Romania¶
The Romanian cases show a state cancelling an election on evidence it has not made public. Voters and the candidate could not examine the intelligence behind the decision. Each later measure rests on that decision, not on evidence anyone outside can check, so each inherits the secrecy. No outside body has reviewed it, and the promised account keeps slipping. Even where the threat is real, the public is asked to trust a file it has not seen, and defending democracy starts to look like deferring to the services.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these. Georgescu’s voters lost their ballots and their candidate on evidence they have not seen, and may now watch him convicted on other charges. Many will read a conviction as proof the annulment was right. His supporters will read it as proof it was planned. Citizens who post about politics now face removal orders written for campaigns. The services gain a say in what counts as a fair election, and the president who holds the report decides when the public sees it. Future candidates with foreign-backed support, wanted or not, can expect the same route. A later government could use it against a rival it fears. Publishing the report and the files, and writing into law what evidence an annulment needs, would narrow the room for that.
August 2026: Three cases¶
On 6 August 2026 the High Court of Cassation and Justice found lawful the indictment of 15 September 2025 against Calin Georgescu, Horatiu Potra and 20 others, and sent the case to trial. Georgescu is charged with complicity in attempted actions against the constitutional order and with communicating false information. Prosecutors allege that on 7 December 2024, the day after the annulment, he met Potra in secret to plan violent action at the protests, and that police found knives, batons, axes, pistols and pyrotechnics in the group’s cars that night. A separate case, for publicly promoting fascist and legionary ideas, including a legionary salute before a crowd, went to trial in February. On 29 September he was held in pretrial detention in a third case, a fraud of 1.1 million euros prosecuted by DIICOT, the organised crime directorate. The clerks note that the courts are now making in public a case the annulment never made, and that a conviction will be read as having justified it after the fact.
August 2026: The report deferred¶
President Nicusor Dan has promised a report on the annulment of the 2024 election: in May 2025 “as soon as possible”, in July 2025 within “one to two weeks”, in December 2025 “probably in two or three months”, and on 6 June 2026 “within a reasonable timeframe”. In August the Presidency told HotNews that “given the volume of material analysed, we cannot estimate a publication date at this time”. The clerks note that the ballots were cancelled within days of the evidence, and the evidence has been on its way for more than a year.
January 2026: The Vexler law¶
A law proposed by the MP Silviu Vexler, which bans the public glorification of fascist figures and makes promoting antisemitism, racism or xenophobia a crime online and offline, was adopted in June 2025, returned by the president, upheld by the Constitutional Court and adopted again in December. In January 2026 just over 10,000 people protested in Bucharest at a march organised by the MEP Claudiu Tarziu, who called it “the most serious attack on the Romanian people in the past 35 years”. Specialists quoted in the same report say the text does not support claims of a blanket ban on speech. The clerks note that the law draws its lines more narrowly than its opponents claim, and that how far it reaches will depend on who prosecutes under it.
April 2025: Posts taken down¶
An emergency ordinance of 16 January 2025 required all electoral material to be labelled, whether posted by candidates, supporters or ordinary citizens. By 14 April the Central Electoral Bureau had ordered more than 600 posts removed, mainly for lack of a label, 149 of them published by private individuals. Civil society groups objected to how broadly the ordinance defined a “political actor”. The clerks note that a rule written for campaigns reached private citizens, and that an electoral bureau became an editor.
March 2025: Strasbourg declines¶
On 6 March 2025 the European Court of Human Rights declared inadmissible Georgescu’s complaint against the annulment. It found “no indication that the powers of the President of Romania are such as to make that office part of the” legislature, which is the only body covered by the Convention’s right to free elections. The clerks note that the court outside the country able to examine the annulment found that its right to free elections does not reach a presidential vote, so the question stays at home.
December 2024: The election annulled¶
On 6 December 2024 Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election, in which Calin Georgescu had come first, and ordered the whole process repeated. Two days earlier, intelligence reports had been declassified at the request of President Klaus Iohannis, describing a social media campaign with around 25,000 fake accounts and bots and signs of a “state actor” behind it. The court found that Georgescu had used “non-transparent and election code-violating digital technologies”. The Polish Centre for Eastern Studies called the ruling based on “vague evidence and procedurally doubtful”. The Venice Commission’s urgent report observed that “the decision does not explicitly mention such external influence”, while resting on intelligence information and referring to Romania’s sovereignty. In 2025 the electoral bureau rejected Georgescu’s new candidacy, citing “the Constitutional Court’s ruling of 6 December”, and OSW observed that the state had failed to credibly demonstrate links between Georgescu and the Kremlin or financing of his campaign by Russian entities. The clerks note that it came after 37,000 votes had already been cast abroad, and that the ruling became the ground for the next exclusion.