Democracy or a Coup?

When elections go off the rails and judges intervene, chaos ensues

It’s not every day when one hears the name Kim Kardashian at an international security conference. Yet the specter of the world’s most “famous for being famous” celebrity was indeed raised at the Central and Eastern Europe Strategy Summit 2025 at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC by Romanian Minister for Research and Innovation Bogdan Ivan. In the audience sat this writer, who at that exact moment spotted a golden opportunity for another newsletter on this blog. The topic at hand is the controversy regarding the recent and ultimately aborted Presidential Election in the Eastern European nation of Romania. While I am indeed a student of Eastern Europe, and all of its fascinating histories and cultures at heart, I choose to highlight the case of Romania because we see in that country a profound reminder of a major political trend that has crossed many borders and ultimately has reached our own shores.

When most Americans imagine Romania, their first thoughts tend to relate to vampires, gymnasts, or less generously, wallet thieves and appalling orphanages. Now, Romania has been in the news again, this time for its chaotic politics. In Romania’s political system, the president is chosen after two elections, the second of which is a runoff involving the top two candidates from the first. In November 2024, Romanian citizens gave former United Nations sustainable agriculture official Calin Georgescu 23% of the vote to become the next president of this Black Sea nation bordering Ukraine. Despite his globalist credentials, Georgescu ran on an ultranationalist platform, criticizing Romania’s membership in the European Union as a threat to Romanian sovereignty and advocating robust economic protectionism and self-sufficiency. Even more controversially, Georgescu has defended the Romanian Nazi puppet regime from World War 2 and labeled the 1989 revolution that overthrew the harsh regime of mad despot Nicolae Ceausescu as a coup directed by foreigners to steal Romania’s resources. Finally, he has criticized Ukraine as an “invented state,” echoing Russian rhetoric.

For the Romanian political and business elite, such a platform was seen an existential danger to Romania’s trade-dependent economy and Western-aligned national security posture. Thus, even before Romanian voters had a chance to choose between Calin Georgescu and a more Pro-Western candidate, the Romanian Constitutional Court intervened by cancelling the runoff, necessitating a do-over election. The court justified their harsh verdict by a last-minute surge in views of Georgescu’s TikTok channel, an amusing collection of masculinity and Eastern Orthodox mysticism that attracted millions of Romanians eager to topple their current elites. And yes, if you find parallels of Georgescu’s horse riding and martial arts escapades in another Eastern European government official, you have just thrown the dart into the bullseye.

The culprit of this campaign to influence Romania’s presidential election was ultimately determined to be Russia, along with perhaps China, since we are dealing with TikTok after all. The purpose of this interference is entirely obvious: both nations seek to deepen divisions within the Western alliance. With the rationale of safeguarding against nefarious foreign interference, Georgescu was ultimately blocked by the Constitutional Court from standing in the do-over election. With such a mess unfolding, I suppose Romania is a good lesson in the old maxim that if you can’t get it right the first time, you can always try again. Romania’s humiliating experience should also comfort us Americans— our politics suddenly appear sane. Just imagine what would have happened had Donald Trump been completely blocked from running for president or even imprisoned, and you’ll know what I mean.

Meanwhile, back at the conference, Bogdan Ivan elaborated on this TikTok campaign. According to the minister, Georgescu’s TikTok channel became the 8^th most-viewed channel in the entire world in the few days leading up to the election in November, nearly on par with, as I alluded to before, Kim Kardashian. Ivan excoriated what he felt was a malign “hybrid attack on a sovereign nation” by hostile foreign powers. The minister made clear that the Constitutional Court had no choice but to undertake drastic action to protect Romania’s sovereignty, no matter the uproar. Most alarmingly, another guest at this conference alluded to me that we cannot rule out the possibility of a full-blown Russian computer hack of the Romanian voting machines, manipulating the results to favor the most extreme presidential candidate. I cannot confirm whether this extraordinary accusation is accurate or not.

And for my fellow Americans, such a claim may sound familiar.

You may be curious, why do I seem so hyper-focused on Romania, a relatively small country with only marginal significance to global affairs? While the nation is in my region of interest, I mainly have opted to describe the political confusion in Romania as a segway to what appears to be a global trend: right-wing, anti-establishment political figures ending up on the wrong side of legal investigations and ultimately criminal indictments. Beyond Romania, we have seen in recent years similar concerted efforts in G20 members Brazil, France, and of course right here at home. To many conservatives across the globe, such a chorus of trials and convictions signify a worldwide conspiracy to systematically destroy right-wing populists personally, politically, and financially lest they eventually win the next election and threaten the power and status of an entrenched global elite.

In our reality of 2025, when the line between truth and propaganda becomes ever blurrier, finding the former regarding these cases, while not easy, is critical. Thankfully, a follow up visit with another (anonymous) expert in Washington gave me an answer I can store in my brain with confidence in its veracity. This expert confided to me that while the evidence seems strong that there indeed was a campaign by Russia and probably China to assist Georgescu’s campaign, the Romanian political establishment is so corrupt and addicted to power that an opening for an extremist like Calin Georgescu was bound to appear. Even though both Ivan and another Romanian minister also went on to dismiss the replacement nationalist and right-wing populist presidential candidates as extremists dangerous to international stability, the Romanian people, like in so many other nations around the world, seek immediate and drastic change.

And that is why I believe these investigations keep appearing in so many different countries. In my understanding, the global political class, perhaps in agreement with the business elites, genuinely believe that these right-wing populist candidates advocate political positions so dangerous and destabilizing that they must be stopped at all costs, even if drastic and undemocratic means are employed. For supporters of these right-wing populists, including our own president, such a state of affairs is highly indicative of an elite coup against a democratic outcome. In fact, the latter expert explained to me how he believed that without the four criminal cases against the President Trump, the 2024 election may have gone differently. And like the trend of politicized prosecutions, we may see the efforts of the Romanian establishment backfire with a possible victory of another alleged “extremist”, or right-wing populist, just as they did in our country.

In turn, my message for the current ruling elites around the world is simple: if you are afraid of the political preferences of your own people, perhaps you should stop attempting to block election outcomes you don’t want and instead focus on explaining your positions more plainly and ultimately making their lives better. That way, there is no need for judicial intervention at all.