eyes of the Court, a candidate running on an antidemocratic platform could not be entrusted with safeguarding the Constitution.

It was only after intelligence agencies exposed Georgescu’s foreign ties and digital-propaganda networks that the Constitutional Court intervened.

Yet the damage was done. His supporters quickly rallied around George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians. Simion built his brand on nationalist defiance and claims of elite betrayal. He promised to name Georgescu prime minister if elected and cast the state’s actions as proof of conspiracy. Rather than neutralizing an antidemocratic threat, the state had unwittingly reinforced it.

In this sense, Romania’s narrow escape was also a warning. The democratic immune system worked — but at the cost of deepening the very crisis it had sought to resolve. Simion lost the election, but he still won 5.3 million out of 11.5 million votes. He remains a strong political leader in the country, and his movement occupies a third of the parliament.

The outcome of the May 2025 runoff preserved Romania’s democratic pro-Western course. But it also revealed just how easily democratically elected authoritarians can come to power. Romania’s institutions passed their stress test, but they emerged weakened, more contested, and more vulnerable to future assaults.

Gatekeeping in a democracy is always fraught — hard to do, harder to justify, and impossible to sustain without public support. The decision to disqualify an antidemocratic candidate risked deepening mistrust. But in this case, Romanians showed that institutional resilience is not just about legal mechanisms — it is also about people choosing to defend the democratic order when it is most under threat. The Court created the opening. But it was the public that ultimately validated the intervention.

Veronica Anghel is assistant professor at the Robert Schuman Center European University Institute.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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