MAGA's new pet European project

Politico

14-03-2025

MAGA HOTSPOT — MAGA has zeroed in on another European fellow traveler, one more character to knit into its global, far-right populist alliance: Romanian ultranationalist Călin Georgescu.
The 62-year-old Georgescu has campaigned for president on a message of making Romania great again, insisting that under his leadership the country will not be treated as second-class in the European Union and NATO. He's styled himself as the Romanian Trump, while also expressing admiration for Russian culture and declaring Russian President Vladimir Putin a patriot. He's the rare candidate who can boast support from both the Trump administration and Putin.
But there's one big problem: Romanian authorities just barred Georgescu from running for president. The country's electoral bureau rejected his candidacy Sunday, pointing to Georgescu's undeclared campaign financing and fraudulent use of digital technologies during last year's campaign. Georgescu appealed, but the Constitutional Court upheld the electoral authority's decision.
The backstory is complicated and understanding it requires some familiarity with Romania's recent past — and its interaction with the rest of Europe.
In the first round of Romania's presidential election last November, Georgescu came out of nowhere to capture a plurality of the vote, edging out multiple establishment candidates. In the immediate aftermath of the election, observers credited Georgescu's TikTok campaign that took off just weeks before the election.
But that online effort immediately came under scrutiny. First, Romania's election authority accused the Chinese platform of violating the country's election rule by not identifying Georgescu as a political candidate, thus boosting his profile at the expense of other candidates. TikTok rejected the accusations.
In addition, declassified intelligence documents disclosed after the first election round alleged Georgescu had benefited from a Russia-style booster campaign and that paid influencers, along with members of extremist, right-wing groups and people with ties to organized crime, had promoted his candidacy online.
Georgescu denied any links to Russia, and accused mainstream political parties of using the same playbook against his victory as Democrats did against Trump after his 2016 victory.
The accusations, though, led Romanian election authorities to invalidate the November results and hold a new election in May. Buoyed by his newfound surge in popularity, Georgescu looked poised to win again — until he was barred this week.
The scandal speaks to both the strength and the challenges facing the global right. Georgescu found significant support relying on Romanian religious and cultural symbols in his campaign rhetoric. He captured a nation disillusioned by the political establishment, which has been constantly buffeted by corruption scandals, and in particular rural areas of the country that continue to struggle to make ends meet.
But he became anathema to Romanians who value European Union membership, which has increased living standards in Romania's big cities, and the protection that NATO membership affords the former Soviet satellite state. And Romanian authorities decided that the irregularities from Georgescu's first campaign were enough to ban Georgescu in May, as well.
That decision has predictably attracted the ire of the American right. The appearance of some parallels between Georgescu's treatment and Trump's experience with the American court system and the political establishment in particular caught MAGA's attention.
Elon Musk called the decision to bar Georgescu 'crazy' in a post on X. And last month, Vice President JD Vance pointed to Romania's November election cancellation as an example of Europe's democratic backslide in his speech at the Munich Security Conference.
'Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like 'misinformation' and 'disinformation,' who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way, or, even worse, win an election,' Vance said.
'While America is becoming great again, Europe and Romania have become petty, corrupt and under dictatorship,' Georgescu himself said on X about the decision this week, notably writing in English.
It all adds up to a grievance against old political institutions that increasingly knows no borders. And while Romania's establishment has so far been successful in shutting Georgescu out, the incident looks like the beginning of a movement rather than the end. After the decision, hundreds of Georgescu supporters protested outside the Central Election Bureau's headquarters in Bucharest with a simple refrain: 'The last resort is another revolution.'
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The militant group in the Gaza Strip did not immediately specify when the release of soldier Edan Alexander and the four bodies would take place — or what it expected to get in return.
Nightly Number
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