After NATO's Romanian Coup, Where Next?
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On December 6th, Romania’s constitutional court made an extraordinary decision to inexplicably overturn first round results of the country’s November 24th presidential election. Conveniently, the ruling was made mere days before a runoff that, according to polls, would’ve seen upstart outsider Calin Georgescu win via landslide. In the process, citizens of all NATO member states were provided with a particularly pitiless, real-time crash course on what could now happen in their own countries, should the ‘wrong’ candidates be elected fair and square.
Georgescu’s stunning victory in the first round caught Romania’s political elite and their Western sponsors off guard, while leaving him the most popular political figure in the country. Campaigning on a traditionalist, nationalist platform, he extolled views some might consider unsavoury, but also advocated state ownership and investment in local industry. Predictably, the Western media has universally smeared him as “far-right”, “pro-Putin” and a “conspiracy theorist”, among other now-familiar sobriquets commonly levelled at political dissidents.
Georgescu’s greatest crime is to determinedly oppose continued Romanian involvement in and backing for the Ukraine proxy war. As Kiev’s Black Sea-facing neighbour, Bucharest has offered significant financial, material and political succour since February 2022, all along running the risk of getting caught in the crossfire. But in interviews with Western news outlets, Georgescu boldly proclaimed any and all “military or political support” would be reduced to “zero” under his watch:
“I have to take care of my people. I don’t want to involve my people…Everything stops. I have to take care just about my people. We have a lot of problems ourselves.”
No official reason has been given for Romania’s constitutional court voiding November’s vote, despite days earlier signing off on the results. Nonetheless, in the intervening time, Bucharest’s security apparatus released declassified reports intimating - without making direct accusations or providing any evidence whatsoever - Georgescu’s victory may have resulted from a wide-ranging, Moscow-sponsored influence campaign, delivered via TikTok. Details provided instead pointed to a rather mundane - albeit successful - social media marketing effort.
The plot further thickened in late December, when it was revealed the TikTok campaign that purportedly boosted Georgescu was in fact financed by Romania’s National Liberal party. This backing helped propel the hitherto obscure candidate to national prominence, the objective potentially being to harm the National Liberal party’s arch nemesis Social Democrats. No evidence of Muscovite funding, let alone support, for Georgescu has ever emerged. Nonetheless, despite these disclosures, the narrative of Russian destabilisation catapulting him into power has since been invincibly minted.
Bucharest’s sprawling territory is home to multiple US missile facilities, and a giant NATO military base, scheduled to soon be greatly expanded, explicitly in service of decisively changing the region’s “balance of power” in the West’s favour. Meanwhile, Romanian presidents wield significant clout in domestic and international affairs. They dictate foreign policy, serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and appoint prime ministers. All of which points to a far more likely rationale for the presidential election’s abrogation than “Russian meddling”.
‘Without Hope’
On December 10th, the BBC published a striking report on how Romanians were “stunned by the eleventh-hour cancellation of their presidential election.” The British state broadcaster was at pains throughout to justify the vote’s unprecedented, despotic annulment as proper, reasonably motivated by a “massive” and “aggressive” malign meddling campaign on TikTok - whether of Russian origin or not - improperly skewing the result. However, the BBC evidently had little choice but to admit Georgescu was enormously, and organically, popular.
For example, NATO veteran Mircea Geoana, Bucharest’s former foreign affairs minister who ran for president in November and finished sixth, was quoted as saying “Romania dodged a bullet” and “came very close” to an all-out coup. “If Moscow can do this in Romania, which is profoundly anti-Russian, it means they can do it anywhere,” he ominously cautioned. Still, Geoana conceded there was “a whole cocktail of grievances in our society,” and it would be “hugely mistaken to believe” Georgescu’s success “was just because of Russia.”
The BBC acknowledged immense “fatigue” with Romania’s doggedly pro-Western political establishment widely abounds among the local population, who harbour an ever-growing number of completely legitimate grievances, entirely unaddressed in the mainstream. By contrast, the British state broadcaster recorded, Georgescu not only spoke openly and passionately about these manifold problems, but offered tangible solutions for tackling them. And a great many average citizens “liked what he said.” Several Georgescu supporters were duly quoted in the article, issuing effusive praise. One evangelised:
“He’s like a preacher, with a Bible in his hand, and I thought he spoke only the truth…He talks about rights and dignity. Romanians go to other countries for work, but we have so many resources here. Wood, grain - and our soil is very rich. Why should we be vagrants in Italy?”
The BBC further noted Georgescu’s “pledge to Make Romania Great Again helped him perform particularly strongly among the vast Romanian diaspora.” Given Bucharest’s mass depopulation in recent years, significantly assisted by EU membership, this is hardly surprising. “Many who left because life was so tough are now getting by abroad rather than prospering,” the British state broadcaster observed. Meanwhile, in Bucharest, costs of basic goods are “climbing at the fastest rate in Europe.” An expat supporter of Georgescu forcefully declared:
“He’s corrupt? He’s with Putin? No, he’s not. He’s with the people. With Romania. Georgescu is a patriot. He wants peace, not war, and we want that too. Someone wants something good for his country and they won’t allow him to do that…Maybe he’ll be in prison in months and for what? For nothing…We feel lost right now, without hope.”
‘Allied Solidarity’
To date, no concrete evidence directly implicating NATO powers in the invalidation of Romania’s presidential election has emerged. We do not - and may never - know what might have been said behind closed doors to members of Bucharest’s Western-bought political, judicial, security and military establishment, and by whom. But there is a clear precedent for such backroom conniving. In the final months of 1989, Communism commenced collapsing across the Warsaw Pact, the Cold War-era constellation of Central and Eastern European Soviet satellite states.
The sole exception was Romania, then led by Nicolae Ceausescu. On December 4th that year, he privately met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, to discuss the fall of longstanding Communist governments in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Gorbachev, to all intents and purposes a Western puppet, assured Ceausescu his position was secure, he would “survive”, and they would meet again in mere weeks. That summit never came to pass though, as on December 25th, Ceausescu was executed by military firing squad.
This followed violent mass protests across Romania. Years later, it was revealed high-ranking US officials secretly met with Gorbachev that month, imploring him to deploy the Red Army to oust Ceausescu. These entreaties were rebuffed. Yet, subsequent research indicates that throughout December 1989, a profusion of KGB operatives were conducting uncertain, covert missions across the country, in coordination with Ion Iliescu, who succeeded Ceausescu. Suspicions he personally ordered the very security service crackdowns that ignited the insurrectionary anti-Ceausescu demonstrations endure to this day.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Romania’s outsized geopolitical importance to the Empire then and now couldn’t be clearer. In the weeks since Georgescu’s victory was vetoed, it has been announced that further scores of foreign NATO troops will be dispatched to Bucharest, in explicit response to “the evolution of the security situation in the Black Sea region.” Meanwhile, Romanian officials talk a big game on “allied solidarity”, and look forward to “extensive joint training exercises” over the year ahead.
Furthermore, on December 12th, the Romanian government abruptly greenlit long-mooted, highly controversial legislation providing for the country’s military and all its “weapons, military devices and ammunition” to come under total foreign control and direction at any time, without a formal state declaration of emergency, siege, or war. In other words, NATO would have unilateral power to commandeer Bucharest’s armed forces, at its behest. A useful capability indeed, as the nearby Ukraine proxy war careens towards total collapse, and overt foreign involvement is openly mulled.
The aforementioned BBC article reported that local “suspicion” about whether unseen foreign forces may have swayed “the judges’ ruling to cancel the vote” is such, “even those who feared a president Georgescu - and believe Russia was backing him - now worry about the precedent just set for Romanian democracy.” We are left to ponder where next an illiberal coup of the kind that just went down in Bucharest might be replicated, as the Empire’s surging contempt for democracy and public will becomes writ ever-larger.
Nonetheless, one might draw some solace from the fact that even those who endorsed Romania’s autocratic putsch are well-aware it was a blunt-force, short-term solution to a panoply of deeply complex, likely intractable socioeconomic and political problems locally. Former NATO high-ranker Mircea Geoana told the British state broadcaster that nullification of Georgescu’s victory had delivered at best transitory reprieve to Western powers, and their chosen puppets in Romania. Moreover, he feared the move could spectacularly boomerang, should elites continue to ignore citizens’ concerns:
“We bought ourselves some time. But there is real fury here. And if we don’t do something, we might have a repeat.”
Excellent as always, Kit. I will add a few more details which may or may not be important. Firstly, it is largely unknown outside Romania that a candidate for the presidency, Diana Șoșoaca, was barred from standing just weeks before the elections took place. She is a controversial, larger than life figure but like Georgescu, a patriot who refuses to lick NATO boot. Her reasons for disqualification were not transparent, but this certainly helped channel further support into the Georgescu campaign rather than have the anti-war vote diluted over two candidates.
Secondly, I found it fascinating watching the foreign press react to the presidential elections. They were all saying that the votes were going to Georgescu and to the PNL (liberal, EU, NATO) candidate Elena Lasconi. The actual data was showing something very different. Lasconi was definitely in third place behind the PSD candidate, Marcel Ciolacu. Now the PSD are the descendants of the old socialist party, but any residual left ideology as been totally expunged. However, they have massive support, especially amongst the elderly and the conservative. Had the second round of the presidential election been between Ciolacu and Georgescu, Ciolacu would have won, no doubt. There are enough conservative voters who would have backed him (religious working class who loathe Georgescu's admiration for the Legion (Romania's nationalist and fascist organisation in the 1920s and 1930s) and the liberals would have backed him too. Then out of nowhere, when just the diaspora votes were being counted, it became a Lasconi/Georgescu contest...... Ciolacu slithered into third place. Colour me suspicious. The foreign press had been fed with this outcome before the results ever came close to showing it.
This leaves me with the feeling that the whole thing has been engineered. Split the country into two camps, one traditional/one liberal. Divide and conquer. It is working. I am here watching friendships and families being broken by voting preferences. The whole thing looks decidedly like the Republican/Democrat s**tstorm that voters in the US get. Everyone getting very aerated by nothing as if it were a matter of life and death. Nothing will change other than Romanian society will continue to fragment. A NATO win, no doubt.
Also the timing is very suspicious. Make as much irreversible trouble for the incoming Trump administration as possible so that he can not possibly back away from project Ukraine. Add to this the demonstrations in Serbia against the Trump-friendly Vucic. Look at the map of the region and see strong anti-war support from the old DDR, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia and Romania and this was simply too much for NATO to stomach. Their plan to promote Georgescu backfired like the Democrat promotion of Trump in 2016. NATO are too stupid to realise that populist rhetoric is actually popular.
Part of the problem is that the western public is to all intents and purposes history-less. And those who do not know history are doomed to see it repeated, or at least restaged.
The fact is that a major theme of the previous cold war was NATO sponsored coups and even military rule. Yes in Asia, Africa and South America such as in Brazil, Argentina, Congo, Korea and Taiwan where NATO was the patron of authoritarian military governments, but ALSO in Europe.
In Europe, NATO sponsored military coups in Greece in the 1970s and I think 1980s. And gladly allied with fascist military dictators such as Franco in Spain and Salazar then later Spinoa and Gomes in Portugal - these were places where NATO backed military governments ruled up until the 1980s!
NATO is not about democracy. Or fighting authoritarianism.
No matter what paid and disgraced liars like Rutte, Stoltenberg and Von der Leyen tell you. They are not guarding against the wolf: they ARE the wolf.
They want to steal everyone's freedom to chose their own government, to elimintate freedom of speech and thought, they want to steal your right to privacy, they want to steal your money by making the false claim that we "owe" them an endlessly growing percentage of our national income, they want to force people to work with no labour rights at all, they even want to steal control of every last shred of nature and the commons under the guise of "critical resources", "critical minerals", "energy security" etc.
You only have to look briefly back in history too all these patterns. Its publically available information. NATO will gladly seize military control of European countries and spread dictatorships, if people let them. People in South Korea appear to understand fully - they too lived under a NATO imposed military government until the 1980s. But people in Europe are at the momment completely asleep. They think it cannot happen to them. But it can.