Sunday, December 8 is Constitution Day in Romania and it was supposed to be the day of the runoff in the Romanian presidential elections. This is the only political event that really counts for Romanians. The country is run by a Prime Minister, the creature of coalition-building in the Parliament. Everyone knows this, but nevertheless people do not really bother to vote in legislative elections, which have markedly lower turnout. But the election didn’t happen. It was in fact canceled. The Constitution has been suspended. 

Constitutional or electoral design doesn’t impress Romanians anyway. They believe that the president represents the nation, so they vote in high numbers for the head of state rather than the head of government. There’s something a little pathetic in that attitude, setting up a rather powerless figure — a hope against hope that how the country works might bear resemblance to what people believe in. But this year we have learned that this belief creates a great danger, because it allows for the decapitation of the national representative. 

Ordinarily, voting for a party in Parliament is considered a somewhat low gesture in Romania, almost like acquiescence in corruption. The popular attitude is resignation and contempt. Voting for the president actually brings out the passions in people. But in 2024, democracy has been suspended from the institutional apex of Romanian politics and nobody knows how to react. Maybe this is proof of our innocence. Innocent people don’t have backup plans or alibis. They are simply stunned. 

The elections were cancelled on Friday, December 6, the Constitution was suspended by the Constitutional Court itself, democracy was summarily dissolved in the name of saving democracy. It was all a bit gauche, as voting had already commenced in the extremely large Romanian diaspora, which is maybe a fifth of the total population. Those votes don’t count anymore — they are an embarrassment we must pretend never occurred. Nothing like this has ever happened in the 35 years of what we loosely call democracy that followed the coup d’etat in December 1989. 

Romanians may be excused for being both naive and conspiratorial in their political thinking

How did communism end? Everyone knows: The tyrant Ceausescu and his wife were executed. It was all over TV on Christmas morning and then broadcast to the world, and there’s something desecrating about that, for all that we all wished them dead. You could look it up on YouTube. It’s our shared digital history! But who abducted them, shot them, and televised it? Nobody knows, not even today. The blessings of freedom came wrapped in a bloody mystery, almost a Machiavellian exercise in satisfying and stupefying the crowd. Romanians may be excused for being both naive and conspiratorial in their political thinking … 

Today, there’s a new coup d’etat in Bucharest, with every structural characteristic reversed. Unlike in 1989, we know exactly who canceled the elections, because it was done in full view of the public: the Constitutional Court, the highest judiciary body in the land. No one ever thought a few judges had the authority to cancel democracy, nor had anything like it ever happened. It was accomplished peacefully, since our elites are convinced no one would dream of disagreeing or resisting. 

The instigation came, as in 1989, from the security services. The mystery of that moment has to do with firefights in the streets of Bucharest and tanks rolling into town. Who was fighting whom, which troops from what unit, on whose orders? Maybe it was one big diversion with bullet holes carved into buildings in posh neighborhoods, to remember it by. I used to point them out to younger friends or foreign visitors, since they’re all alike in marvelling innocently at such violence, which is only supposed to happen in less civilised places. 

The deep state goes deep in Romania. It’s the major remnant of the old Communist tyranny, and has largely proved resistant to reform or democratic accountability. In 2024, the public face of the deep state, CSAT, the Supreme Council of National Defense, went into action, just before the electoral runoff. In a very public, but very obscure statement, it suggested some kind of foreign interference in the November 24 elections. This unprecedented gesture was the mystifying excuse offered by the Court in its decision, without argument either as to the facts alleged or its authority to act on them. 

Why all the bother of overthrowing democracy? Romanians are, politically, boring. They never accomplish anything and they never quite disappoint. Everyone in Europe is supposed to be part of NATO and the EU — we dutifully joined and obey the rules as well as can be expected. Protests are very rare, violence is unheard of, the state doesn’t even bother to try to repress anything. Yet not only were elections cancelled, but elections that had already happened on November 24 were annulled. 

There is something of the theological about all this. Sins can be washed away, erased, as though things never happened, deeds are undone and speeches unspoken. The Romanian elites in the judiciary, in the security services, as well as in the major parties, have just told the nation to believe that the campaign, voting, and outcome had never happened. It takes remarkable powers of belief to act this way. 

The occasion for this drama — apologies for the suspense — is that the wrong guy won. A political non-entity, Calin Georgescu, with a past in various mid-level government positions and in international bodies, ran an independent campaign, without party support, without access to the press, and while being kept out of the official televised debates. He didn’t even register in the opinion polls. He ran an effective, it seems, TikTok campaign. He’s a populist, forever talking about God and the nation, both forbidden subjects in Romanian politics, but popular. Then on November 24, he won the first round of elections, with about 23 per cent of the votes. 

It was such a stunning success that the sitting PM, the Social-Democrat Marcel Ciolacu, who was also running for the presidency, resigned as party leader, after failing to qualify for the runoff. Another major party leader and the previous PM, the Liberal Gen. Nicolae Ciuca, also ran for the presidency, also made a disastrous showing, and also resigned. So far, so good. But then these very same elites turned around and cancelled the elections instead. The only major politician not to participate in the coup is the center-left Elena Lasconi, candidate of USR, who made the runoff and would probably have lost to Georgescu. She declared that the coup exposes a system that doesn’t know how to lose. 

Indeed, only winners make it into the Romanian elites. Today, instead of being elected by the Romanian people, they are elected with universal approval by EU-NATO elites. This is perhaps the most shocking aspect of it all. Back in December 1989, the coup against the Ceausescu tyranny was the last, bloodiest of the anti-Communist movements in Europe, and all the world applauded the arrival of freedom but no one leant a helping hand as mass arrests threatened to turn into slaughter. In December 2024, the coup against democracy is applauded only at elite level, but this applause actually has power behind it. Mere diplomatic pronouncements, but a complete abolition of dissent. This is a new kind of coup, evidence of the enormous power of post-Cold War elites, and therefore a sign of Progress. 

Elections are a test organised by the state, which the electorate can pass or fail

The ordinary man might believe that elections are an opportunity for the people to choose their representatives. The elites know better: Elections are a test organised by the state, which the electorate can pass or fail depending on the choices they make. Choose the wrong party or politician and you lose your democracy. Normally, in Western democracies, this disciplining of voters is arranged politely by the French “cordon sanitaire” or tergiversations on Brexit or, in Germany, threatening to ban a major party, AFD. In the East, it’s possible to be more direct and simply cancel the elections. I guess Romania is in that sense like America, given the political shocks of 2016-2020, but more so. 

The American ambassador in Bucharest sanctioned the coup on December 7: “The United States reaffirms our confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence. We call on all parties to uphold Romania’s constitutional order and engage in a peaceful democratic process free from threats of violence and intimidation and which reflects the Romanian people’s democratic will.” You have to be a sophisticated, maybe cynical observer of the political scene to read such a passage and understand what it really means.  

Of course, Romanians raised on Communist propaganda know how to read between the lines. The only surprise is that it’s Washington rather than Moscow that offers tyranny instead of freedom.But government without consent, the state against the people, judges canceling elections — that is ordinarily understood to be tyranny and none of the people applauding it would like it if it happened to them. But of course, it’s not happening to them — it’s happening to us. 

It took ten days after the November 24 elections for this coup to be set in motion, testimony to the shock of the event. Now, arrangements have to be made, there is a counter-shock. The outgoing Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis, has declared that he will not go out once his Constitutional term ends this December. It would look bad to have an empty presidential office. People would ask questions. The Constitutional Court hurried to confirm that in this way too the Constitution must be suspended — the president will just keep at it until further notice. As for democracy, not this Christmas, but there might be elections in the spring. It is human to endure and to hope. Politics is something else altogether.