The forest

Who really killed Romania's election?

Romania has been regarded, in Brussels and Washington, as a docile pupil in Eastern Europe. If there was any mention of the country in the Western press, this usually centered on corruption cases rather than national politics. But when the 2024 presidential elections were canceled, due to alleged Russian influence, events in the country shocked observers worldwide and made headlines for weeks. Călin Georgescu, a fringe candidate, unexpectedly won more votes than any other politician and our Constitutional Court annulled those ballots just as Romanians were lining up to vote again.

This month marks one year since that cataclysmic event. What happened to the claim that it was actually Moscow that rocked Romanian politics and society, and what happened to the country after the discarded ballot?

Nicușor Dan is now president. He is the fifth man to hold this office since the dramatic fall and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, which marked the end of an erratic version of state socialism in Romania and the beginning of its turbulent transition to capitalism. Dan, the former mayor of Bucharest, beat far-right candidate George Simion in a new contest in May 2025. Simion enjoyed the endorsement of Georgescu, who was banned from running again and was put on trial following his surprise victory. In Romania there is a folk theory that those who lose elections go to jail. In Georgescu’s case, it seems it was his success that got him into trouble.

Dan won comfortably against Simion in a contest that was billed as a referendum: Vote for Dan and stay in the EU, or vote for his rival, and open the door to Russian dominance. Pro-EU sentiment won the day, and the docile pupil behaved once more. This happy story, depicting the endurance of democracy in the face of extremism at home and Putin abroad, was offered by mainstream Western publications as well as the dominant commentariat in Romania. I want to suggest something very different: that both the cancellation of Georgescu’s victory and Dan’s ascendance represent the most recent instantiation of a long history of secret state agencies encroaching on Romanian public life.

After assuming office, President Dan seems to have made peace with the forces he so adamantly opposed during the campaign. Dan, who was simply called a “pro-European centrist” during the second election, was always actually more of a right-wing politician, and had risen to prominence by pushing for the privatization of public services. Simion and Georgescu, in addition to being described as Russian assets, were labeled fascists for their sympathy (extremely open, in the case of Georgescu) for the Romanian Iron Guard, the sui generis interwar fascist movement that blended Orthodox mysticism with political assassinations and anti-Jewish pogroms.

Once in power Dan cozied up to the extreme right when he made a pilgrimage to Sâmbăta de Jos, the monastery complex in the Carpathian foothills that functions as a shrine to Romania’s interwar legionary movement. Anticommunism, the dominant ideology of the transition period that has served to justify neoliberal transformation and keep any leftist forces in check, offered the discursive space for this rapprochement: since the right-wing Legionnaires were imprisoned by the Communists, they should be celebrated.

Dan’s presidency so far has been defined by a harsh austerity program. Ilie Bolojan, his prime minister, introduced a series of brutal cuts in social spending which, predictably, impacted the poor and the vulnerable the most.

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Last year Marcel Ciolacu, prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party, was expected to win the first round of the November elections. George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romania (AUR), was expected to come in second place. A contest between Ciolacu and Simion would give the powerful Social Democrats a clear path to victory, the thinking went. It appeared that Elena Lasconi, the president of the liberal Save Romania Union, also had a decent shot at making the second round.

Georgescu, an agronomist, nationalist, and former member of the AUR, was polling at 6% one week week before the election. Nicolae Ciuca, former prime minister and leader of the National Liberals, was polling at about 8%. Apparently the well-established National Liberals, seeing that their candidate had zero chance of entering the second round, diverted support to Georgescu to prevent Simion from qualifying for the run-off. Lasconi, the thinking went, had a better chance of beating the Social Democrats, the traditional rivals of the National Liberals. Later investigations revealed that the National Liberals paid a firm to recruit TikTok influencers to campaign for Georgescu. He himself had zero campaign infrastructure. But outside the country, where citizens vote two days early, polling stations were flooded with Georgescu voters. He won the first round with 23% of the vote. Lasconi came in second.

Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of voting, claiming that it was a necessary step to safeguard Romanian democracy and sovereignty from foreign interference. Declassified documents from the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) seen by the Supreme Defense Council and made public on December 4th painted an alarming picture: coordinated Russian hybrid warfare had allegedly propelled Georgescu to first place through the use of TikTok bot networks and secret finance mechanisms. Through annulment, the court declared, democracy had been saved from an unprecedented assault.¹

Yet a year on, evidence of foreign interference has failed to materialize. No Russian operatives have been identified. No financial trails have been traced to Moscow. Georgescu himself was put on trial for alleged attempt of a coup d’état, though the evidence presented so far on this count is thin. The European Commission launched its own investigation. Dan’s administration issued its own report in October, which repeated the previous findings of the intelligence services but did not offer any additional revelations. No prosecutions have been launched, and no independent parliamentary panel was convened. Over twelve months later, convincing evidence of Russian involvement is nowhere to be found.

All of this raises a very uncomfortable question: If the Russian interference narrative cannot be substantiated based on available evidence, what are we to believe actually happened last year?

North South Notes sent a set of written questions to the European Commission, asking if Russia had interfered in Romania’s election, and inquiring as to the results of investigations into the matter. The European Commission confirmed it had sent two requests for information to TikTok, in October 2024 and November 2024, and “opened proceedings against TikTok for a suspected breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA)” last December. According to a Commission Spokesperson, “The investigation is ongoing and the Commission is in touch with TikTok, who is responsive to the Commission’s requests.”

So far the most prominent story has presented Georgescu as an outsider: a mystic pushing Orthodox nationalism mixed with strident anti-EU rhetoric, a social media prophet who emerged from nowhere to channel popular anti-establishment rage. But Georgescu was never the outsider he and others claimed that he was. He came of age in late Ceaușescu-era Romania and navigated the transition by inserting himself into networks of still-influential former Communist apparatchiks. Trained as a pedologist, he pivoted to environmental policy in the 1990s, securing positions within the Ministry of Environment and later with various UN agencies. By the 2000s, he had become a consultant moving between government ministries, international organizations, and the private sector, often interviewed by mainstream journalists on prime-time television.

And he had deep connections to the security and defense apparatus. Georgescu’s long-standing relationship with Horatiu Potra is particularly instructive. Potra, who financed Georgescu’s 2024 campaign, is a Romanian-French citizen who fought in the French Foreign Legion and has ties to the Ministry of National Defense. Potra’s professional network extends throughout Romania’s defense establishment. If we scan the disrupted terrain of global politics over the last 15 years, Georgescu is certainly not the first well-connected political actor with a fiery personality well-suited to social media, an insider posing as an outsider, that did far better than anyone expected.

Georgescu may have campaigned against the “parallel state,” but he was supported by individuals deeply embedded in its military-intelligence wing. His bid for power was ultimately blocked by a more powerful faction of the state, represented by the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) and its allied institutions (including the judiciary). They used the constitutional mechanisms at their disposal to end his campaign after its unexpected success. In this clash, both sides were apparently willing to disregard democratic norms. Instead, I believe they were interested in power and the perpetuation of a system in which unelected secret institutions carve out zones of autonomy and extract significant economic and political advantages.

Romania maintains a very large security apparatus relative to its population. Though the numbers remain classified, unofficial headcounts indicate several times more secret agents per capita than in most of Europe. Recent calculations put total Romanian spending on intelligence services at roughly €1.6 billion, around 0.5% of GDP. No matter how you calculate it, the same figure in Germany is much lower.

What is particularly striking here is that – as anyone who has read about the end of the Ceaușescu period knows – the legacy of the Securitate, one of the largest secret police forces in the world of European Communism, has been vehemently and obsessively rejected since 1989. We have a new intelligence apparatus, built through collaboration with Washington and Brussels. When that vast network acts with different goals – not to preserve the immortal leadership of the Party, but to ensure the privileges of elites created in the transition to capitalism - few public figures seem to care.

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The archives of the Securitate, opened after being vetted by SRI in the mid-2000s, have become a national fixation. Rather than providing transparency, the opening of the archive created what I call a “cult for the occult” – a passion for revealing that which has been hidden about others; searching through files for evidence of collaboration; using the archive as a weapon in political and personal disputes; and trading secrets from the archive for money. More troublesome, the contents of the archive are unreliable.

For 25 years, no evidence existed that Traian Băsescu, the former president, had been a Securitate collaborator, something that would have legally barred him from office. But shortly after he finished his second term, marked by a conflict with the intelligence apparatus, incriminating documents suddenly appeared in the archive, and he was officially declared a collaborator. He lost all the privileges granted to former presidents as a result of this revelation. After vocally campaigning for Nicușor Dan, his appeal was accepted by the Constitutional Court and his privileges were restored.

The resources lavished on the intelligence institutions have translated into domains of control that extend far beyond traditional intelligence work and are uncomfortably reminiscent of the 20^th century. Since the 2000s, Romania’s intelligence services have systematically expanded their competencies into areas that would, in most democracies, fall under civilian oversight. This expansion was legitimized through the requirements for NATO and EU accession and through direct participation in the covert and extra-judiciary detention programs organized by the CIA in the Global War on Terror. Moreover, a revolving door between active service and civilian life, particularly in law, consulting, and business, creates a class of individuals whose power derives from their institutional connections and their access to classified information.²

Former officers populate boardrooms, law offices, government ministries, and private security firms. They form an informal network of shared interests and mutual benefits that operates according to rules different from those governing ordinary citizens. However, despite the lack of official public interest in the workings of the state’s security apparatus, the reference to the “parallel state” has become commonplace in Romania. Many politicians have denounced it (especially after they lose power and end up in jail). Journalists discuss it sotto voce and citizens reference it in casual conversations. It even has a folk name: “the forest.” The headquarters of SRI are close to the remains of a vast forest on the outskirts of Bucharest.

Unsurprisingly, when regular people are presented with the knowledge that powerful forces really might be making plans in secret, they often turn to conspiracy theories. This kind of frenzied guesswork, as we all know, corrodes trust in institutions and warps the public sphere - ironically, this is exactly the atmosphere in which someone like Georgescu thrives - and it is the secret agents themselves who must be blamed for this, not the hapless citizens trying to make sense of their world.

I suggest that it is productive to analyze Romania’s intelligence and security services as a salaried bourgeoisie - that is, a class faction that has used its institutional position to carve out extraordinary advantages for itself. These are not omnipotent puppet-masters, controlling politicians from the shadows, but, rather, bureaucrats extracting rents from privileged access to state resources, information, and decision-making processes. They enjoy generous salaries and pensions, a parallel healthcare system, housing estates, and, as explained above, pathways to lucrative careers in business and politics. Entry into this world offers economic security increasingly rare in contemporary Romania.

No wonder that when I recently asked my sociology students what they want to do after finishing their BA program, a large majority confessed that they would try to do an MA in intelligence studies, and thus join the SRI.

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We know that it was the SRI that provided the evidence justifying the cancellation of the election in 2024, carried out by the Constitutional Court. We cannot know why, exactly, these actors chose to do so, unless they simply tell us. But it is helpful to understand who would have been impacted by their results.

The Romanian president appoints the head of the secret services, including SRI. The new president was also due to appoint a judge in the Constitutional Court. Clearly, these actors had skin in the game. After the first-round elections of 2024, no candidate from Romania’s traditional two-party establishment had any chance of being in charge of these decisions. Dan himself was an “outsider” of a sort, hailing from outside this bipartisan establishment, but he was also a continuity candidate.

On another level, EU bureaucrats surely care about our elections. They already have to deal with Orbán in Hungary, and the victory of someone like Georgescu would have placed a troublesome Euroskeptic president in a position to make important decisions.

Is Moscow above interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries? Of course not. Maybe the Russians saw an opportunity and tried to get involved. Maybe not. I do not have any evidence either way. This is what we know: The story of a Russian plot was used to justify the cancellation of an already completed election, by well-connected actors, as it appeared that someone inimical to the establishment could win.

Media and sympathetic commentators did the rest, by elevating the superficial narrative that dominated the 2024 contest: Russia as the villain, responsible for everything bad within the country; the EU as the savior, and the security services as local heroes ensuring that Mr. Putin would be foiled this time. These schematic oppositions offer moral clarity and a convenient mobilizing platform.

But they cannot replace structural analysis in which domestic class struggle and political factionalism within and between the secret services is salient. Both Georgescu’s shocking rise and dramatic fall are symptoms of a society in which secret services have too much power. Nicușor Dan’s victory ensured this will not change.

Florin Poenaru is a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Bucharest. His work revolves around class, post-socialism, and the global history of Eastern Europe. Poenaru is a founding member of LeftEast, co-editor of CriticAtac, and has monitored over a dozen elections across Europe and Asia. His latest book is Locuri comune: clasă, anti-comunism, stânga, Tact, 2017. Photos by Vincent Bevins³

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1. We must emphasize again that this decision was made after millions of people had already woken up, made their way to the polls, and cast their votes. By this point, any foreign interference would have been taking place within the brains of Romanians.

2. George Maior transitioned from SRI director (2006-2015) to ambassador to Washington. Eduard Hellvig moved from his position as MEP to SRI director and then back to being prominent liberal politician. George Tuță went from SRI chief of staff under Hellvig to mayor of Sector 1 in Bucharest. This pattern crosses parties and other state institutions, and the circulation is institutionalized through elite academies. The National College of Defense (Colegiul Național de Apărare) runs short courses bringing uniformed officers together with parliamentarians and journalists. This is less about education than networking, signaling security-consensus alignment. The National Academy of Intelligence, run by SRI, offers MA and PhD diplomas and many top politicians graduated from one of its programs.

3. Pictured: supporters outside Nicușor Dan’s campaign headquarters, on victory night; Palace of the Parliament; a guide to local floral and fauna outside the capital.