The Supreme Court has ordered a vote recount and given itself until December 2 to take a decision on whether to cancel the election result outright.
The official campaign against Georgescu, focused solely on technical-legal issues, serves to obscure the social and political issues involved. It is driven not by any aversion for his far-right views, many of which are shared by his rivals, but more by his criticisms of NATO and the Ukraine war. Politico noted: “Georgescu’s success has triggered alarm as Romania has in recent years been viewed as one of the EU’s more reliable members in Central and Eastern Europe when it comes to rule of law and security—with a major NATO base on the Black Sea.”
The election result is first of all an indictment of the Romanian ruling establishment, who came to believe their own lies about a pro-war “national consensus.” Georgescu, who made criticism of the war the focus of his campaign, centered on Telegram and TikTok, built an audience among workers and youth who could find no progressive outlet for their concerns.
An important political role of this campaign is to amalgamate opposition to war with Georgescu’s fascist sympathies. The ruling capitalist parties suppress opposition by falsely arguing that all opposition is necessarily fascist.
The ongoing COVID pandemic has led to the near-collapse of the healthcare system. In the summer, revelations of mass deaths in a public hospital led to the framing of two doctors by prosecutors and the media for murder. The case against them has since been dismissed by a judge, but this ongoing “social murder” is continuing unabated.
Romania is heavily involved in the imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine, which risks turning into a direct conflict between nuclear armed states. As a Black Sea state bordering Ukraine, Romania would undoubtedly suffer heavily in any expansion of the war. Yet any deviation from the official pro-war line is denounced as the result of Russian interference. The pro-war official consensus is backed by pseudo-left groups like the Socialist Action Group (GAS), which denounce “Russian imperialism.”
The global cost of living crisis has been compounded by austerity measures demanded by the EU Recovery and Resilience Plan as well as ballooning defense spending. A recent pension cut deprived many elderly workers, notably in mining and nuclear sectors, of cost-of-living adjustments. 2025 is expected to bring new rounds of austerity in Romania.
The policies of war and austerity have degraded the bourgeois democratic norms, such as they were after the Stalinist regime’s restoration of capitalism in the 1990s. The ruling establishment, with the post-Stalinist PSD at its head, swung towards the far right, adopting extreme forms of nationalism, irredentism, and COVID denialism. Fascist parties like the Alliance for the unity of Romanians (AUR) and the SOS Romania Party were staffed by PSD apparatchiks, Stalinists, academics and union bureaucrats.
A report published in November by the Romanian site PressOne highlights the AUR’s dominant political position in the Jiu Valley mining region:
Demoralization and confusion prevail among the remaining miners, after suffering decades of defeats and closures at the hand of the state and the unions. A revolving door of Stalinists, union bureaucrats and local politicians forms the basis of AUR’s activities in many deindustrialized regions. One such example is Nicu Bunoaica, a mining union leader and former associate of the pseudo-left Association for the emancipation of workers (AEM) who ran as an AUR candidate in local elections earlier this year.
The elevation of a fascist admirer of interwar Romania’s Iron Guard to the highest office appears to be a less “shocking” bolt from the blue as it has been described in the media.
Similar to other far-right leaders elected in recent years, Georgescu is first of all the expression of the ruling class’ increasingly open abandonment of democratic norms, under conditions of global war and intensifying working class resistance. The main responsibility for the rise of the far right lies with the nominal left political forces, who have adapted to nationalism and have surrendered any resistance to war.
Georgescu himself is the product of the former Stalinist ruling establishment. He followed the path of his mentors, Sergiu Celac and Mircea Malitza, who enjoyed careers in the Stalinist regime’s diplomatic corps and remained influential after capitalist restoration. Georgescu has links to the Malthusian “Club of Rome” think tank and has been promoted by PSD leaders in the foreign policy establishment as an expert on “sustainable development.” During the pandemic, he became a leading promoter of quack medicine and opponent of health measures.
Georgescu’s opposition to war is, however, a complete fraud. He has called for the reintroduction of the military draft. His criticism of the Ukraine war is merely raised from the standpoint that it undermines the economic and geostrategic interests of Romanian capitalism.
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Publish date : 2024-11-29 18:39:00
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