Romania’s top court on Friday wiped out results from the first round of presidential elections and called for a re-run, days after declassified Romanian security documents alleged Russian interference that promoted a far-right outsider candidate.
The Constitutional Court issued a unanimous decision to annul the entire electoral process of the presidential election, which took place late last month, and charged the government with assigning a new date of elections.
The decision is final and generally binding, the court said in its release, and will cancel a run-off vote that was expected to take place on Sunday.
The unprecedented move by the Constitutional Court follows alarm in Romania and among its NATO allies and European Union members over a series of intelligence reports that credited the shock success of the relatively unknown candidate Călin Georgescu to a Russian operation that, in part, exploited social media, paid influencers and carried out cyber attacks to influence the election results.
The Biden administration and lawmakers in Congress had raised concern over the Romanian intelligence findings.
Georgescu, who had reportedly declared zero campaign spending, had catapulted from obscurity to win the first round of the presidential vote on Nov. 24. He was set to face off against the reformist Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union Party, who came in second.
Georgescu, while claiming he is not pro-Russian, has in the past called Russian President Vladimir Putin a patriot for his country, expressed skepticism toward NATO and called Ukraine an invented state.
Romania, a NATO ally that borders Ukraine and the Black Sea, is a key supporter for Kyiv in its nearly three-year defensive war against Russia’s full-scale invasion. Romania hosts thousands of U.S. troops on an airbase in the southeast of the country, on the Black Sea, and has plans to develop it as the largest NATO base in Europe.
