Romania and the Iranization of the West

To many leftists, "democracy" is a government where there are limits on the powers of the president, but most other officials are totally unbounded by law. This is also the preferred system in Iran.

If you want to understand the hypocrisy of left-wing globalism, there is perhaps no better example than the vastly different media responses to recent events in South Korea and Romania.

The failed coup in South Korea got a lot of attention. Basically, on 3 December, President Yoon Suk Yeol surprised the country (and even his own administration!) with a sudden declaration of martial law, which he insisted was necessary to protect the country from “anti-state forces” who were conspiring with North Korea.

Some military and police units proved loyal to the President, and tried to carry out his orders to keep the legislature from meeting, but after massive street protests and resistance from other elements within the army, the legislators managed to meet anyway. They immediately passed a resolution nullifying the martial law declaration, and not quite two weeks later, they voted to impeach President Yoon.

The whole incident got plenty of coverage in the international press, where there is virtually no sympathy for the President. Rather, his action is generally seen as a desperate ploy to extend his career in the face of low popularity (his party was roundly defeated in this year’s legislative elections back in April.)

Now compare that to the events in Romania. On 24 November, Călin Georgescu won 23 percent of the vote in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, entitling him to advance to a runoff against Elena Lasconi, who won 19 percent. The second round of the presidential election was supposed to be held on 8 December, after parliamentary elections on 1 December.

Georgescu had begun his career in a rather humdrum fashion – he was basically a sustainability officer with a degree in soil science who worked with the usual range of environmental ministries and NGOs, until at some point he really, really soured on the whole globalist project and reinvented himself as a right-wing populist.

His rise, achieved almost entirely through social media, came as a rude shock to Romania’s political class. In addition to his localist economic positions – he wants his country to produce more of its own food and energy, and rely less on imports – he’s also a nationalist who distrusts the European Union, doesn’t think that NATO would actually defend Romania if Romania were attacked, and wants to stay neutral in the Ukraine War and have a friendlier relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

As a result of all this, on 6 December, the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the 24 November election and cancelled the upcoming runoff, declaring that the entire thing would have do be done over at some indefinite time in the future, and that until then, the current president, Klaus Iohannis, is free to remain in office after his term expires.

The Court cited a combination of Russian disinformation (apparently, Russian social media influencers were promoting Călin Georgescu) and accusations of campaign finance fraud as reasons to cancel the presidential election. But since Georgescu has yet to be charged with breaking any specific law, and since there is nothing in the laws or the written constitution of Romania that gives the Court power to cancel elections, a lot of people are understandably upset about what has happened, with Georgescu himself calling it a “formalized coup d'état.”

And yet, the left-leaning globalist media has responded to all of this with a near-total blackout of news about Romania. For instance, CNN.com ran only two stories about this in the two weeks following the cancelation, one of which was about the EU investigating TikTok for giving “preferential treatment” to Georgescu, which TikTok denies. And what coverage there is tends to be extremely biased, focusing on things like Georgescu’s belief that the Apollo Program was a hoax – obviously not a belief that I agree with, but not any sort of legal disqualification for office, either.

Unfortunately, the response of Georgescu’s supporters within Romania was weak. About half of the country’s politicians celebrated the ruling, and even many who disagreed with it still asked their supporters not to protest. Such protests as did happen never involved more than a few hundred people, and they seem to have eventually dispersed without anyone being injured or killed. (A very different situation from when the communist governments across Eastern Europe fell back in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of people were refusing to go to work and making barricades in the streets instead, and the governments’ only options were to make concessions or to do a massacre.)

Nor has the Biden State Department, which complains endlessly about even mild cases of corruption in right-wing countries like Hungary, said anything of substance about the actual coup in Romania - indeed its only response was this bizarre piece of noncommittal doublespeak, a brief statement which simultaneously “reaffirms our confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions” and claims that “it is the choice of the Romanian people whom they elect.”

So at the end of the day, it looks like democracy in Romania is well and truly dead. Basically, the left-wing parties there managed to do what some of America’s Democrats only tried to do to Donald Trump earlier this year – that is, to halt their opponent’s run for office in a pure judicial power-grab, without actually trying him for breaking any specific law.

Let’s face it: if elections are invalid when foreign media tries to influence them, then just about every European election that George Soros spends money on – i.e. a lot more elections than the Russians have ever been involved with – needs to be annulled too. Also, if (as the Romanian Court’s apologists claim) this was really just about slowing things down so that people can make an informed decision after the investigations are complete, then the Court would have ordered the 1 December parliamentary election to be redone as well. But it didn’t, because in that election the Social Democratic Party won the most seats and formed a coalition with its centrist allies. Apparently, elections are only a problem when the wrong people win.

Will Romania actually hold new elections in the spring, as some parliamentary leaders have promised? And if it does, will Călin Georgescu be permitted to run in them? And if he isn’t, will it be because he has been convicted of an actual crime, or merely because the Constitutional Court has decided that he’s too dangerous? Those questions have yet to be answered, but for now, I think the most likely outcome is that we’ve already seen the sad and pusillanimous end of Romania’s 35 year experiment with democracy.

The huge contrast between this, and the way that both Koreans and the international press responded to the martial law crisis in South Korea, says something important about how the global Left and the NGOcracy work. To them, tyranny usually means one thing, and one thing only – that the president, king, or prime minister has too much power. No amount of tyranny exercised by a group of people gets nearly as much of an emotional response.

So if the President of South Korea cites vague foreign threats as a reason to disband the national legislature and govern without it for an indefinite period of time, then it’s really really bad – bad enough to justify violent protests and the president’s near-immediate impeachment. But when an oligarchical institution like the Romanian Constitutional Court does a very similar thing, like cancelling elections in response to the sort of foreign social media influence that usually gets no attention at all, then it’s barely even newsworthy – a controversial but fully licit exercise of power by the “independent judiciary,” which is of course a necessary part of any real democracy.

As Aristotle said, there are three basic forms of government: Monarchy, the rule of the one; Oligarchy, the rule of the few; and Democracy, the rule of the many. Polybius and Montesquieu believed that the best governments will (like the Roman Republic) incorporate elements of all three. And these philosophers were a big influence on the authors of the American constitution.

Yet most progressives don’t share the views of Polybius, Montesquieu, and Madison. They of course hate and fear monarchy, but they also hate and fear democracy, at least when it produces a non-progressive result, which it often does. And they love oligarchy. But to keep the rest of us confused, they call oligarchy democracy.

And this also explains how modern leftism works here in the United States. Progressives think that American citizens should be able to vote in elections. But they also think that, once in office, elected officials need to be prevented, by an all-powerful, left-leaning judiciary, from actually deciding any issues that the Left feels strongly about – and of course this judiciary will be takings its cues from left-wing academic institutions, think tanks, and news media. This is how, from the 1960s to the 2010s, the left-leaning Supreme Court was able to enact a hard-left agenda on religion in public schools, abortion, forced bussing, homosexuality, and the rights of illegal aliens – and even though elected officials never had to approve any of these de facto changes to the constitution, hardly any leftists or even centrists questioned whether the United States was still a democracy. After all, our presidents are term-limited and have lots of constitutional limits on their powers, and isn’t that all that really matters?

Eventually, the Left lost control of America’s top judicial body. But this didn’t happen because despotic decisions like Engel v. Vitale and Roe v. Wade produced the sort of massive popular uprising that we would have seen if the American citizenry was still made up of people like Samuel Adams and George Washington. Rather, it happened because of the Left’s own overconfidence – basically, back in 2014, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had just turned 81, chose not to retire while the Democrats still controlled the White House and the Senate. Apparently, she believed that, due to demographic changes, the Dems would keep on winning all the big elections indefinitely.

But it turned out that many of the “diverse” demographic groups that the Dems love to paint as perpetual victims aren’t really happy about being pigeonholed this way. And, as I’ve written about here, a lot of these people voted for Donald Trump, so when Ginsburg died at age 87 in 2020, Trump got to name Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her. The upshot is that, at the moment, the United States has a fairly impartial Supreme Court, which (as I’ve written about here) lets both red states and blue states enact laws that reflect their own moral vision so long as there’s no obvious constitutional reason to do otherwise.

And yet, as the events in Romania have shown, the leftist dream of managed democracy is still alive – the dream of elections that give the common people the illusion of power, while in practice the elected officials are just figureheads with no power over any issues on which the country’s real rulers have a strong opinion.

There is perhaps no other country that better embodies this dream than Iran. Because Americans are used to hearing the media talk about Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as if he were the most powerful man in Iran (which in fact he is), it’s easy for us to forget that Iran also has a president (currently Masoud Pezeshkian) who is limited to serving (at most) two four-year terms, which he must win in multi-party elections. And Iran has parliamentary elections.

Granted, there are hard limits on what these elections can achieve. Even though elected officials have limited powers over the budget and the provision of government services, they must unconditionally submit to the unelected portion of Iran’s government – that is, the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts – on any question which the latter deem too important to be meddled with by people who don’t share their scholarly outlook and extreme devotion to Islamic law. So, for instance, no president or parliamentary majority can stop Iran’s morality police from beating women who dress improperly in public (and sometimes the beatings are fatal!) nor can they end Iran’s off-and-on war with Israel, or stop Iran from providing money, weapons, and elite soldiers to just about every Shi’a terrorist outfit in the Middle East.

Obviously, the specific issues about which Iran’s mullahs are passionate are different from those that animate American and European leftists. But, as Kevin D. Williamson wrote about here for the National Review, the actual role of the Guardian Council and the US Supreme Court have been quite similar. So when it came to stopping late-term abortion, or preventing gay-straight alliances from promoting homosexuality in the public schools, the elected officials of the pre-Trump United States were just as useless as their Iranian counterparts.

Even though Donald Trump and the Federalist Society have now put the brakes on Iran-style government at the US Supreme Court, the old leftist dream is not going to die easily. Right now, America’s progressives are trying to get the Court to create a constitutional right for parents to chemically sterilize their child if the child identifies as transgender, and while this is likely to fail, they’ll probably try again sometime in the future if the accidents of old age give them another court majority.

In Romania, the Constitutional Court’s successful cancelation of this year’s elections shows that that country is even further along the road to Iranization than the United States has ever been. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the ability of a Supreme Court judge to ban Twitter/X for all 203 million Brazilians without a shard of congressional authorization (due to Elon Musk refusing to enforce Brazilian court orders to remove certain far-right accounts) shows that in that country, both freedom of speech and genuine representative democracy are thoroughly dead.

Will right-wingers in Europe and the Americas show enough spine to take their countries back? This is something that has yet to be seen. But the fact that, if given the opportunity, the Left will make Irans out of all of these countries is something that should be obvious by now.

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.