Romanian court defers decision on annulling presidential vote

 

Romanian court defers decision on annulling presidential vote

 

Court has ordered recount of vote won by far-right candidate and will decide whether it needs to be rerun

 

Jon Henley Europe correspondent

Fri 29 Nov 2024 12.08 EST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/29/romanian-court-to-rule-on-whether-presidential-election-should-be-rerun-calin-georgescu

 

Romania’s constitutional court has deferred a decision on whether to annul the first-round vote in the country’s presidential election until Monday, a day after parliamentary elections in which far-right parties are forecast to post major gains.

 

The court, which had already ordered a recount, considered for two hours on Friday a request to annul the 24 November vote, which was won by Călin Georgescu, a far-right, Moscow-friendly independent who had previously been polling at barely 5%.

 

Amid multiple allegations of fraud and foreign interference, the head of Romania’s central election bureau, Toni Greblă, earlier said that the first round of the presidential election could be rerun on 15 December, with the runoff two weeks later.

 

That would delay both presidential votes until after Sunday’s parliamentary elections, which polls suggest the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) could win with about 22% of the vote, just ahead of the centre-left Social Democrat party (PSD).

 

A second far-right party, SOS Romania, headed by an MEP that the constitutional court barred from running in the presidential vote over antisemitic, anti-western and undemocratic statements, is also on track to win seats in the 330-member parliament.

 

Both votes are seen as critical to the future direction of Romania, hitherto a reliable EU and Nato ally – and strategically important for western support for Ukraine – which, since emerging from communism in 1989, has largely evaded nationalist populism.

 

The court is considering a request to annul the first-round vote filed by a conservative politician who has alleged electoral fraud by the runner-up, the centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi, in a case that risks tarnishing public faith in state institutions.

 

“We are in a place where the constitutional court decides for the Romanian collective public life in a manner that supersedes its purpose,” said Sergiu Miscoiu of Babeș-Bolyai University, adding that Romanians would “no longer trust anything”.

 

Georgescu came from nowhere to comfortably win the presidential election first round after a campaign that he declared had incurred zero expenses and was based heavily on viral TikTok videos, reportedly boosted by bot-like activity.

 

If the court does not annul the result, he is due to face Lasconi in an 8 December runoff. However, his sudden and unforeseen surge has prompted intense speculation in Romania and beyond about possible foreign interference in the vote.

 

The country’s presidential office said on Thursday that officials had detected online efforts to influence voting and noted “a growing interest” on the part of Russia “to influence the public agenda in Romanian society”.

 

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Friday that any accusations of Russian interference in Romania’s presidential election were groundless.

 

Romania’s presidency also said Georgescu had benefited from “massive exposure due to preferential treatment” by the social media platform TikTok, which it said had not marked the far-right candidate’s content as political.

 

TikTok has dismissed the allegations, saying it enforces guidelines against election misinformation. A spokesperson on Thursday said it was “categorically false” to suggest Georgescu’s account was treated differently from those of other candidates.

 

Georgescu has called for an end to the war in Ukraine, denied the existence of Covid-19, described two second world war-era Romanian fascists as “national heroes” and claimed that in foreign affairs Romania would benefit from “Russian wisdom”.

 

The constitutional court – which was supposed to validate the first-round result by Friday for the runoff to go ahead – can legally annul the first-round vote only if it finds evidence of fraud affecting the two candidates who reached the runoff.