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PARIS – Here’s how the website Le Grand Continent described on Monday Călin Georgescu, the frontrunner in Romania’s presidential race: “A sustainable development expert, pro-Russian, accused of antisemitism, who owes his surprising success to a TikTok campaign.”
All the keywords of our time are there. It’s possible to be green, pro-Russian, and antisemitic and, less surprisingly, gain traction in an election thanks to Tik Tok, the Chinese social platform known for short, addictive videos. On TikTok, Georgescu portrays himself as a horseman and judoka — like a certain Vladimir Putin.
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Georgescu is above all the candidate nobody saw coming. This ultranationalist, known for his controversial views, including Holocaust denial, was largely overlooked in early polls. Yet he outpaced the official far-right candidate, who finished fourth, and he’s ahead for the second round in two weeks’ time.
Political Ripples Across Europe
It’s a new political electroshock in a European country, and not just any country. A member of the EU and NATO, bordering the Black Sea, Ukraine and Russia, Romania is also host to a U.S. missile missile shield and a NATO contingent, including 1,000 French soldiers, on the ground since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
This breakthrough is not an isolated one. The “Georgescu surprise” follows the election in Slovakia of Robert Fico, a populist close to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a friend of Putin — and Trump. It comes after the successes of the far-right and a new anti-war far-left party in eastern Germany; and after significant far-right scores in the June 2024 European elections.
Georgescu is the typical “anti-establishment” candidate to whom voters turn when they lose confidence in the traditional political class, or even in liberal democracy, which no longer knows how to solve problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfwP0NaBCm4
Călin Georgescu visits Moldova to progress his “Food, Water, Energy” initiative as the independent candidate for the Presidency of Romania, Sept. 7, 2024.
Călin Georgescu/YouTube
A Divided Europe and Its Future
Each country, of course, has its unique context: in Romania, that includes disreputable socialists, distant heirs of the Ceausescu dictatorship, a deficient information system, a conservative Orthodox church, a troublesome Russian neighborhood.
The fear of war, and especially of the Ukraine war expanding, is a powerful tool for those exploiting it. And between Putin’s nuclear threats, pro-Russian and pro-Trump denigration of Ukraine, and the economic impact attributed to the conflict, they are spoilt for choice.
The defense of Ukraine is certainly less audible, increasingly equated with an unwinnable war and with the risks of escalation with a nuclear power. In the battle of narratives, the pro-Russian camp has the upper hand.
But we should also be surprised by the passivity of “old-fashioned” democrats — as it is tempting to call them — all consumed by their political quarrels while their voters look elsewhere.
In this context, the political crises in Germany and France — the two leading countries of the EU — are disconcerting; everything is weakening around them. Romania is far away, but it’s also a distorting mirror of what’s happening across Europe.
