“When is a revolution a coup d’etat?”

“When the events are televised live” would be a Romanian answer.

The fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in December, 1989, was the first revolution broadcast live globally by the new-fangled satellite news channels. 

But behind the dramatic disruption of the dictator’s speech, the storming on the official media’s newsroom during its live broadcast, and other eye-catching and distracting events in Bucharest’s streets, key figures in the military, the security services and among members of the Communist elite pushed aside by Ceausescu acted to topple the tyrant — and secure political control for themselves under the guise of democracy. 

Ceausescu’s ex-Number Two, Ion Iliescu, became the new “democratic” Number One.

I remember IIiescu telling the international election observers in May, 1990 that he knew if he got more than two-thirds of the vote they would be sceptical, but he was really talking to the “boys” running the polls around Romania not to over-egg the count. They were slow on the uptake and produced an 85 per cent result for him. Iliescu needn’t have worried about the Western observers. They swallowed the result as the birth of true democracy. 

Romanians who remember how the “West” went on to swallow the beating of protesters against this result by mobs of miners brought into Bucharest by Iliescu’s regime are not surprised by the deafening silence of US and EU diplomats and media at their Constitutional Court’s judicial coup d’etat on Friday, 6th December.   

Yesterday’s ruling by the country’s constitutional court annulling the presidential elections was unanimous — as all decisions in Romania were before 22nd December, 1989 — but it was unique in that neither candidate facing the run off on 8thDecember applied to the court to overturn the results of the first round — and even the Socialist Prime Minister who came third had announced his withdrawal from contention.

The Romanian establishment decided that Călin Georgescu, the anti-NATO mystic and sceptic about helping Ukraine, was unacceptable to them and their generous sponsors in the West. But Romania’s “deep state” also wanted to sideline the Number Two in the first round, Elena Lasconi. She is learning an updated lesson from Communist days.

Naïve people used to insist that they loved the Party, but, asked cynics, does the Party love you?!

Ms Lasconi loves the EU and NATO but she is critical of Romanian politicians, bureaucrats and, yes, lawyers and judges who see them as a cash cow and the provider of well-paid sinecures. Ironically, her rival. Georgescu, used to be an international bureaucrat before turning populist, like Donald Trump defecting from the Democrat oligarch class. 

Long before the post-Communist stitch up after 1989,  Romanians had always taken a wry view of their rulers and their ideals. 

Satire survived even in official publications under the Ceausescu regime, toppled thirty-five years ago in December, 1989.

Urzica was the officially-sanctioned satirical magazine permitted to mock approved targets — rather like Krokodil in the Soviet Union or Private Eye in Britain. Occasionally, it got close to the bone. In 1980, one story ridiculed shortages in the clothing industry suggesting that Romanians buy their own zips before ordering a pair of trousers.

Their Constitutional Court’s verdict blocking the election was convincing as if the  pompous judges had their flies un-done.

Romania’s partners in NATO and the EU have shown spectacular indifference to the nullification of the vote

It is not only Romania’s democracy that has been debagged by the insiders’ cancelling of elections to “save democracy from the voters”. Romania’s partners in NATO and the EU have shown spectacular indifference to the nullification of the vote.

Since the allegations that Georgescu had used TikTok to campaign a grand scale reaching voters ignored by the old parties and funded possibly in dubious ways had been massively reported in the Romanian media and on TikTok needless to say, no one could claim anyone voting on Sunday would have been unaware of the charges against him. 

Romanians’ widespread suspicion of Russia seems not to have damaged Georgescu despite the media and NGO hysteria against him as Putin’s man. Even if he is pro-Putin, the Western conspiracy theory caucus cannot explain, let alone deflate, deep-seated Romanian rejection of the country’s elites so effective at courting  Brussels and Washington but not the Bukovina or Wallachia.

The Romanian establishment wants their man to win. 

Far from securing democracy by entering the EU and NATO, Romania’s “establishment” saw membership as a way to recycle ex-Young Communists like Mircea Geoana into a NATO deputy-secretary generalship before this post-Communist Icarus crashed and burned as a candidate in a presidential election decided by voters not [ex-]apparatchiki. 

Across much of the old Soviet bloc, alienation from official elites is almost as great as it was in 1989. It is increasingly commonplace west of the old Iron Curtain too.

Media peddling reports of “Russian” disinformation to curtail democracy risks killing the geese laying Europe’s golden eggs of stability and “soft power”. In practice, they despise ordinary voters and fuel alienation from the basic processes legitimising our rulers.

No elections unless the top seven judges like the result is not a recipe for political stability. 

And this kind of patent contempt for voters’ capacity to choose their rulers plays in Russia’s hands.

Who says loud and clear that Western democracy is a sham? Putin

After a serious setback to alleged  Russian attempts to hack the presidential elections in neighbouring Moldova only a few weeks ago, the Kremlin must be rubbing its hands in glee. The West’s silence is consent to a Constitutional Court decision which flies in the face of the choices of around 97 per cent of Romanians polled about how they had intended to vote in the second round. 

Western democracy’s reputation was on the court docket in Bucharest and the Romanian judges trashed it as much as their own country’s standing.