Calin Georgescu, a far-right populist candidate who won the first round of Romania’s canceled presidential election last year, was taken into custody for questioning by the country’s top prosecutors on Wednesday.
His communications team said on Facebook that Georgescu was stopped in traffic on his way to submit his new candidacy for the presidency when he was “taken in for questioning at the General Prosecutor’s Office.”
The country’s prosecutors said Wednesday that authorities raided 47 addresses of people and associations connected to Georgescu, Reuters reported. Prosecutors said the allegations against them included “false statements regarding the sources of financing” of an electoral campaign, illegal possession of weapons and initiating or establishing an organization “with a fascist, racist or xenophobic” character. Authorities searched the home of Georgescu’s campaign manager earlier this month.
Georgescu said on Facebook that authorities “are looking to invent evidence to justify the theft of the elections and to do anything to block my new candidacy for the presidency.” He called on supporters to attend a protest on Saturday in Bucharest.
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Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said on X, “The judiciary is independent & the law must be applied regardless of persons.”
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire involved with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, weighed in.
“They just arrested the person who won the most votes in the Romanian presidential election. This is messed up,” Musk wrote.
Musk has previously criticized Romanian top court chief, Judge Marian Enache – who voted to annul the election’s first round – as a “tyrant.”
Romania’s Constitutional Court made the unprecedented move to annul the election two days ahead of the Dec. 8 runoff after Georgescu’s first-round win. He had polled in single digits and declared zero campaign spending, according to The Associated Press. Allegations of Russian interference and electoral violations quickly emerged. After the election cancelation, prosecutors launched an investigation into alleged campaign funding fraud, as well as alleged antisemitism and hate speech.
The Trump administration has criticized Romania for canceling last year’s presidential election, with Vice President JD Vance alleging that the court’s ruling was based on “flimsy suspicions” and “enormous pressure” from Romania’s neighbors.
At the Munich Security Conference, Vance said the threat he worried about the most regarding Europe was not Russia, China or another external factor.
“What I worry about is the threat from within – the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America,” Vance said. “Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.”
“Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears,” he said. “For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.”
Vance said in December, “Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.”
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“The argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d asked my European friends to have some perspective,” Vance said. “You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
Vance warned European leaders that they cannot win a “democratic mandate” by “censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” nor by “disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.”
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance said.
Vance further criticized Romania’s top court at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend.
“You don’t have shared values if you cancel elections because you don’t like the result – and that happened in Romania – if you’re so afraid of your own people that you silence them and shut them up,” Vance said. “So let’s have shared values. Let’s defend democracy. Let’s have free expression, not just in the United States, but all over the Western world. That is the path to strong alliances in Europe.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bucharest on Saturday to support Georgescu, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and argued the election was “canceled illegally and unconstitutionally.”
The first round of the rerun of the election is scheduled for May 4. If no candidate gets more than 50% of ballots, a runoff will follow on May 18. It is not clear whether Georgescu will be able to participate in the vote.
Georgescu, a staunch critic of NATO and Western support for Ukraine, has sparked controversy in the past for describing Romanian fascist and nationalist leaders from the 1930s and 1940s as national heroes, according to the AP.
He has also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past as “a man who loves his country,” and has called Ukraine “an invented state.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
