Article intitally published in Jacobin
After Romania’s election was canceled, both the far-right candidate and his liberal opponent wrote to Donald Trump to seek his backing. The country’s political leadership class remains strongly deferential to Washington.
There are whole decades when nothing happens — and then days when Romanian elections happen. The last few weeks in Romania have been tumultuous even by 2020s standards: after the first round of presidential elections on November 24 was won by Călin Georgescu, a far-right, Vladimir Putin–curious independent who seemingly came out of nowhere, the parliamentary elections on December 1 saw (another) far-right party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), come in second place. The result: to force all mainstream parties into negotiations for a “government of national unity.” More than ever, Romanian society has become polarized between the “sovereigntist” camp (including AUR) rallying behind Georgescu, and the pro-Western bulk of the political establishment and civil society. In effect, it’s a battle between the nationalist right and the neoliberal right.
But last Friday, the Constitutional Court delivered a fresh plot twist less than forty-eight hours before the planned second round of the presidential elections: the nullification of the first round and a complete rerun of the whole electoral process, with the vote likely to take place sometime next spring. The decision was based on evidence of electoral law violations by Georgescu’s campaign, including the failure to report campaign expenses and to label electoral advertising accordingly. Nevertheless, the over two million votes received by Georgescu were themselves genuine. Had they not been seen as a threat to Romania’s “Western path” (read: unconditional subordination), the highly politicized Constitutional Court would probably not have made this decision.
Surprisingly, both Georgescu and the pro-Western candidate who had made it into the second round, Elena Lasconi from the neoliberal Save Romania Union (USR), criticized the decision. So did Donald Trump Jr, who deplored this “[George] Soros/Marxist attempt at rigging the outcome and denying the will of the people.” This compelled both candidates to write to his dad and argue their case, like schoolchildren in front of the headmaster. Lasconi — ostensibly the candidate defending democracy, the rule of law, and all the rest — started by praising Trump “for the great things you have done, and will continue to do, to put America first and for your continuous fight for the American people.” Georgescu went as far as suggesting that this is in fact a plot to drag NATO into the war in Ukraine and thereby block Trump’s investiture in January. His characterization of Trump echoed the old Wallachian delegations kowtowing to the sultan: “They want to stop the Peace-Maker Donald Trump from keeping world peace.”
When even the “sovereigntist” candidate speaks like this, it gives you a good idea of Romania’s status in the world-system today. And when the candidate supposedly defending democratic values and freedom from the far right wants a pat on the head from Trump, it becomes clear that Romania’s pro-Western allegiance is not an alignment with some mythical community of values, but a nearly total subservience to Western powers, the United States in particular.
Compared to mainstream politicians, Georgescu’s geopolitical orientation is, indeed, more ambiguous, with reported links to people around both Trump and Putin. He is less keen on Western support for Ukraine and wants Romania to adopt a more neutral position on the war ravaging its northern neighbor. People’s fear of war has been a strong driver of his support, especially in the border regions of Romania. There is a case to be made that Romania would be particularly vulnerable in the case of a major escalation, as the biggest NATO military base in Europe is being built on the Black Sea.
Also in contrast to the political establishment, Georgescu doesn’t shy away from talking about Romania’s economic dependency and calling for a restoration of sovereignty. This resonates with many in Romania who feel that after 1989 the country was sold at bargain price to foreign interests.
Unfortunately, so was public debate itself: the pro-Western bias runs so deep in the Romanian public sphere, including most progressive circles, that merely addressing such legitimate concerns about Romania’s economic and geopolitical status gets you castigated as belonging to the camp of “Putin apologists” and “national traitors.” This only widens the window of opportunity for nationalist opportunists like Georgescu to rake in support.
Economic Appeal
At the same time, while a lot has been said about Georgescu’s foreign policy — as well as his ideological cocktail of Romanian neo-fascism, wild conspiracy theories, and New Age mysticism — there’s been much less talk of the economic dimensions of his political project. As some left-wing commentators have already pointed out, here and elsewhere, his spectacular rise is rooted in a particularly aggressive strain of neoliberalism that has seen Romania become, over the last three decades, a land of low wages, low job security, low regulation, low taxes, and low public investment.
This has led to chronic mass disillusionment with mainstream politics and liberal democracy as a whole — over 40 percent of Romanian youth today think the country needs a strong leader “who does not bother with parliament and elections.” More important, there is strong support for a left-wing economic agenda, with an overwhelming majority favoring state-funded job creation as well as greater investment in public services and poverty reduction programs. However, in the absence of a mass left-wing party willing to take up that agenda, the antiestablishment anger is channeled by false prophets like Georgescu. It’s what brought Victor Orbán into power in Hungary more than a decade ago and what fuels the ongoing rise of far-right populists worldwide.
Still, this is also only part of the story. Sure, some of the most precarious Romanians voted for Georgescu, including those in the sizable diaspora, where he got over 43 percent of the votes (versus his 23 percent overall score). But with a turnout of merely 52 percent, most working-class people did not bother voting at all. Even in the diaspora, Georgescu’s 400,000 votes only represent about 10 percent of the eligible voters living abroad.
Another chunk of the popular classes voted as usual for the Social Democratic Party (PSD). While it may be the main political vehicle of domestic capital and clientelist bureaucratic networks, PSD has also been the only party in living memory to implement some palpable policies in the interest of ordinary people, particularly the repeated increases in the minimum wage and pensions.
Georgescu himself does not speak about these things, and his discourse is not meant to appeal directly to working-class voters. Instead, his economic agenda calls for a reduction in corporate taxes from 16 percent to 10 percent and further tax breaks for agricultural businesses. The overarching goal is “the spread of associative forms of productive property (over land, tools, educational resources) . . . based primarily on the capitalization of the small producer.” Furthermore, Georgescu makes it clear that the “sovereign” state he wants to (re)build is not at all “a nanny-state that will redistribute wealth in an egalitarian way, as per the socialist model,” but one supportive of small and medium domestic capital. That support would go beyond fiscal perks and subsidies and also include the outsourcing of some state functions to the private sector.
Thus, as I’ve argued elsewhere, Georgescu’s political economy is a petty-bourgeois utopia, in which Romania becomes a country of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs concentrated in the villages and small towns. His digs at foreign corporations and his political links to domestic small and medium businesses are further testimony to that. Indeed, it has been shown that the vote for Georgescu was particularly prevalent in areas characterized by an expansion of domestic businesses in recent years. This is a fraction of the national petty bourgeoisie that, unlike foreign capital and the domestic capitalists embedded in transnational supply chains, feels less represented by the mainstream political parties.
Georgescu — who himself has made good money from real estate speculation — seems, therefore, to be the representative of Romania’s “provincial” petty bourgeoisie, from the rural and small-town areas. This may well include those Romanian emigrants who have worked hard abroad to make enough money to open a small business back home. To people like them, Georgescu has a twofold appeal: his nationalist rhetoric restores some sense of pride in people often discriminated and humiliated on foreign lands, while the pro-domestic-capital agenda promises concrete material advantages to this upwardly mobile social category, who feels the state has been captured by foreign interests. This includes people like Horațiu Potra, former mercenary in the French Foreign Legion, who now owns several small businesses in his hometown (where he was also elected on the local council earlier this year) and who has been providing the security detail for Georgescu.
Insurgent Elites
In their bid for power, no political actor can rely on one social class only, let alone one class fraction. While more systematic mapping is yet to come, Georgescu’s social bloc seems to also include, at the top, people involved with cryptocurrency, including the main sponsor of his online campaign; people linked to Russian business interests; certain factions within the bloated and all-powerful secret services; disenfranchised layers of the comprador bourgeoisie that has fallen out of grace with foreign capital, with Georgescu’s wife a prime example in that respect; and former soldiers turned neofascist leaders. In short, Georgescu seems to be linked to a motley crew of privileged interest groups and insurgent elites.
Exposing this elite character of Georgescu’s political project may help dissuade more ordinary people from voting for him than will merely demonizing him as the biggest existential threat to Romania’s democracy and “European destiny.” Doubling down on the uncritical and unconditional pro-Western stance of Romanian elites, ignoring or minimizing the country’s economic and political subordination to the Western power bloc, and sidelining the way in which neoliberalism engenders far-right populists like Georgescu will only fuel his antiestablishment appeal. The Left is faced with the crucial challenge of standing its ground on an independent basis, by opposing the Right in all its variants, neoliberal or nationalist, and putting forward an alternative to both, rooted in the most pressing issues facing ordinary people.
