The decision of the Central Electoral Office on the exclusion of Călin Georgescu‘s Romanian presidential candidature, like the one – the latter presupposed – of the Constitutional Court of Bucharest on the annulment of the first round in December 2024, may arouse all kinds of doubts and perplexities, not least because it constitutes an unprecedented response to a problem that, due to its nature and proportions, has no precedent, nor any real terms of comparison: that of the engineering of hybrid warfare and the technological sabotage of democratic processes.

To claim, however, as many do in Italy too (from Salvini to Renzi), that Georgescu has been excluded from the upcoming presidential elections and that the previous elections were cancelled due to pure ideological discrimination against a pro-Russian candidate is much more than solemn nonsense: it is precisely an act of hybrid warfare, i.e. the construction and dissemination of false information, deliberately aimed at misleading the electorate’s awareness and provoking a Pavlovian anti-democratic and anti-European reaction.

The motivations of the Constitutional Court

The Constitutional Court annulled the elections because Georgescu had declared that he had spent ‘zero leu‘ (the Romanian currency) on an electoral campaign in which several initiatives and massive investments on social networks were reported, all of them carried out irregularly, not only because they were not declared in economic terms, but also because they were misleading, i.e. not explicitly traced back, as required by Romanian (and not only Romanian) law, to the candidate’s commission and therefore to an advertising nature.

The Constitutional Court, on this basis, concluded that Georgescu had violated the basic rules of transparency of financing and electoral activities, as well as having enjoyed an undue competitive advantage through an abusive manipulation of the algorithms for displaying political messages.

Is this clear? The presidential elections were annulled and reconvened because Georgescu violated Romanian electoral law, regardless of the additional allegations – from illicit financing to an attack on the constitutional order – that his special relations with Russia and with paramilitary and subversive groups have brought about and for which, in any case, he has yet to be judged.

Before saying that ‘eliminating’ a candidate or an elected person for mere administrative irregularities in electoral expenses and activities is an undemocratic abomination, one should take note that this apparently abominable practice is also provided for, as it is, in Italy and applies to all elected persons, from municipalities to the national and European Parliament.

‘The ascertained violation of the rules governing the electoral campaign, declared by the Electoral Guarantee Board in a definitive manner, constitutes cause for the ineligibility of the candidate and entails the disqualification of the elected candidate from holding office’: this is how Article 15, paragraph 7 of Law 515/1993 states it. We should know this and have it fresh in our memory, because it is precisely the rule at the heart of the possible disqualification of the President of the Region of Sardinia Alessandra Todde, who like Georgescu had declared that she had spent nothing on the electoral campaign, even in the face of equally blatant – though not disguised – evidence of contributions received and expenses made for her candidature.

On the basis of the Constitutional Court’s decision, the Romanian Central Electoral Office concluded that the ineligibility arising from the violation of the regulations in force in the annulled election extends to the entire electoral process, thus also to the repetition of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections. Yesterday, the Constitutional Court itself confirmed the consistency of the interpretation given by the Central Electoral Office, rejecting Georgescu’s appeal.

In any case, this is a decision that has nothing to do with the ideological orientation of the candidate, and to claim that it is a completely arbitrary legal artifice implies a robust dose of bad faith, given Georgescu’s macroscopic violations of the transparency of electoral law.

Between legitimate questions and pro-Moscow instrumentalisation

Pending the outcome of Georgescu’s appeal, the questions remain: did the Constitutional Court have the power it exercised or did it arrogate it to itself unduly, because the Romanian Constitution or legal system, like others, is defenceless and indefensible against such interference and therefore the judges of the country’s highest court should have taken note of it? And again: is not the possibility of invalidating elections an even more democratically lethal weapon than the possible conditioning of the electoral process, and therefore is it not preferable to have an election polluted rather than annulled by a judge or other authority?

Given that these are legitimate questions (the second legitimately suicidal), even if they are generally used instrumentally to justify the tampering with democratic processes, to criticise the decision of judges and institutions of guarantee on Georgescu is not to speak of this, but literally of ‘a coup d’état’ against a political opponent. Which is a licence for militant or at least honorary Putinism for anyone who ventures down this road.