Garvan Walshe: Romania disqualified pro-Kremlin Georgescu. We should all learn from its defence of democracy

Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party. He is founder of Article7 – Intelligence for Democrats.

Romania’s election commission has blocked pro-Russian candidate Calin Giorgescu from running in its rescheduled presidential elections, on the grounds that he has illegally benefited from Russian support. Its decision raises one of the most fraught questions in the running of democratic processes: what do democracies do about anti-democratic politicians – the people who would use democratic freedoms to destroy the system that allowed them to seize power?

It’s not so difficult when the enemies of democracy take the form of terrorist groups or paramilitary movements. Their hostility to democratic practice is obvious. Such organisations are easy to ban, and the state, unless it has been infiltrated by supporters of extremism, normally has the will and institutional strength to crush them. Even some young democracies that had only just begun to get used to the post-World War I mass politics introduced by universal suffrage, like Belgium or Finland, were often able to clamp down on or outwit the more blatant kind of extremist movements.

Italy and Germany were not so fortunate, but Mussolini and Hitler were helped into office by other politicians who thought they could be controlled. They didn’t win elections on a promise to dismantle democracy, they used the power they had won to rig future elections. The Weimar republic banned the Nazis from the radio, forcing Goebbels to make a virtue of organising physical Nazi rallies around the country. 

Fascists and communists became experts in techniques of barely legal intimidation.

They would dress up in uniforms and employ thugs to march in formation and beat up opponents. The more successful examples of anti-extremist legislation of the time, for example in Czechoslovakia, banned these practices. The Czechoslovaks were forced to capitulate at Munich, made to render their country defenceless under pressure from the great powers, and hand over much of their industrial might to Germany, but had managed to rid domestic extremism of its capacity to intimidate.

The Czechoslovak example comes from the work of Karl Löwenstein, a German political scientist exiled to the United States after the Nazis seized power, who, writing in 1937, gave the Czechoslovak policy as an example of “militant democracy”, able to set aside ordinary political practice to overcome extremists.

Central to all his examples is that successful pro-democratic crackdowns focus on the tactics that give the extremists unfair advantages in a political system. In the fascists’ case it was their appropriation of militarist glamour — still powerful in 1930s Europe — and the impression of menace they created by organised drilling, marching, and the wearing of uniforms. Once these practices were banned it became harder for them to stand out from other movements.

Today’s authoritarians are different. Organised uniformed marching would make them look, at best like imitators of Putin’s Russia, and at worst like relics from a hundred years ago.  Their unfair advantage comes from propaganda, and nowhere was it clearer than in the presidential Calin Georghescu’s Romanian presidential bid.

The original election held last year was cancelled after he had made the run-off, thanks to a surge in social media support, likely financed from Russia, and despite declaring zero election expenses. He was disqualified by Romania’s electoral commission from running in the replacement elections, due in May.

Here the Romanian authorities had to grapple with the dilemma that Czech and Finnish authorities faced 90 years ago. Banning an evidently popular politician risks a backlash, but failing to do so risks the government being taken over by someone under the influence of a hostile foreign power.

The backlash argument deserves to be taken seriously, but is strongest among people who think politics represents deep social forces rather than individual effort. There is no doubt that Georgescu, like Donald Trump, exploits social resentment in his campaigning; but also like Turmp, he possesses personal charisma, albeit of a more conventional kind than Trump himself. What Romanian authorities, whose democracy is new, understood that US Senators trying Trump’s second impeachment could not imagine, is that it is sometimes necessary to play the man, not the ball.

Fortunately for the Romanian authorities, Georgescu’s campaign had one big weakness: the source of his financing.

Unwilling to disclose the true sources of campaign expenditure, he submitted a nil return. Some of this money was used to finance a social media campaign, including the employment of accounts to boost his reach on TikTok. Other amounts doubtless went into more conventional campaign activity. The issue is not really that he conducted a campaign on TikTok, but rather the questionable sources from which he obtained the money to do so, and that the nature of the campaign was covert.

Romania’s actions were squarely in the tradition of militant democracy, using the democratic state, however imperfect  it may be, to defend itself from someone who would destroy it. For democracy is a system composed of far more than elections: it is the organisation of the competition for power, so that it takes place in peaceful conditions and in which the people are able to make informed choices. They cannot do so when one candidate is secretly funded by Russia and conducts covert campaigning using that money.

Romania’s voters will have other candidates, including ultranationalist ones, to choose from in elections in May, but the known campaign fraudster will have been excluded. 

Pro-Georgescu Elon Musk has hinted he would like to support a British ultranationalist. Britain’s election authorities should endure secret money cannot illegitimately influence general elections here.