Romania’s shock election: Who is Călin Georgescu and what happens next?

 

NOVEMBER 26, 2024

The first round of Romania’s presidential election produced a shock result with ultranationalist Călin Georgescu topping the poll with 23% of the votes, followed by centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union and in third place the social democratic Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, the pre-election favourite, who has now resigned the leadership of his party. Below we reproduce a post by Cornel Ban.

Călin Georgescu, the frontrunner in Romania’s presidential race, emerges as a hard-right Eurosceptic, a product of the swirling nebula of far-right rhetoric fed by the catastrophic mediocrity of mainstream political campaigns.

Yet Georgescu is no typical ‘Trumpist’ outsider; his sulphurous, often cringeworthy presence signals something more insidious and extreme than anything the European far-right has in store. In theory, Romania – firmly anchored to EU and NATO interests -should not be the kind of place where such a phenomenon should flourish. After all, this is a country that has reaped transformative social and economic gains since joining the European Union. Moreover, its governments cannot be blamed for engaging in the culture wars that typically fuel MAGA-style movements.

An independent candidate backed by the far-right Georgescu is an unsettling cocktail of alt-right fervour and mystic, ‘anti-globalist’ nationalism – with a bastardized strain of ecology that flirts with what some call eco-fascism. His vision? An ethnocratic and religiously fundamentalist state presiding over a post-corporate, ‘Christian’ economy driven by small, patriotic entrepreneurs – lightly taxed, minimally regulated, and somehow enthusiastic about massive wealth redistribution to fuel an ecological utopia. Indeed, the man speaks in eschatological terms in both Orthodox and Evangelical settings and sees himself in a literally messianic role (“I do not run an electoral campaign but I am on a God’s mission”). You have to go as far as Sayyid Qutb to find similar forms of criticism of modernity.

The specifics of his economic programme are vague, but his rhetoric leans heavily on MAGA populism, interwar far-right nostalgia, and pastoral fantasies of clean water, organic food, self-sufficient farms and low taxes for all. Ironically, cooperativism and ecology – historically fringe issues even on the  fragile left of Romanian politics – don’t seem to have widespread voter appeal, making his rise all the more confounding. Polls barely register the resonance of his platform, yet Georgescu’s improbable momentum cuts against the grain of every conventional indicator.

Furthermore, Georgescu is anything but an outsider to politics and state administration. He spent decades embedded in Romania’s political and administrative elite, serving in central government roles from the twilight of communism to the country’s EU accession. He represented Romania in global institutions like the UN, OECD, and Club of Rome and spearheaded sustainability planning for multiple cabinets. A product of NATO-aligned security establishments, his credentials seem unimpeachably mainstream – at least on paper.

But in recent years, Georgescu has openly drifted into the conspiratorial ether, peddling fevered tales of international institutions hijacked by ‘globalist’ forces – a narrative peppered with antisemitic dog whistles and the kind of emotional rhetoric designed to inflame. Even Romania’s far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians, which looks to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni for inspiration, found his extremism too toxic, ejecting him despite once considering him for a leadership role. Meanwhile, the state’s attempts to prosecute him for glorifying interwar genocidaires have fizzled, leaving the unsettling sense that such rhetoric may still find fertile ground within a Romanian establishment that has not experienced a serious reckoning with the fascist and late national-Stalinist past.

With a weak counter-candidate to Georgescu, Romanian democracy finds itself teetering on the edge – its foundations gnawed away by inequality and endemic poverty, all while riding the wave of one of Europe’s fastest-growing and least redistributive economies over the last decade. Romania must grasp the weight of a cordon sanitaire – or brace itself to peer into a yawning political chasm in its politics. My fear is that the unapologetically neoliberal tropes of Elena Lasconi, Georgescu’s counter-candidate in the upcoming presidential run-off, will fan the flames of the electoral riot taking place in Romanian society at this point.

In the next two weeks we will find out if these existential elections will yield a moment of democratic resilience or one of Europe’s biggest internal political problems for the years to come.

Cornel Ban is Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Ruling Ideas (OUP 2016). This is an edited version of a Facebook post, republished here with the author’s kind permission.

Image: Călin Georgescu. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:C%C4%83lin_Georgescu,_discurs_Biserica_Penticostal%C4%83_Jebel.jpg Source: Mesajul lui Călin Georgescu la Biserica Penticostala din Jebel (archived Author: Focus Creștin,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.