One year after the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) annulled the presidential elections and decided a complete rerun, amid a flawed electoral process backed by evidence in a declassified report sent by intelligence services to the state defence council CSAT, president Nicusor Dan announced a detailed report on the developments would be released within two to three months. The promise follows the president's earlier pledge to issue such a report.

"The Romanian state must explain in as much detail as possible the moment of the cancellation of the elections. I said that, within two to three months, we will do this," the president said, answering a question about the timetable for the publication of the report, as reported by Bursa.ro.

President Dan's statements in a Le Monde interview are, however, not boding well for the content of the report.

"Romanian intelligence services can recognise signs of Russian interference, but it is much more difficult to prove it. This is about counterintelligence. Sometimes this process can take between three and five years," president Dan said.

The disclosure of the circumstances leading to the cancellation of presidential elections in Romania is reportedly complicated (delayed/prevented) by alleged involvement of the senior ruling party at that moment, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) with the participation of factions within the intelligence services and former officers, in the consolidation of isolationist party AUR as a potential threat to the state's stability supposedly backed by Russia, to encourage voters choose a more reasonable option of the PSD-PNL coalition (and its presidential candidates). Leading PSD politicians reportedly admitted that the party's regional organisations extended votes for AUR candidate George Simion.

However, available evidence but no official reports indicate that Russia-backed entities, with the participation of, again, active or retired Romanian intelligence officers, have carried out a well-prepared operation aimed at propelling presidential candidate Calin Georgescu as an alternative to the corrupt PSD-PNL ruling coalition. 

Georgescu won the first round of the presidential elections in November 2024, after a complex operation that allegedly took years, during which the local electorate, vulnerable to conspiracism due to precarious education, was targeted and eventually convinced to vote for Georgescu.

President Nicusor Dan argued that the loss of trust in the authorities is not determined exclusively by the episode of the annulment of the election. 

"We must look at corruption, at the fact that we fail to digitise, at the way in which the civil servant interacts with the citizen. All these are reasons why people, rightly, some of them, no longer have trust," Nicusor Dan pointed out.

iulian@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Inquam Photos/George Calin)