How did the anti-Western candidate Călin Georgescu get to the 1st place in the presidential election? There are many causes. I will now refer to one related to national security and Romania's pro-west option, inscribed in the Constitution. There are four large areas infested with an anti-Western ideology, and we have signals that this is where Georgescu got his votes, money, and influence: the army, the secret services, the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Romanian Academy.
Attention, we are not talking about the reorientation of the institutions as a whole, but of larger or smaller factions that, for various reasons, embraced the speech of Georgescu, Simion or Șoșoacă.
Army. We are talking about an institution whose leadership has consistently refused to hand over a Patriot battery to Ukraine, to the amazement of other institutions in the state. The anti-Western current is strongly spread in its educational institutions – universities and the National Defense College, as demonstrated by G4Media in several investigations.
G4Media information shows that reservists from MApN and other law enforcement institutions were extremely active in supporting Călin Georgescu, both on the ground and online.
The frustration of the military or reservists with what they perceive as unfair treatment by the state has been constantly speculated by Georgescu. He introduced himself as an officer's son, who understands the needs and frustrations of the military, and addressed several professionally filmed messages to them.
Moreover, we have indications that several army generals gravitate around his association, and a former officer of the General Directorate of Army Intelligence (the dreaded DGIA) was with him at least until 2022 as his right-hand man at the Ancestral Earth association.
Romanian Orthodox Church. We have confirmation from both the country and the diaspora that hundreds of Orthodox priests were electoral agents for Călin Georgescu in these elections. Seduced by the sovereignist, pro-religion, anti-Western discourse (what an irony for Romanian priests serving abroad), they played a role in propelling Călin Georgescu.
The behavior of the priests is in contradiction with the pro-European orientation of Patriarch Daniel, but perfectly congruent with the ideology of the majority of the Holy Synod.
Romanian Academy. The institution led by the nationalist professor Ioan-Aurel Pop is in a continuous equivocation regarding Romania's orientation. Instead of being at the intellectual vanguard of the country, the Academy has shadowed increasingly dark and anti-Western figures through its research institutes.
Moreover, this year began a series of conferences under the pompous title “The Romanian National Project in the Horizon of the 21st Century”. Through this project, the Romanian Academy “reevaluates” – in fact, it directly calls into question the thesis of synchronization between Romania and the West, Eugen Lovinescu's concept on which Romania's entry into the EU and NATO is based.
The most recent example of the questioning of Romania's European path by the people of the Academy took place in mid-November, at a conference entitled “Doctrines of development of Romania” organized by the Institute of Sociology, the Institute of Legal Research and the European Studies Center in Ethnic Problems and at which a candidate of the extremist AUR party spoke, a sociologist who wrote the afterword to Dughin's book and a researcher who claims that “the Americans started the war in Europe”. Full list of speakers: Ilie Bădescu, Dragoș Paul Aligica, Radu Baltasiu, Victor Rizescu, Gelu Sabău, Tudor Avrigeanu, Ovidiana Bulumac, Marcela Țușcă, George Damian, Lucian Dumitrescu, Cristi Pantelimon.
The secret services. Under their eyes, the Călin Georgescu phenomenon developed unhindered. As I wrote before, I don't know if we are talking about the complicity of the services, the fact that they did not see the phenomenon or did not act. But we know that in recent history there have been cases of people helped by some secret service factions to grow and who then got out of control – see the case of Sebastian Ghiță.
Their dangerous play with dark characters opened a Pandora's box from which the ghosts of nationalism, extremism and anti-Westernism emerged: George Simion, Diana Șoșoacă, Călin Georgescu. It's just that some didn't want to go back into the order box, on the contrary. They began to take on a life of their own, as happens with any master puppeteer who gets tangled up in strings.
We also know that the constant expansion of the national security sphere, as expert Marius Ghincea showed, may have led to the dilution of the reaction capacity of the services. Ghincea wrote in October 2024 that “In 2015 the fields of public policy included in “national security” exploded from the four traditional fields, related to defense and public safety, to nine fields. The next version of the national defense strategy adopted in 2020 further increased the number of domains included under the already cramped umbrella of “national security”, reaching 18 domains of public policy.
All these questionable behaviors described above happen in institutions financed with money from the budget. It is time for the future CSAT, the new parliament and the new government to decide what is the logic of financing behaviors that violate the Constitution itself, in which “Euro-Atlantic integration” is an independent chapter.
PS: There is a great temptation to see Russian or Chinese influences behind Costin Georges. We don't have proof yet, but I'm convinced that either country tried to somehow buy into his anti-Western, conspiratorial speech.
