Romania tries to suppress a far-right surge

Welcome back. Until yesterday, Călin Georgescu, an anti-establishment candidate portrayed in the western media as an anti-Nato, Russophile extremist, seemed set to win Romania’s presidential election.

But then, in a bombshell ruling, the nation’s constitutional court annulled the result of the election’s first round, which Georgescu won. The contest will have to be rerun from scratch.

Two questions in need of answers are whether the above description of Georgescu is accurate, and how to account for his appeal to voters. An explanation needs to bring into focus Romania’s long history of ultranationalism, of which Georgescu is the latest embodiment. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

First, the result of last week’s poll. Asked if Russia’s economy is close to breaking point, 63 per cent of you said yes, 16 per cent said no and 21 per cent were on the fence. Thanks for voting!

Georgescu: not an unknown

It came as no surprise to me that Georgescu has risen to prominence, or that the nationalist right is gaining strength in Romania.

For many years, political and economic conditions in Romania have been ripe for this sort of breakthrough. Blaming it on Russian interference and the support that Georgescu generated through the social media platform TikTok — factors cited by the court on the basis of declassified intelligence reports — is to miss the larger point.

In the first place, Georgescu wasn’t a complete unknown before he won the first round. Corinne Deloy commented in this piece for the Fondation Robert Schuman:

Despite being relatively unknown to the general public, Călin Georgescu has been involved in politics for many years. He has worked in various ministries and his name has even been put forward several times for the post of prime minister.

The party that aired that proposal was the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), a far-right group that came second in last weekend’s legislative elections. Georgescu belonged to AUR before breaking with it in 2022 over, among other issues, his views on Russia.

In 2021, Georgescu launched the Homeland Movement, whose goals included “the promotion and support of small producers, peasant farming, arts, crafts, family, faith”, according to this deeply researched article by Panorama, a Romanian publication.

Secondly, the rise of the hard right across western, central and eastern Europe, coupled with Romania’s present difficulties (on which more below), have made mainstream parties vulnerable to insurgent campaigns from extremists and unconventional candidates.

Finally, we need to grasp the enduring strength of Romania’s ultranationalist political tradition. It stretches back to the pre-second world war era, revived before the fall of communism in 1989, gained momentum thereafter and continues to resonate today.

Romanian ultranationalism and Russia

Before I outline that tradition, a word on Romanian politics and Russia.

Yes, Georgescu is like other European rightwing nationalists in that he admires Russia’s authoritarian system, its emphasis on patriotic values and its espousal of an extreme anti-western cultural conservatism.

Just as the Russian Orthodox Church supports Vladimir Putin, so some Romanian Orthodox prelates, such as Archbishop Teodosie of Tomis, have pronounced rightwing sympathies. Despite a Church ban on priestly involvement in politics, some clearly supported Georgescu in the election campaign.

That matters a great deal, as my FT colleague Alec Russell points out in this commentary.

In other respects, Romanian nationalism is at odds with Russia. This is especially true with regard to the ambition of uniting Romania with Moldova, the mainly Romanian-speaking country that broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991 (see my newsletter of February 2023 for a discussion of Moldova’s contested history between Romania and Russia).

It also applies to the favourable light in which Georgescu and other ultranationalists hold Ion Antonescu, Romania’s dictator during the second world war. An informal, partial rehabilitation of Antonescu took place in the 1990s — for the reason that he was seen as an anti-Russian patriot.

Cristian Pîrvulescu, a professor of political science, gets it right:

“My impression is that Georgescu himself is not pro-Russia . . . His supporters are nationalists, not pro-Russian but also not pro-Ukrainian.”

Romania’s far-right tradition

The modern Romanian far right emerged in 1927 with the creation by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu of the ultranationalist Legion of the Archangel Michael. The Iron Guard, the legion’s military wing, soon became the name applied to Codreanu’s group.

(For excellent background on far-right movements in Romania, see
Sorina Soare’s essay for the European Center for Populism Studies and this article by Dragoş Dragoman and Camil Ungureanu for the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs.)

In his 2014 book A Concise History of Romania, Keith Hitchins sets out three central elements of Codreanu’s programme: antisemitism, a distorted version of Orthodox Christianity and “the cult of the peasant as the embodiment of natural, unspoiled man”.

The appeal to peasant values and Orthodoxy is visible today in the ideas of Georgescu and the ultranationalist right.

Georgescu’s campaign slogan — “Hrană, Apă, Energie”, or “Food, Water, Energy” — underlined how carefully he targeted his campaign at hard-pressed rural Romanian voters.

AUR does the same, as Ungureanu and Mihaela Mihai write for the Europe blog of the London School of Economics. They emphasise “a new form of far-right environmentalism” that is combined with an appeal to conservative religious values.

Ultranationalism reappeared in the late communist period with the rise of Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the “court poet” of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. After the 1989 revolution, he formed the Greater Romania party and came second in the nation’s 2000 presidential election.

In 2012, a similar movement led by Dan Diaconescu came to the fore, capitalising on widespread discontent with official corruption and economic hardship.

And now we have AUR and Georgescu.

‘A system that does not know to lose’

Had it taken place as scheduled tomorrow, the election would have pitted Georgescu against Elena Lasconi, a liberal and the preferred choice of much of Romania’s political establishment.

To her credit, Lasconi criticised the recount of votes that Romania’s high court ordered after the first round in a move that foreshadowed its annulment of the result. She described the recount as “the desperation of a system that does not know how to lose”.

The court’s decision yesterday risks making a martyr of Georgescu and driving up support for the far right.

It strikes me as significant that, despite the intelligence reports about Russian interference, not all Romania’s mainstream politicians regard Georgescu as a danger to the country’s place in Nato and the EU. Victor Ponta, a former prime minister, says: 

“Romania will not leave Nato or the EU, with or without Georgescu.”

Mediocrity of the mainstream

The first-round result was, to a great extent, an outburst of frustration at the failures of the mainstream parties that have governed Romania more or less without interruption since the fall of communism.

This point comes across clearly in the Panorama article I cited above. It quotes sociologist Ovidiu Voicu as saying Georgescu achieved his breakthrough “primarily because of the mediocrity of the political offer” from the mainstream parties.

There’s a parallel with the first round of the 2017 presidential election in France. Voters turned against the mainstream right and left and sent the far-right Marine Le Pen and the upstart young centrist Emmanuel Macron into the knock-out round.

In Romania, it’s not good enough to blame Georgescu’s success on TikTok – even though it was the vehicle that propelled him to victory. Writing for Visegrad Insight, Adrian Mihaltianu and Bianca Felseghi provide a perceptive appraisal of the Georgescu phenomenon:

TikTok can explain just the delivery of his nationalistic and isolationist message, but not its resonance. For that, one must consider global trends in anti-system voting and the specific frustrations of contemporary Romanians.

Economic ills and the anti-establishment vote

At or near the top of Romanians’ complaints is the state of the economy. ING bank sums up the mess: low growth, balance of payments difficulties and a budget deficit that it forecasts will be 8 per cent of GDP this year and 7 per cent in 2025 — even worse than in France, whose troubles are under close scrutiny from the financial markets.

The broader picture is that, despite much progress since the fall of communism, Romanians in small towns and rural areas have not experienced anything like the rise in living standards seen in Bucharest and other cities.

Corruption in high places has been a persistent problem, as this FT editorial in 2018 pointed out.

It is anyone’s guess who will be Romania’s next president – but the danger is that a spell of profound political instability beckons.

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More on this topic

Charisma, Religion and Ideology: Romania’s Interwar Legion of the Archangel Michael — the first chapter of a book by Constantin Iordachi, published by the Central European University Press

Tony’s picks of the week

• A Syrian rebel offensive on Aleppo appears to have the support of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, potentially increasing his leverage over Syria’s Kremlin-backed leader Bashar al-Assad, the FT’s Ayla Jean Yackley reports

• Besides its military campaign in Ukraine, the Russian leadership plans to build up sizeable troop formations for a possible conflict with Nato in the Baltic region and the Kola peninsula, Yuri Fedorov writes for the French Institute of International Relations