JD Vance Owes Romania an Apology

When JD Vance blasted Europe for abandoning democracy in February, he singled out Romania over its unprecedented decision to annul a first-round presidential vote that a candidate from the far-right had come from nowhere to win. The US vice president owes this country an apology.

I say that despite agreeing at the time with two points Vance made in his blistering address to Germany’s annual Munich Security Conference. These were that declassified intelligence documents used to justify voiding Romania’s Nov. 24 vote fell short of proof beyond reasonable doubt and that Romanian democracy must be weak if it can be so easily swayed.

There’s no doubt many Romanian voters wanted an outsider to vote for — any outsider — so they could protest a political class they saw as corrupt. In a field of 14, Calin Georgescu was among several candidates who fit that bill, but we have a lot more information today on what drove him rather than others to 23% of the vote on election day, surging from opinion poll ratings of around 1% just a month before.

Mircea Toma, a member of the National Audiovisual Council of Romania, is disarmingly frank about the regulator’s failure to detect what was happening, let alone prevent it. With desktop computers from 2006, no expertise in the distribution systems of networks such as TikTok and few legal tools to use in a still-unregulated digital realm, he could see only the extraordinary increase in social media activity that drove an obscure Romanian politician’s campaign to one of the top-trending TikTok topics in the world.