Bucharest mayor and presidential candidate Nicusor Dan has argued that the US administration’s bias towards Calin Georgescu, the far-right candidate who won the first round of the cancelled 2024 presidential election, is a result of insufficient explanations provided by the Romanian authorities.

US Vice President JD Vance has repeatedly criticised the cancellation of the elections in Romania, and American billionaire Elon Musk frequently posts on X, the social network he owns, about the cancellation of the election and the judges involved in the process, and reposts messages by Georgescu.

While Georgescu has repeatedly expressed his point of view in the United States, the Romanian state did not provide sufficient explanations for the decision to cancel the 2024 election, Dan argued.

“It is our [Romania’s] duty, and I hope this will be done before the repeated elections, to clarify the annulment of the elections,” Dan said quoted by Digi24 TV station.

Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the presidential elections on December 6 and decided to repeat the process – which was received with relief by part of the electorate that feared a win by Georgescu over his second-round rival, reformist candidate Elena Lasconi. The annulment was received with irritation by Georgescu and Lasconi. 

The annulment decision was officially based on classified reports from the intelligence services about the interference of “statal and non-statal entities”. However, the reports were never aggregated into a concise public report by the Romanian authorities.

The Constitutional Court’s reaction was in broader terms prompted by Georgescui’s statistically improbable first round win. 

The ruling coalition formed by Social Democratic Party (PSD) and National Liberal Party (PNL) was accused of having ordered the annulment because their candidates failed to make it to the second round. There is speculation that both the PSD and the PNL had hidden agendas involving support for Georgescu and other far-right candidates. The involvement, or at least a deliberate lack of action, by the intelligence services was also suspected. 

However, this does not mean that serious reasons did not exist for the annulment. Independent investigations and a report from the French government’s body dealing with digital disinformation revealed massive hybrid campaigns in favour of Georgescu.

French President Emmanuel Macron concluded, during a question and answer session with social media users on the situation in Ukraine, that Russia manipulated elections in Romania.