How democracy died in Romania

What occurred in Romania is a harbinger of things to come elsewhere: as propaganda loses its efficacy, ruling elites are increasingly willing to to discard even the formal structures of democracy

Mar 13, 2025

I’ve written for Compact about the exclusion of “populist” candidate Călin Georgescu from the upcoming Romanian elections (which he was set to win) and what it means about the future of “Western liberal democracy”:

The events in Romania represent a new and fateful step for Western societies that claim to be liberal and democratic. Elites no longer limit themselves to influencing electoral outcomes through media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure, and intelligence operations. When these fail to achieve the desired result, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether, including elections.
Therefore, what transpired in Romania should be seen as a warning sign of what may soon unfold elsewhere. Indeed, Breton openly stated that similar actions could be taken elsewhere—he was referencing Germany—if populists were at risk of winning the elections. It’s important to realize, however, that this anti-democratic drift has been a long time in the making. Indeed, one may argue that Western liberal-democratic states have been operating in a permanent state of exception for some time. The ease with which basic freedoms and constitutional guarantees were cast aside during the pandemic provided ample evidence of this. Ruling elites are able to do this because there is little in the way of organised mass resistance to challenge them.
For a brief 30-year period following World War II, the masses succeeded in leveraging democratic institutions to wrest a measure of economic and political power from entrenched oligarchic elites, but the material conditions that made that possible—first and foremost the organized power of labor—no longer exist. In retrospect, the brief period of (relative) popular sovereignty was an exceptional, geographically limited deviation from the historical norm, sustained by unique material and political conditions. Indeed, countries like Romania never even experienced that, having gone straight from communist rule to neoliberal post-democracy. The two pillars of the transatlantic alliance—the European Union and NATO—have advanced Europe’s anti-democratic trends, leading the charge in undermining democratic processes and suppressing popular self-determination.
What we are witnessing is not “degeneration” of Western liberal democracy, an unfortunate deviation from the historical norm, but rather its logical conclusion. States that were once briefly responsive to popular demands have now returned to the function state institutions have had throughout most of capitalism’s history—preserving elite power at all costs.

Read the article here.

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