Information has allegedly emerged that the Biden administration tried to manipulate the elections in Romania against Călin Georgescu, the independent presidential candidate who won Romania’s presidential election in the first round.
President Donald Trump’s special representative for foreign policy, Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun that the Biden administration was trying to help tip the balance against a “conservative” candidate in the recent Romanian elections. He said that it was not Russia who was involved in manipulating the election, as was claimed.
According to Grenell, this information came to light while investigating Biden’s foreign diplomatic actions. However, Grenell did not disclose much regarding specific actions from Biden or whether the Trump administration is willing to reveal them.
Hungarian news outlet Mandiner stated that in early February, Grenell himself testified about this on X, saying that “USAID programs were weaponized against people and politicians who were not woke enough” and that “the Biden administration spent American taxpayer money to support left-wing programs and candidates. They targeted conservatives around the world. Romania is the latest example.”
Notably, Georgescu won the first round of the presidential election in Romania, only for the Romanian Constitutional Court to later cancel the entire election when polling showed that he was set to win the second round. Georgescu is known for his conservative beliefs and opposition to the war in Ukraine, raising worries in the EU that he would turn the country away from NATO.
Even pro-Ukraine politicians found the court’s decision to cancel elections highly undemocratic and reeked of outside interference, possibly from the EU or even the CIA. Romania’s top court, with very little evidence, simply claimed that Russia supported his account on TikTok, and therefore the entire election process should be canceled, amounting to an unprecedented cancellation of democratic elections.
Earlier this month, Polish President Andrzej Duda questioned whether democratic elections can still be genuinely free if only candidates favored by the EU are able to win. “Is it so that today elections in individual countries — democratic ones, it would seem — can only be won by those who are accepted in Brussels? I have such an impression, and I don’t like it very much,” he remarked, expressing skepticism over the European Commission’s involvement in both Polish and Romanian affairs.
While many conservatives have looked at Georgescu’s election in a positive light, Hungary takes a more muted approach. Hungarian newspaper Mandiner writes; “it is important to point out that, despite Georgescu’s vain attempt to paint himself as a right-wing, conservative, sovereignist politician, he has actually deservedly been the target of the wet blanket that the left-liberal parties… Being truly nationalist, neo-fascist and anti-minority (specifically: Hungarianophobic), it is no coincidence that the Hungarian party in Romania is wary of this figure, even if the results of the presidential election were probably annulled by dishonest means.”
