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Romanian independent far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu poses for a portrait in Bucharest Romania, on Dec. 4, 2024.
Romania braces for presidential runoff
Romanians head to the polls Sunday for a presidential runoff that could lead to significant foreign policy changes for the country – and profound implications for the war in Ukraine.
Who’s running? Far-right candidate Calin Georgescu, a critic of both NATO and the EU, faces pro-European centrist Elena Lasconi. Georgescu, 62, is pro-Russia and emerged as a surprise front-runner in the first round of voting on Nov. 24 amid claims that Russia manipulated the election through paid TikTok influencers. Romania’s constitutional courtupheld the first round result this week, butnewly declassified Romanian intelligence documents suggest a certain “state actor” did its best to sway voters in Georgescu’s favor.
What’s at stake? Lasconi, 52, is framing the election as a choice between NATO and Russia. “We must choose between NATO protection and Putin’s war,” she warns. Georgescu declared that if he wins, he will oppose grain exports and military aid to Kyiv.
In Romania, the president has authority in matters ofnational security and foreign policy, and also gets to choose which party forms a government following Romania’s Dec. 1 parliamentary vote, which saw the right make significant gains. Georgescu has said he will pick a premier who shares his “Romania first” vision.
Opinion polls showGeorgescu leading with 60% of decided voters, though 40% of voters remain undecided, and the outcome could hinge on voter turnout.
Supporters of the radical right Alliance for Uniting Romanians wave Romanian flags following the first exit polls, at the party’s campaign headquarters, on the day of the parliamentary election, in Bucharest, Romania, on Dec. 1, 2024.
Romania repels the right – for now
However, the country still needs to hold a crucial presidential runoff on Dec. 8 – following first-round results from Nov. 24. Afterthe surprise first-place finish of populist candidate Calin Georgescu – an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin – Romania’s Constitutional Court ordered a recount amid accusations of electoral interference by Moscow andTikTok, throwing the election in doubt.
On Monday, however, the court unanimously upheld the first-round result. Georgescu now faces center-right contender Elena Lasconi. If he wins, it could strain relations with Brussels and weaken support for Ukraine – which Georgescu has called “an invented state” – while a Lasconi win would reinforce Romania’s pro-EU position. While the prime minister is the head of government,the president has key decision-making powers in national security and foreign policy matters and nominates prime ministerial appointments, with the power to dissolve parliament if their choices are twice rejected.Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Moldova's President Maia Sandu and President of the European Council Charles Michel attend a joint press conference, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine November 21, 2023.
Europe flirts with the East but won’t yet commit
The European Union has expanded to the East in recent years, but some would-be members remain in line to join the club.
On Tuesday, Ukraine and Moldova finally began talks to join the European Union after applying for membership within weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. (Ironically, it was Ukrainian protests over their president’s failure to sign a trade agreement with Europe that triggered the uprising that led Vladimir Putin to invade Crimea in 2014.)
Eager to encourage them, the EU has “fast-tracked” their processes, but aligning with the union’s dozens of policy requirements takes time. (Just ask Turkey, now entering its 20th year of talks.) Ukraine must also contend with efforts by Hungary’s government, Russia’s best European friend, to block Kyiv’s bid to join both the EU and NATO.
But the EU isn’t the only club open for new memberships. The eurozone, a monetary union comprised of 20 member states, told EU members Bulgaria and Romania they haven’t yet cleared the hurdles needed to adopt the euro. Bulgaria is close; of all the needed economic criteria, its high inflation is the only remaining barrier to entry. Romania must do much more to tame inflation, bribery, money laundering, and Russian influence on its policymaking.
Protest rally against COVID-19 vaccinations on 30 August 2021 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The world’s worst COVID outbreak (for now)
Right now, only one region of the world is reporting an increase in new daily COVID cases. Here's a hint: it's one of the places where vaccines are, for the most part, easiest to get.
It's Europe. According to the World Health Organization, the region last week notched a 7 percent uptick in new daily infections, the third week in a row that infections rose there.
Much of that comes from Central and Eastern Europe, which is currently mired in its worst COVID outbreak to date. Home to just four percent of the world's population, the former Eastern Bloc is now racking up 20 percent of all new cases each day.
Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria have in the past three days all reported their highest daily numbers of infections and deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Romania, where funeral parlors are now running out of coffins, leads the world with 22 daily COVID deaths per million people, followed closely by neighboring Bulgaria and eleven other Eastern European countries in a row.
Governments in the region, once hailed for their early action to "flatten the curve," are yet again imposing fresh restrictions on businesses, schools, and entertainment venues. Latvia recently went back to an almost full lockdown. Russia has ordered most businesses and schools to close for a full week beginning October 30, with some regions of the country starting already.
Part of the story is that vaccination rates throughout the region are still low. While three-quarters of all EU adults are fully vaccinated, those numbers fall off a cliff as you move eastward. In Romania it's barely 36 percent, while Bulgaria's mark is still below 25 percent. In Russia, which developed one of the earliest COVID vaccines, Sputnik V, just 32 percent of the population has been fully immunized. In Ukraine, it's 16 percent.
And it's not because there aren't enough jabs in stock. Despite early hiccups with securing vaccines, the EU now has more than it needs. Russia now makes its own supply in large quantities. Ukraine is a partial exception here, as the country's fractious politics have hampered its ability to buy and distribute shots.
But the region's problem isn't supply, it's demand — or, more specifically, it's vaccine hesitancy.
EU surveys find that rates of vaccine hesitancy are much higher in Eastern Europe. A recent EU poll found that just 31 percent of Bulgarians were keen to get the shot, and fewer than half of Slovaks, Croatians, and Latvians were with them. Other countries like Romania are in the 50s, but that's far off the overall EU mark of 59 percent, or the Western European countries which are almost all above 70. Surveyed separately, Russia had one of the highest rates of vaccine skepticism in the world, as does Ukraine.
Why is this happening? Not coincidentally, public trust in government is also markedly lower in Eastern Europe, where democracies are in general younger and less well established, than in Western Europe.
It's hard to draw a direct link between trust in government and willingness to take a vaccine — but in countries where people generally don't believe what their governments tell them, it's harder for those governments to convince people that vaccines are safe and important.
Moreover, political turmoil in some of the worst-hit places isn't helping: Romania's government collapsed after a no-confidence vote earlier this month, and Bulgaria is heading next month into its third election of the year, in a vote where new coronavirus restrictions are shaping up to be a salient issue.
Upshot: Unlike in earlier waves of the pandemic, most of Eastern Europe has the tools to grapple more successfully with COVID-19. But political bickering, weak trust in government, and high skepticism about the jabs are proving to be an endemic condition of their own.