The theater of struggle in the Russia-NATO conflict that began in Ukraine has expanded over the year. This expansion, both in terms of the use of force and in terms of geography, has been realized on the military front with the inclusion of ATACMs and Oreshnik missiles in the war, while on the political front it has grown to cover a much wider area from the Caucasus to the Middle East and the Balkans. While the coming to power of a President in Georgia that favors good relations with Russia and demonstrates the will to prevent Western intervention has dealt a blow to the Western influence in this country, the response to this has been the fall of the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria, losing to Western-backed opposition forces, and opening Syria to the area of dominance of the Western powers and Israel. The political arm wrestling of the global struggle has finally reached the Balkans, and a risk that could threaten the Western hegemony has suddenly emerged in Romania, a strong NATO ally, in the presidential elections.
Romania is a country where two parties have dominated the political arena since the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. In the country where the left-liberal Social Democratic Party and the center-right National Liberal Party control the dynamics of mainstream politics, almost all actors, including large and small political parties, can easily find common ground regarding their strong commitment to the European Union (EU) and NATO. Therefore, it must be said that a political change that could cause a wobble in the line determining the geopolitical priorities of the West in Romania, which also has strategic importance for the Euro-Atlantic alliance, is beyond expectations.
Romania is a strategic base for the delivery of Western military aid to the Ukrainian theater in the ongoing Russia-NATO conflict. It is known that Ukrainian air force elements receive F-16 training at the 86th air base in Romania, which acts as a central base for NATO to have a presence on the ground in the Ukraine war. In addition, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base near Romania’s main Black Sea port city of Constanta, which is currently undergoing extensive modernization, will soon become NATO’s largest military base in Europe, a location critical to Euro-Atlantic powers’ ability to put pressure on Russia’s southwestern flank. For this reason, the direction of Romanian politics has a decisive influence on the formation and implementation of the Euro-Atlantic alliance’s Black Sea strategies, as it is directly related to the preservation and even increase of NATO’s current capacity in the Black Sea and Romania’s role as a garrison in NATO’s operations in the region.
For these very reasons, the victory of an independent presidential candidate in Romania who favors balanced relations with Russia (Călin Georgescu) against a candidate supported by mainstream parties (Elena Lasconi) in the first round of the election risked creating a fault line in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics. At this point, the decision of the Romanian Constitutional Court to cancel the first round of the election on a grounds that is not based on concrete evidence (based on an intelligence report claiming that Georgescu’s social media campaign was a hybrid attack by Russia against Romania) should be read independently of the discussions about the erosion of democratic norms. Undoubtedly, this intervention is an intervention that cripples democratic functioning in an EU country, however, the geopolitical priorities of the hegemonic system always take precedence over the dynamics of national democracies, and this is also true for the other side.
In countries within the Western system, especially in the EU, democratic values are directly related to the global hegemony of the Euro-Atlantic. Because the survival of democratic values within the liberal framework depends on the sustainability of the economic wealth of societies, and economic wealth (although there are other components) is achieved through the continuation of global hegemony. The continuation of the global hegemony of the Euro-Atlantic also depends on the military alliance (NATO) being able to suppress the non-Euro-Atlantic powers (Russia) that challenge this hegemony. In such an equation, it is the nature of the global power struggle that any political actor that tries to show the will to step outside the mainstream political axis in a country like Romania, which is in a strategically important position, will encounter resistance.
In fact, the independent Georgescu is not a candidate who challenges the hegemony of the West over Romania. He is a political figure who has previously served as a rapporteur for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, chaired the European Research Center at the Club of Rome, an influential and prestigious think tank within the Euro-Atlantic system, and was a director of the UN Global Sustainability Index Institute. However, the fact that he has included in his political promises that could be perceived as deviations from Euro-Atlantic geopolitics has strengthened the belief that he could be an outsider. The most important factor that strengthened this belief was that Georgescu focused on issues related to the economy and Romania’s geopolitical position in his campaign, frequently emphasizing Romania’s national sovereignty and reducing its asymmetrical dependency on Western global powers.
Apart from these, his criticism of NATO’s position in the war in Ukraine as someone outside the mainstream politics, his view that Romania should be in a position to contribute to peace, his speeches that the war in Ukraine was not in Romania’s interest, his criticism of NATO’s deployment of ballistic missiles in Romania, his statement that Romania’s membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions did not automatically mean participation in the policies of these institutions, and his views that EU-NATO membership eroded national sovereignty inevitably made Georgescu appear as a politician who touched the nerves of Euro-Atlantic geopolitics (although the impact he could have is debatable). This situation went as far as being accused of being “pro-Russian”, however, what is more important in the narrative is not the accusation of being “pro-Russian” but the risk that a politician with this profile, assuming the presidency at the top of the Romanian state, could lead Romania, one of the critical bases in the West’s struggle against Russia, to deviate from the West’s “strategic path”. In such cases, democracy in the West quickly turns into a storytelling and respect for the will of the people, that is, for the winner of the election, is lost. For this reason, the system’s resistance and counter-reaction and the Romanian Constitutional Court’s annulment of the election (for whatever reason) are normal in Western-type democracies and are not contrary to the flow of developments in the global order.
When you look at the whole picture, the West, which seems to be losing
in Georgia, could not allow an accident in Romania, the most critical base
country in the Balkans, while gaining in Syria. Indeed, the Romanian
Constitutional Court, seeing the task of preventing a possible accident in
terms of Euro-Atlantic geopolitics, annulled the elections. When you look at
all of this, the developments in Romania should not be considered independent
of the global power struggle, and although nothing concrete can be said about
whether Russia had any involvement in the Romanian presidential elections, the
prevention of an actor like Georgescu, who cannot avoid being perceived as an
“out-of-system politician”, from rising to the top of Romanian politics is a
regional reflection of this global power struggle.