I’m Romanian and I recently turned 39, soon after Romanian democracy turned 35 — if we date it to the secretive execution of the tyrant Ceausescu and his wife, on Christmas morning, 1989. A basic rule of politics that most people in the West don’t know is that almost nobody respects a political regime younger than himself. We could all have been spared regime change had we known this. We could be spared regime change now, which is happening in Romania, by a coup d’etat.
On November 24, 2024, the Romanian people made the mistake to think that they live in a democracy guaranteed by the most moral institutions in world history, the EU and NATO, so they voted for the most recognisably Romanian kind of guy that ever captured the public attention, Calin Georgescu, in the first round of presidential elections. Unfortunately, he was not a politician, elites didn’t like him, and he committed an unforgivable sin — he represented vocally the anti-war opinions of the Romanian people.
On December 4, in advance of the second round of elections, the Romanian deep state, the secret services, the institution most directly connected to the old Communist tyranny and least reformed in the democratic era, declared that Russian disinformation had potentially determined the presidential elections. Not the legislative elections on December 1, which had been won by the centrist parties (although rightwing parties won a third of seats), which were free from suspicion. Only the presidential elections. Then on December 6, the Romanian Supreme Court canceled the second round of elections and annulled the results of the first.
These unprecedented decisions were countersigned immediately by the US Secretary of State, Blinken, and by Ursula von der Leyen, along with the Polish and Italian Foreign Affairs ministers. Romanians had no idea what was going on, but clearly someone knew, since the reactions came very quickly and often on social media rather than in official communiques, in a guarded language that referred to disinformation and the problems of digital technology, but silently avoided the question of an abuse of power leading directly into a post-constitutional situation.
Since December, the coup d’etat has proceeded one step at a time, in a shocking slow-motion version of everything we civilised people tend to blame what we used to call “third world countries” of doing or tolerating, but nowadays we are ourselves doing.
The Romanian president at that time proclaimed unilaterally that he would not relinquish his office at the end of his mandate, never mind the Constitution. Then the Supreme Court backed him up. Months after the coup, on February 10, political infighting among Romanian parties, involving eve the threat of an indictment, led to the resignation of that president, who was replaced by the unelected president of the Senate. The post-constitutional situation deepened.
Then the promise of democracy returned. The major parties, with the quiet support of the deep state, declared presidential elections would occur in May 2025. But does not the thought shock that there is a power above democracy that can suspend it, restore it, program and reprogram it, suspend the Constitution, and do all this with the quiet approval of international organisations? Meanwhile, the international media has been largely quiet, suppressing the story, as though democracy didn’t matter in the West anymore and elites had moved on to managing institutions without bothering with the consent of the governed.
The French political scientist Pierre Manent has written at length about this extremism of the centre, whereby elites control the institutions of the permanent state. As he explains, the meaning of elections has changed in the 21st century. No longer is it the case that the people gather every four years to express their will through the act of voting, demanding that politicians represent them. Instead, elites hold a test every four years and the people either vote for the correct candidates or, if they give the wrong answer in the voting booth, get a stern talking to.
Now, we’ve advanced to what the South Americans, where the coup has been most enthusiastically practiced in the modern era, call the self-coup, the “auto golpa,” the elites replacing the people as sovereign. But the steps taken by Western democracies paved the way for what they are supporting in Romania. And the problem of the Romanian people is only an extreme version of what people are suffering in many other countries. The conspiracies against Trump created the “Russia disinformation” rhetoric now employed in Romania — with much less concern about providing any plausible evidence.
In Europe, the major political devices that prepared for this are the “cordon sanitaire” and the demissionary government. For example, Emmanuel Macron called for legislative elections last year, promptly lost them, and nevertheless he governs, somehow, by some agreement, in defiance of the will of the people. This is not democracy, but obedience to something that substitutes for religion, the imperative of Progress — the right decision must be made and only elites can be trusted to make it.
In the Netherlands, Mark Rutte’s government resigned in 2021 in a national scandal in which the state was persecuting innocent citizens in very large numbers without any basis in law or fact. But he remained PM until elections returned about the same division of seats and, after the longest negotiations in Dutch history, formed a new coalition. Like Macron, he then called snap elections in 2023 — over the immigration issue — and his party and entire coalition were thrown out of power. But he has been rewarded with a new job, Secretary General of NATO.
The demand of Progress prevents political choice and the competition that keeps the people free
Political change has become shockingly difficult and government no longer has anything to do with the will of the people. The Merkel years in Germany, which saw two or three different coalitions, whatever people voted for, were proof enough of that. The post-Merkel years in which the centrist parties all offer the same pro-war policy a majority of Germans reject show the same thing. So, there was a very long preparation for a complete coup d’etat in a more vulnerable less established democracy like Romania, which is only drawing the necessary conclusions from the premises.
The demand of Progress prevents political choice and the competition that keeps the people free, because there is only one correct answer to moral-political questions. Hence, our elites have Stalinist levels of consensus. They have conquered the most difficult political problem, disagreement, disagreeableness, the opposition that makes it impossible to predict and therefore to achieve the victory. The price they’re willing or eager to pay is despotism.
Romanians obeyed the demands of Progress because it was better than Communist tyranny and seemed to offer freedom. That has proved to be a delusion and nowadays it is only the American Vice-President J.D. Vance who talks about the coup d’etat. Not even such public statements scare or shame European elites into at least pretending to care about democracy and backing off.
Instead, in March, after threats of arresting Georgescu, the authority supervising elections and the Supreme Court declared him unfit to run for the presidency. The two candidates who made the runoff have suddenly disappeared from politics, one by political violence, the other by, it seems, private persuasions, after she had declared against the coup and in favour of democracy.
What now? The centrist parties seem unwilling to run the candidates that lost in November 2024, as though that were a step too far; those men are the sitting and the former Prime Minister, rejected by the Romanian people. They have since resigned as party leaders. Instead, politicians from ten or twenty years back have announced they will run. Democracy is now a farce. With under two months until elections, we have reached a new scandal. Elites demand that the people vote for who they’re told to vote — but then they won’t tell us for whom they want us to vote! I suppose we’re all waiting to see whether Ursula von der Leyen has any opinions; or whether Trump swoops in, shines a light on the scam, and saves the day.
It may seem arrogant, but I am betting I will make it to 40. Romanian post-1989 democracy might not.