In November last year, Calin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s presidential election, on a platform of ending all further Romanian political and military support for the Ukraine regime. He won decisively, garnering 23 percent of votes as against the 19 percent secured by the pro-EU candidate Elena Lasconi, who took 19 percent.
However, the constitutional court annulled this result, citing unproven claims of ‘Russian electoral interference’. On 26 February Georgescu, on his way to register for new elections in May, was detained and called in for interrogation by the prosecution office, and he now stands accused of lying about his election spending and of “founding or supporting fascist, racist, xenophobic or antisemitic organisations”.
But according to the Telegraph, the accusations “stopped short of providing detailed evidence linking Russian interference to the election results. Now, critics say that the evidence is thin and does not warrant the result being cancelled.”
Presumably feeling the heat of public outrage, even the European Union’s stooge candidate, Elen Lasconi, has felt obliged to distance herself from this farce. Ms Lasconi has denounced the cack-handed way the prosecutors are dealing with the case, which she says makes a mockery of ‘democracy’ (and which will no doubt be putting her own role in the affair under unwelcome scrutiny).
Allegations of foreign interference in domestic elections are rich coming from those in the west for whom meddling with every one else’s elections is a full-time profession and a god-given right. Even leaving aside the whole history of postwar western Europe, one need only recall the continuing attempts by the USA to impose the reactionary nobody Juan Guidó onto the Venezuelan people in preference to their chosen president Nicolás Maduro. Or the arrogance with which then-US president Barack Obama lectured workers in Britain on the perils of abandoning the EU imperialist club at the time of the Brexit referendum.
Especially rich are the allegations that Georgescu supported “fascist, racist, xenophobic or antisemitic organisations”, or praised the wartime fascist dictator Ion Antonescu who allied himself with Hitler. Whatever the truth or otherwise of such allegations, the fact remains that the people who are making them happen to be the most vocal supporters of the present-day Ukrainian fascists, who have been running the Kiev junta since 2014. The pot indeed paints the kettle black.
As splits within the imperialist camp are driven deeper, EU imperialists will find that it is not so easy as hitherto to expect the rest of the ‘free world’ to snap to attention every time Brussels gets its knickers in a twist over people voting for the ‘wrong’ candidate. US Vice-president JD Vance, chose the occasion of his speech to the European security conference in Munich to denounce Romania for cancelling the elections based on “flimsy suspicions” and under “enormous pressure” from other European countries.
And responding to the news that Georgescu had been arrested, Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Donald Trump, posted: “They just arrested the person who won the most votes in the Romanian presidential election. This is messed up.”
