Hyper-governmentalist candidate Calin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s sudden interruption last year and was banned from a vote scheduled for May, triggering small and violent protests from his supporters in the Romanian capital Bucharest.
The Central Election Bureau issued a statement on Sunday evening saying it ruled that it would not want to register Mr. Georgesku, a outspoken critic of Ukraine and NATO who expressed sympathy for leadership of Russia and Romanian fascism during World War II. The bureau also said it rejected three other possible candidates.
This has no explanation for the decision, less than two weeks after the Romanian prosecutor filed a criminal case against Mr. Georgescu, the decision “inciting actions against the constitutional order”, “communication of false information” and participating in the “building of organizations with fascism, racism or racism or performance characteristics”.
Hundreds of angry protesters gathered outside the election bureau in Bucharest on Sunday night, screaming “thieves” and “traitors” and throwing stones and firecrackers at police officers, who responded with a quantum of tear gas.
The protests are much smaller than the previous street demonstrations of Mr. Georgeku’s supporters, but ahead of the country’s second election attempt, political tensions and fear of violence. Later the crowd dispersed.
The Romanian president has limited power but often plays an important role in the foreign policy of NATO member states, which borders Ukraine and has a large air base near the Black Sea, which is used in the air by the U.S. military.
Mr. Georgeku, who has the right to appeal his right to exclude, condemned the Election Bureau’s decision as “another direct blow to the centres of democracy around the world”. “Europe is now dictatorship. Romania is under tyranny,” he said.
Mr Georgescu shocked the country by winning the first round of the original election in November. Romanian political institutions saw him as a marginal candidate, and he challenged more mainstream candidates and outstanding far-right nationalist George Simion.
Mr. Georgeku, who claimed to have spent “zero” on the campaign, was unaware of it among most Romanians until a large number of videos supported him mysteriously appearing on social media in the last few days of the campaign, amid his opponents’ intervention in Russia.
The Constitutional Court said it wanted to “ensure the correctness and legitimacy of the election process” to eliminate his first round victory two days before December runoff. Many of Romanian NATO compatriots supported the decision, but it angered some European and American conservatives.
“This is crazy,” Elon Musk On his social media platform X, he said on Sunday that the decision was to ban Mr. George Cu from competing again.
Vice President JD Vance quoted the abolished Romanian vote in his speech at the Munich Security Conference last month, what he called Europe’s “retreat” from freedom of speech and democracy.
The constitutional court canceled the original election after the release of the security department in Romania, explaining the intelligence report, which noted that Russia might intervene in the campaign on behalf of Mr. Georgescu, but provided no reliable evidence.
