The Constitutional Court of Romania on Wednesday, May 21, registered the statement of the head of the far-right Alliance for the Unification of Romanians, George Simion. He demands to cancel the results of the presidential election because, according to the plaintiff, interference in the election campaign from abroad. According to the official results of the vote, Simion lost to Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, a liberal by conviction. The chances that the claim will be satisfied are slim. But the probability that Simion will try to organize street protests, on the contrary, is high. However, even in this case, the ultra-right is unlikely to achieve results.
The second round of the presidential election was held on May 18. According to the final vote count, Simion scored about 46%, and Dan – about 53%. The attitude of the former to this result was changing. At the end of the day on May 18, Simion declared that he had won. The next morning, he admitted defeat. Two days later, Simion appealed to the Constitutional Court. As the politician wrote on the social network, he demands that the elections be canceled “for the same reasons that the December elections were canceled: external interference by state and non-state actors.” In December, the same Constitutional Court annulled the results of the vote, finding that the far-right candidate Calin Georgescu was campaigned for from abroad through a large number of fake accounts on social networks. Later, a criminal case was opened against the politician, and a written undertaking was taken from him. This did not stop Georgescu from campaigning for Simion. They even went to vote together.
In her doubts about the honesty of the victory, Dana Simion relies, among other things, on the testimony of Pavel Durov, co-founder of the Telegram social network. On election day, he claimed that before the vote, French officials, in particular, French Foreign Intelligence Director Nicolas Lerner, demanded that he delete accounts related to the Romanian far-right. Durov said he was ready to testify about this in any court.
Former Constitutional Court judge Augustin Zegrean explained in an interview with Romanian media that this would not be enough to cancel the elections. Simion will need to prove that foreign interference significantly affected the voting results. The judges decided that this was the case with Georgescu, who based his election campaign on campaigning on social media. Simion and his associates used the Internet less actively for propaganda purposes. In any case, it was far from their only tool in the struggle for the sympathy of voters. “I think this story will end in two or three days. I don’t think they (Simion’s team. – NG) will be able to prove that, say, 800 thousand votes were transferred from them to other persons,” Zegrean predicted in an interview with the digi24 portal.
Ekaterina Shumitskaya, a senior researcher at the Department of European Political Studies at IMEMO RAS, was also extremely skeptical about Simion’s chances of winning the Constitutional Court. “No more than 30% of voters usually vote for right-wing populists. The fact that more people voted for Simion is a consequence of the December cancellation of the first round of elections, which many Romanians believe was unfair and beyond the legal framework. Some of the voters voted for him out of spite, in protest, knowing full well that he had neither a team nor a program. Now Simion is using his last chance to influence the voting results. He understands that the wave that carried him to the second round of elections will not rise again,” the expert said.
Meanwhile, Simion has already announced mass actions. The main events are expected, probably, when the election results will be approved. “To all Romanians: urgently ask the Constitutional Court to cancel this farce. We will not give up and we will not betray! This is just the beginning of a great victory!” wrote Simion on the social network. However, according to Shumitskaya, an ultra-right revolution in Romania will not work. “I don’t expect Simion to be able to gather large protests. Everything that could have been was in January and February. It was the peak of the far–right’s rally activity,” she is sure.