When Democracy’s Defenders Turn Into Its Gravediggers

Romania’s top court annulled the first round of presidential elections. It’s a betrayal of democracy masquerading as its defense.

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The Romanian Palace of Parliament, which houses the constitutional court. (Photo by Emya Photography via Getty Images.)

Imagine this scenario.

A country in the European Union is about to elect a new president. Its political scene has long been dominated by two political parties widely considered to be deeply corrupt. In the first round of the election, two outsider candidates unexpectedly top the polls: one, a 52-year old woman, is a pro-European mayor from a small town in the provinces. The other, a 62-year old man, is a far-right social media personality with evident sympathies for the Kremlin. The traditional parties are apoplectic, and there’s well-founded concern about what the far-right candidate might do in office if he wins. But given how different the two top candidates are from each other, voters in the second round of the presidential elections will have a meaningful choice about the future direction of their country.

Then, with some voters overseas already casting their ballots and only two days to go until polls are due to close in the run-off, the country’s constitutional court nullifies the outcome of the first round. Its judges do not claim that there has been any irregularity in the way the vote had been counted. Nor do they say that voters have been intimidated or that candidates have been unable to campaign freely. They merely imply that recent revelations made by the security services—that Russian agents engaged in cyber attacks and improperly funded advertising for the far-right candidate on TikTok—explain his meteoric rise.

The election, the judges announce, will need to be restarted from scratch. Because of the delay, the outgoing president will remain in office long beyond the date on which his mandate was originally scheduled to lapse.

Would you expect this to be a big story? And how do you think the self-declared guardians of democracy would react?

Well, as you may have guessed, this scenario is not at all imaginary. It is the remarkable chain of events that, largely ignored by the international public, has just played out in Romania, an EU member state with a population of nineteen million. And yet, these events failed to draw much international attention; worse, the institutions and organizations that claim to support democracy have, for the most part, cheered on the court’s decision.

“By acting as it did,” claims The Financial Times in an article by its editorial board, “the constitutional court upheld the rule of law surrounding the electoral process.” The U.S. State Department expressed the same sentiment in more flowery language. “The United States stands with the Romanian people as they face an unprecedented situation regarding the integrity of their elections … The United States reaffirms our confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence.”

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But the judgment by Romania’s constitutional court, and the blithe acceptance of it among people who claim to be fighting for the preservation of democracy, is a big mistake. If you want to rein in extremist candidates, there simply isn’t some clever way around actually convincing voters that there is a better, more moderate alternative. If those who claim to stand for democratic values invoke spurious pretexts to cancel the outcome of an election they find to be shocking, they are no longer democracy’s defenders; they have become its gravediggers.

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The constitutional court’s justification for canceling the first round of the election is shockingly thin. It held that “the electoral process … was marred throughout its duration by multiple irregularities and breaches of electoral law.” But rather than discussing these irregularities in detail, it remains oddly vague. “The right of voters to form an opinion includes the right to be correctly informed before making a decision,” the judgment reads at one point; but this was “violated as voters were misinformed during an electoral campaign that favored one candidate.” Does that provide strong enough reason to cancel an election after all the ballots have already been cast and counted?

Let’s take a step back.

There is a long tradition of authoritarian powers trying to influence the outcome of democratic elections in other countries. The Soviet Union did so throughout the Cold War, covertly financing powerful communist parties in countries from Greece to Italy to Spain. Over recent years, Russia has revived this tradition, albeit in a more ideologically flexible manner. Now, extremist parties on both the far-right and the far-left can hope for an infusion of cash from the Kremlin if they prove to be reliable spokespeople for Russian interests.

There is also ample evidence that Russia has started to peddle its influence in more tech-savvy ways. The best studies of the 2016 presidential elections in the United States found that tweets and other social media posts pushed by Russian bots made up a tiny fraction of the content seen by American voters. It is very unlikely that they swayed the outcome of the election. But it probably wasn’t for lack of trying. There is good reason to think that the Kremlin did try to interfere in that election—and that it has become more sophisticated in how to exert its influence on social media since.

In the case of Romania, declassified intelligence reports and public admissions by senior executives at TikTok do provide enough evidence to suggest that foreign influence operations played a role. In the wake of the elections, for example, the Chinese social media platform took down a cluster of accounts that had, its executives acknowledged, engaged in unmarked political advertising for Călin Georgescu, the far-right candidate. Even the strongest defenders of free speech—and I proudly count myself among them—need to recognize that we can’t allow foreign powers to get candidates who favor their interests elected by flouting local laws about campaign finance.

The Romanian case, then, is a timely reminder that Western democracies need to get serious about containing foreign influence operations. Dictatorships should not be able to fund political parties in democracies. In countries that have traditionally restricted campaign spending, social media platforms need to ensure equal treatment. And, yes, people who have broken existing laws should be prosecuted.

But while energetic action against foreign influence is needed, none of these arguments can justify ignoring the expressed will of millions of voters. In a democracy, voters deserve a minimum modicum of respect. Courts can step in to ensure that the laws of the land are obeyed during a campaign. In extraordinary circumstances, such as when votes are being tallied in an unfair manner, they must even retain the ability to order new elections. But to conclude that voters were unable to form an informed opinion because one candidate’s supporters were engaged in disinformation campaigns on TikTok is the height of hubris. It presumes not only that the court is the ultimate arbiter of truth or falsehoods in the realm of political opinion; worse, it suggests that only an irrationally deluded voter would have cast their ballot in the way they did.

In the age of social media, every election will feature some accounts spreading false rumors, and some foreign actors trying to sway the minds of voters. If we normalize the idea that unelected judges can cancel the outcome of free elections on such flimsy grounds, the political establishment will be tempted to preserve the status quo every time an election takes a shocking turn.

The most important reasons to oppose the court’s decision are (like the ones I have given so far) moral in nature. But even on purely prudential grounds it is less clever than it might at first appear. For it is highly questionable whether the kind of gamesmanship to which the Romanian constitutional court resorted can keep extremists from power.

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Up until now, Georgescu’s oft-repeated claim that there a nefarious conspiracy is doing everything it can to keep him from power looked hyperbolic to most Romanians. With Georgescu only receiving 23 percent of first-round voters, his ability to win a head-to-head run-off was also far from assured. In the wake of that constitutional court decision, his claims to being a political martyr—one that the political establishment is willing to shut out by any means and at any cost—is looking a lot more plausible. In the end, the court’s decision may turn out to delay rather than to avert his victory, and give him a much more crushing mandate when he does.

In fact, such gamesmanship may be the real reason why Georgescu won the first round of the election in the first place. What little international media coverage there has been of his rise largely blamed “TikTok algorithms” for his sudden ascendance. But part of the explanation is more prosaic: Another far-right candidate was doing well in the polls until she was disqualified by the constitutional court. Once she was no longer on the ballot, a lot of her supporters looked around for an alternative—and coalesced around Georgescu.

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Sometimes, the outcome of elections really is illegitimate. Both in July’s presidential elections in Venezuela and in October’s parliamentary elections in Georgia, there was strong evidence of straight-up fraud. When the votes of citizens are not counted fairly, there is no reason to pay deference to the supposed results.

In both countries, courageous opposition movements promptly took to the streets to protest their disenfranchisement. In the face of brutal attacks, the citizens of Georgia are still waging their righteous battle today. The cynical voices in the United States who have never met a dictator they do not like are dead wrong when they suspect an America-led color revolution anytime ordinary citizens take to the street to fight for its rights.

But the standard for when to discount the outcome of elections must be very high. This is true in two senses. First, the feature which supposedly rendered an election illegitimate needs to be core to the process. If the votes aren’t counted fairly, that counts; if some candidate was favored by a social media algorithm, that simply isn’t enough.

Second, the evidence for the supposed irregularity needs to be strong. Rumor or vague allegations are not enough; nor, in most cases, are declassified documents from the intelligence community whose sources cannot be easily traced. Especially when we are talking about courts stepping in to overrule the voice of voters after the fact, there can be no space for uncertainty.

Neither of these conditions was met in Romania. And that turns the court’s decision, and the international support for it, into a scary precedent. In an age in which the extremists are rising, those who see themselves as defenders of existing institutions will be increasingly tempted to resort to antidemocratic means. Already, politicians in Germany are discussing the possibility of banning the Alternative for Germany, and prosecutors in France have requested that Marine Le Pen be excluded from presidential elections coming up in 2027 if she is found guilty of embezzling EU funds.

But giving in to that temptation is morally wrong and politically stupid. In the long-run, the only way to beat extremists is at the ballot box. Clever ways to sidestep that imperative are as democratically illegitimate as they are short-sighted.

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