Romanian authorities are facing intense pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration to ensure Calin Georgescu is allowed to run in the May presidential election, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
According to Bloomberg, US officials have focused almost exclusively on the vote in private meetings with Romanian counterparts in recent days. They have warned Romanians not to block the campaign of Mr Calin Georgescu, a Trump supporter who has denounced NATO and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to people familiar with the discussions who declined to be identified.
Romania’s political crisis was put under the spotlight when Vice-President J.D. Vance used a keynote address in Munich last week to blast Bucharest’s decision in December to scrap a presidential vote after security officials determined that Russian interference had helped propel Mr. Georgescu to an unexpected first-round victory on Nov 24.
Officials in Bucharest were stunned by Mr Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Feb 14, in which he condemned European leaders for marginalizing right-wing groups, and have been bewildered by the US insistence regarding Mr Georgescu, one official told Bloomberg.
Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu responded to the report on Wednesday saying that in his bi-lateral conversations with U.S. administration officials “there was no kind of discussion or intervention about a candidate or the electoral process in Romania.”
The fallout over Mr Georgescu’s improbable victory and the Constitutional Court decision to invalidate the election has become a rallying point for the global far-right. As Romanian authorities prepare for a rerun of the election in May, the vice-president slammed the ruling and said Bucharest had been pressured by its European allies to suppress a surge of populist figures.
Mr Georgescu, a former agricultural engineer, had been polling in the single digits until a social media campaign that featured TikTok videos propelled him to a stunning first-round victory in November.
But the result was scrapped after the court decision, which cited findings that his digital campaign was illegally aided by a ‘foreign state actor’ later identified as Russia.
