What Romanian Runoff Says about the Russian Ruse

Eastern European elections rarely make headlines in the U.S., but when Vice-President JD Vance spoke to the Munich Security Conference in February he made Romania’s recent round of elections a key theme of his argument on where Europe is going off track. This past Sunday’s result suggests Vance may have been prescient.

Romanian voters, it seems, were more keyed into the line of thinking that the controversial American vice-president was expressing than what their own elites have been telling them in less convincing terms.

“Now we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that, this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors,” Vance told the assembly of mainly European defense ministers.

“As I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections, but I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he added.

While Romanian authorities ended up first arresting the populist Calin Georgescu on his way to register for the rescheduled election, and then disqualifying his candidacy weeks after Vance’s speech, another right-wing candidate, George Simion, won a resounding plurality in the May 4 re-do nonetheless. Simion has promised to bring Georgescu back into the political sphere.

Last fall, Georgescu emerged out of nowhere and surged to front-runner status in pre-electoral polls, leading establishment voices in Romania — via the country’s long nefarious security services — to eliminate him by claiming he was a Russian stooge whose meteoric rise was due to little more than Tik-Tok manipulation (Tik-Tok is a Chinese rather than Russian owned platform, but whatever).

It was almost as though now unemployed Hillary Clinton staffers had found a new gig in the Balkan state most famous, perhaps, for being home to Dracula.

Even without Georgescu in the fray, another right-wing populist, Simion, won the first round with over 40 percent of the vote and is poised to win the second against Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, who narrowly beat my old client Crin Antonescu — no powerhouse, I must admit — with only 21 percent to the underwhelming Antonescu’s 20. Victor Ponta, a former socialist spoiler, took 13 percent.

With a run-off now less than two weeks away, it is of course possible that Romanian centrists will rally around Dan, but as of two days ago, momentum was not on his side. Romanians tend to prefer a hot-blooded candidate to a cold fish, but its been more than a decade since I last worked a presidential campaign there so things might have changed.

The moral of the story is this: calling someone you don’t like a Russian stooge is not a winning strategy, in fact its been known to backfire dramatically. External powers try and frame races like this according to their own preferences. Simion is neither hostile to Russia, not bullish on his NATO member country upping its game in support of Ukraine.

By crying wolf on Georgescu, internal Romanian elites and their friends in Brussels and beyond ended up with the same kind of outsider, and potentially a more hard-edged one. If Simion wins on May 18, Romania is likely to join Hungary and Slovakia as a Ukraine skeptic within the European Union.

Vladimir Putin’s longstanding grip on power in Russia proves that the big bad bear is no fan of democracy — except when it works in its favor. Romanian elites hid behind their shameful Securitate, the internal state security bureau that tortured and imprisoned dissidents throughout the country’s communist past, to try and knee-cap the opposition in a manner not entirely different than what Putin does at home. They were just less good at it. Now they have reaped what they had sown.

Calling your opponents Russian agents is not a winning strategy. Worse yet, its abuses have clouded an honest discussion about how to help Ukraine. Maybe Romanian voters have helped us all learn a useful lesson we could have drawn from our own experiences. Or maybe not. MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow is coming to Portland on Saturday — perhaps we should ask her.