The Constitutional Court of Romania annuls the result of the first round of the presidential elections

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The Constitutional Court of Romania annulled this Friday, December 6, the result of the first round of the country’s presidential elections, adding that the entire electoral process would have to be repeated. On November 24, Calin Georgescu, who wanted to end Romanian support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, won a victory that raised questions about how such a surprise had been possible in a member state of the European Union and NATO.

Documents declassified on Wednesday by Romania’s top security council stated that the country was the target of “aggressive Russian hybrid attacks” during the election period. “The electoral process to elect the president of Romania will be repeated in its entirety, and the government will set a new date and… schedule for the necessary steps,” the court said in a statement.

The second round of the presidential elections, scheduled for this Sunday and which had already begun in some countries, would have pitted Georgescu, a far-right and pro-Russian candidate, against the pro-EU centrist leader Elena Lasconi. Far-right parties also performed well in the parliamentary elections held last Sunday in Romania, although the Social Democrats, in power, turned out to be the largest party and hope to form a pro-EU coalition government.

This change in attitude of the Constitutional Court may be due to the enormous uncertainty shown by the polls in which both candidates are practically tied.

”On the basis of article 146 letter f of the Constitution, the entire electoral process related to the election of the president of Romania is cancelled,” the court explained in a statement. This rule establishes that the Constitutional Court “will ensure compliance with the election procedure” of the head of state and will confirm the results of the vote. The highest judicial instance met to analyze the new appeals that asked to cancel the results of the first round of the presidential elections, after receiving an avalanche of requests between Thursday and Friday. The session was called by the president of the Constitutional Court, Marian Enache, when considering the possibility of the appearance of new elements related to the organization of the first round.

Declassified documents

The annulment of the elections comes after the secret services declassified documents that point to Russian interference in the elections. Specifically, it revealed that Romania had been the target of cyber attacks in favor of the Eurosceptic candidate and that more than 25,000 accounts had been created on the TikTok social network to promote the extremist candidate.

On Thursday, the court received four appeals from the publication Calea European, the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism of the Romanian Academy, the National School of Political and Administrative Studies of the University of Bucharest and the independent candidate Cristian Terhes. This Friday, other institutions also joined the request to cancel the first round.

Asked about a possible cancellation of the first round, Lasconi told Radio Romania Actualidad this Friday: “If the first elections were cancelled, a terrible state of tension would occur in society. Let the Romanians choose.”

The tension will undoubtedly increase, as the pro-European candidate indicated, in the coming days.

The polls published in Romania for the first round of the presidential elections turned out to be totally wrong. The winner, Calin Georgescu, was not given more than 5% when he reached 23%. The campaign unleashed against him from that date and the holding between the first and second round of the legislative elections in which the Socialist party was the winner, introduce even more uncertainty about the presidential elections that began today and will end on Sunday. December 8. Among the accusations leveled against Georgescu was that he had spent just over €300,000 paying influencers and the Tik-Tok network. A small amount if we compare it with the 260 million dollars that the press reflects today that Elon Musk gave to Donald Trump for his campaign. The Electoral Authority ordered the recount of the first round and even threatened to suspend their validity.

Survey results

The results of the survey, published by HotNews, appeared on Thursday, December 4, one day after the CSAT (Supreme Council of National Defense) declassified secret service reports on Călin Georgescu’s election campaign and after another survey from Atlas Intel which, on Wednesday, placed him with 47% voting intention, compared to the 43% that Elena Lasconi had.

According to the new survey, Elena Lasconi has taken the lead with 48.6%, two percentage points behind Călin Georgescu, with 46.4%. 3.1% of those who responded to the survey say they will cancel their vote, and 1.9% do not know who they will vote for.

It is surprising that in a single day such relevant changes occur in the survey announced by the same polling company, which generates distrust and disbelief in voters.

On Friday, December 6, 2024, at 01:00 (Romanian time), the second round of the presidential elections has begun with the opening of the first polling station, in Auckland, New Zealand (12:00 local time).

Subsequently, the polling stations in Australia have opened: Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, at 03:00 Romanian time (12:00 local time), followed by the Adelaide polling station at 03:30 (Romanian time) and the Perth at 06:00:00 (Romanian time).

Abroad, the second round of the presidential elections takes place over three days:

* Friday, December 6, between 12:00 and 21:00 local time;

* Saturday, December 7 and Sunday, December 8, between 7:00 am and 9:00 pm local time.

Romanian citizens with the right to vote who are abroad on election day, regardless of whether or not they have their domicile or residence outside the country, can vote in the 950 electoral districts organized abroad.

It is important to know that more than 20% of the Romanian population is emigrants. More than 4 million people (2,133,078 women and 1,874,015 men according to 2020 data) reside in countries such as Italy 1,048,862, Germany 654,822, Spain 613,336 or the United Kingdom 393,569. In 1990, shortly after the fall of the Ceaucescu regime, the number of Romanian emigrants was 811,853.

Nearly a million Romanians came to live in Spain, but as a result of the economic crisis of 2008, a significant part of them left for other countries such as the United Kingdom or France or returned to their country of origin. The vote of emigrants from Eastern countries is being decisive, given their high number, in some countries such as Georgia or Moldova.

Romanians residing in Romania will vote on Sunday, December 8

Călin Georgescu considers in his statements that Russia is not a threat to the West. In statements to the BBC, he stated that he would end all support for Ukraine, in line with what was stated by Orban or Donald Trump. He has denied being “the man from Moscow”, mockingly referring to the “agencies outside the intelligence services” of Romania.

“They cannot accept that the Romanian people have said, in the end, ‘we want to recover our life, our country, our dignity,'” Georgescu said. In a tense interview in which he praised Donald Trump and Hungarian populist leader Viktor Orban, Georgescu He referred to Vladimir Putin as a “patriot and leader.”

“They are afraid,” is how Georgescu dismissed evidence that hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent promoting campaign content for him, in violation of both Romanian electoral law and TikTok’s own rules.

He then stated that Romania is only interested in promoting peace on its border, but refused to say that this should be done on kyiv’s conditions. When asked if he agrees to support Ukraine “as long as it is necessary”, as the EU says, Georgescu replied: “No. I don’t want to involve my people. Zero. Everything stops. I just have to take care of my people. We also have many problems,” says Georgescu.

Romania shares a long border with Ukraine and has been a strong supporter of kyiv since the large-scale invasion in 2022.

Under a Georgescu presidency, Romania would join Hungary and Slovakia as Russia-sympathizers on NATO’s eastern flank.

It would also be a serious blow to the EU’s solidarity with Ukraine, just as it faces the prospect of taking on more responsibilities to support kyiv with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Georgescu stressed that he will keep Romania within the EU and NATO, but that from now on everything will be “negotiated” and will focus on his country’s interests.

Elena Lasconi, the liberal-nationalist candidate who has unexpectedly managed to get into the final stretch of the presidential elections in Romania, is a journalist and mayor of a small city with a very brief political career, which is defined as religious, right-wing and pro European Union and NATO. In the first round he beat the poll favorite, social democrat and Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, by one tenth.

A journalist, after abandoning her professional career, she took advantage of her popularity and was elected mayor of the city of Câmpulung, a town of 27,000 inhabitants, as a candidate for the liberal conservative Union Save Romania (USR) party.

She defines herself as religious and Orthodox and during the last election campaign she appeared at rallies dressed in traditional Romanian costumes.

Romania is a very traditionalist and conservative country, where nationalist messages can easily be translated into votes.

In recent weeks she has assured that, if elected president, she will be “the voice of millions of Romanians” and that she would not let “others say what Romanians want.”

In his first reactions, Lasconi assured that he will seek to create an alliance with the right-wing forces, in order to beat the ultranationalist Georgescu, considered pro-Russian and who won after taking off his presence in a surprising way on social networks.

“Your vote was not for me, but for you,” Lasconi told the press upon learning the results and added that he promises to give “everything to live up to (the voters’) expectations.”

«I want to be the president of Romania and this means that I will listen to the voices of all the party leaders in the country. “I want to have a right-wing government,” Lasconi said this morning, adding that he wants to maintain Romania’s pro-European and pro-NATO policies.

Lasconi will have the support of the Socialist Party, winner of the recently held legislative elections. Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, social democratic leader, has reiterated his support for the candidate to stop Georgescu’s victory.

Romania is experiencing the war in Ukraine very closely and the historical ties of more than forty-four years of communist government with the former Soviet Union, leads sectors of the population, especially rural ones, to keep their distance from the war-mongering policies of the government parties. Russian missiles launched from the Black Sea against Ukraine cross Romanian territory and are the subject of diplomatic complaints by the foreign minister against Russia. On the other hand, the continued presence of Victor Orban, in the western part of Romania, populated by a significant Hungarian minority, is also a cause of concern and confrontation among the Romanian population.