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Romania’s top court on Friday overturned the results of the first round of presidential elections and called for a repeat, days after declassified Romanian security documents alleged Russian interference promoting a far-right external candidate.
The Constitutional Court issued a unanimous decision to nullify the entire electoral process of the presidential election, which was held at the end of last month, and ordered the government to assign a new date for the election.
The decision is final and generally binding, the court said in its statement, and will cancel a runoff that was expected to take place on Sunday.
The unprecedented move by the Constitutional Court follows alarm in Romania and among its NATO allies and European Union members over a series of intelligence reports that attributed the shock success of the relatively unknown candidate Călin Georgescu to a Russian operation that, in part, exploited social networks. , paid influencers and carried out cyber attacks to influence election results.
The Biden administration and lawmakers in Congress had raised concern on the findings of Romanian intelligence.
Georgescu, who had declared zero campaign expenses, had catapulted from obscurity to win the first round of presidential voting on November 24. He had to face the reformist Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union Party, who came second. .
Georgescu, while claiming he is not pro-russianin the past he has called Russian President Vladimir Putin a patriot for his country, expressed skepticism towards NATO and called Ukraine an invented state.
Romania, a NATO ally bordering Ukraine and the Black Sea, is a key supporter of Kiev in its nearly three-year defensive war against Russia’s full-scale invasion. Romania hosts thousands of US troops at an air base in the southeast of the country on the Black Sea and has plans to develop as the largest NATO base in Europe.
