The United States sent a team of election observers to Romania on Friday ahead of a presidential election rerun, following criticism in Washington over the decision to cancel the initial 2024 ballot.
DAILY POST reports that Romania, a NATO and EU member, has become the focal point of a dispute between Europe and the administration of US President Donald Trump concerning the nature of democracy. This stems from the decision in December to cancel an ongoing presidential vote amid suspicions of Russian interference, which Moscow denied.
According to US Vice President JD Vance, Romania’s annulment of the election after a far-right, pro-Russian candidate surged from relative obscurity to take the lead in the first round, based on what he described as “flimsy evidence,”; signalled that Bucharest did not share American values.
The first round of the election rerun will take place on Sunday, with a runoff vote scheduled for May 18 if no candidate secures more than 50 per cent of the vote.
“We’ll spend some time with the government discussing how the elections are conducted and then on Sunday, we’ll actually go out to polling locations, and we’ll watch people vote. As Vice President Vance has said, there are some questionable things that have happened but at the end of the day, it’s important to root out what these foreign influences are, because the worst thing that can happen for democracies is for outside influences to drown out the voice of the people,”; James E. Trainor III, Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission of the United States, told reporters in Bucharest.
A Romanian government spokesperson had not commented at the time of filing this report.
The cancellation of the election reportedly undermined the already fragile trust many Romanians had in state institutions.
Recall that in the first round of the cancelled vote on November 24, far-right candidate Calin Georgescu, who had been polling in single digits before the ballot, rose to first place amid an explosion of content on TikTok that favoured him.
A court has since barred Georgescu from standing in the rerun, and now George Simion, leader of the radical-right Alliance for Uniting Romanians, AUR, is leading in opinion polls.
Bucharest has tightened campaign rules to combat online disinformation, and on Friday, the country’s telecommunications regulator ANCOM revealed that it had uncovered a network of ‘Doppelganger’ sites imitating government institutions and media outlets, designed to spread misinformation.
