On Dec. 31, 2024, the Bucharest Court of Appeal rejected action by the Coalition for the Defense of the State of Law and Călin Georgescu regarding the annulment of Romania’s presidential elections. The decision will soon be challenged at the High Court of Cassation and Justice.
The Court avoided comment on the substance of the case, but simply dismissed any legal standing of the summoned institutions. These institutions, the Central Electoral Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Defense General Staff, the government, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, the Constitutional Court, the Romanian Intelligence Service, as well as President Klaus Iohannis, showed up at the hearing “with their hands in their pockets,” and didn’t bother to bring any proof showing the alleged campaign irregularities by Georgescu, who had won a large plurality in the Nov. 24, 2024 first round. They only rejected being a party to the process. A crime may have happened, but nobody did it.
The context is that independent Presidential candidate, Călin Georgescu, was on his way to winning the Presidency in the second round of the election set for Dec. 8, putting at risk the Euro-Atlantic orientation of Romania, a NATO country, and its Ukraine war engagement. So, the Romanian establishment, after the failure of the mass media’s character assassination against Georgescu, took the risk to halt the democratic process in the middle of the vote, arguing suspicions of illegalities and Russian foreign interference. It is very probable that they did this under foreign pressure, as President Iohannis stated on Dec. 18, that “the foreign influence was found afterwards and I must say that on this issue we had significant support from strategic partners who helped the Romanian entities to, however, find out what happened.”
The “legal” coup d’état took place through goofy illegalities exposed by the lawyers: the declassified intelligence notes hinting at Russian interference, which were the basis of the Constitutional Court’s decision, turned out to be false rumors.
Proof of the allegations of Georgescu’s campaign illegalities, or of foreign interference, were requested by his lawyers, without success. Then, the institutions gave no respect to any normal legal procedure: the polling stations closed on the basis of some press communiqués of the Constitutional Court and of the Central Elections Office, but before the publication of the decisions in the Official Monitor. Georgescu’s lawyer explained on ROCTV that some polling stations even continued to function the day after the annulment, lacking, in the middle of this chaos, the legal basis for closing. The original documents of the meeting in which the Central Elections Office decided to close the polling stations are, of course, not available, etc.
