Votes, verdicts and rising uncertainty

Cormac Lucey examines recent election turmoil in Romania, questioning the fragility of democratic processes and need for greater scrutiny in safeguarding electoral integrity

We pride ourselves that our modern societies are democracies, but what if this is a comforting illusion? What if the foundations of our democracies are considerably more fragile than we imagine? Some recent developments suggest that caution is warranted.

Last November, Romania held its first round of presidential elections. As nobody secured an overall majority, the second run-off round was due to be held on 8 December. 

On 6 December, however, the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the election, alleging Russian interference in the first-round outcome, which had been won by Calin Georgescu, a “Romanian far-right politician, agronomist and prominent conspiracy theorist, who worked in the field of sustainable development”, according to Wikipedia.
Four days earlier, on 2 December, the Court had confirmed the first round results despite vote-rigging allegations. 

It appears that intelligence agency reports alleging that TikTok had been used to spread political disinformation caused the Romanian Constitutional Court to change its mind. The election is now scheduled to be re-run in May, six months after the original, aborted election. 

There are at least four concerns I have with this chain of events. 

First, elections have always been battlegrounds of contention. One should not be able to cancel a democratic election without hard evidence of sustained manipulation. Is the assertion that untruths were told on TikTok now sufficient to overturn the election results of a democracy? 

Second, the intelligence types asserting that social media fatally undermined the recent Romanian election are the same sort of people who claimed, in the run-up to the 2020 US election, that the disclosure of Hunter Biden’s emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”.

We now know that those emails (suggesting criminal behaviour by members of the Biden family) were true. 

Those intelligence operatives who untruthfully dismissed the emails in 2020 were granted a pre-emptive Presidential Pardon by Joe Biden as he departed the White House. 

Third, if democracy is as important as we are regularly told it is, why is Romania delaying the re-run of its cancelled November 2024 election until May 2025? 

Fourth, while the mass media in Britain and Ireland cover in astonishing detail every twist and turn in American politics, there has been almost total silence regarding the cancellation of the results of a modern European democracy on pretty flimsy grounds. 

It brings to mind the warning issued by Alexander Solzhenitsyn—the Russian dissident, Nobel laureate in literature and author of “The First Circle” and “The Gulag Archipelago”—shortly after he first arrived in the Western world in 1978 having been let out of the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn said: “The Western world has lost its civic courage…Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.”

The UK’s 2016 vote to exit the European Union and last year’s vote for Trump to reprise his role as US President were as much votes of no confidence in those countries’ ruling political establishments, as they were votes in favour of the outcome.  

There is a danger, in an ever more atomised world, that we—part of the ruling and intellectual elite—take democracy for granted, assume that everyone else is doing their job properly and fail to do our bit to sustain the system. 

As Chartered Accountants, we are highly trained guardians and interpreters of fact at a time when the facts are increasingly in dispute. Maybe it’s time for us to speak a little louder in public debate.