Since his election as president in Romania’s May 2025 re-run, Nicușor Dan has yet to fulfil a key campaign promise: releasing a detailed report explaining why the Constitutional Court cancelled the 2024 presidential race after far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round with nearly 23 per cent of the vote.

The Court justified its unprecedented intervention on the basis of intelligence assessments alleging a coordinated foreign interference operation. According to those evaluations, the campaign involved illicit financing, online manipulation, and Russian-linked networks that artificially boosted Georgescu’s visibility on platforms such as TikTok.

Dan repeatedly promised greater transparency on the matter. He initially suggested the report would likely be released by the end of January 2026. Officials within the presidential administration later shifted the expected release date to the end of April. However, no report was published. Then, the president said that it would come out later this year, without providing a clear timeline.

In the absence of the promised report, Dan has nevertheless made increasingly categorical public claims. He has stated that, “without a doubt”, Georgescu had benefited from “an infrastructure created by Russia”. Dan has also argued that Romania has been the target of Russian hybrid warfare for at least a decade, and suggested that around 90 per cent of the information gathered by state authorities could eventually be disclosed publicly.

Dan may be right. The interference may have been real, serious, and well-documented. Still, there remains a consequential question that no authority has publicly addressed: Was annulling the election a proportionate response? Did the alleged Russian campaign decisively distort the result, or did nearly a quarter of Romanian voters choose Georgescu for reasons of their own?

The legitimacy of the annulment ultimately depends not only on what happened, but on whether what happened justified one of the most extraordinary interventions possible in a democratic process. And even proving proportionality may not be enough in a country where trust in institutions has been eroding long before 2024, and where, for many, the verdict on that question has already been reached.

Uncharted territory

In March 2025 and in the wake of Romania’s decision to annul the elections, the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters, released a report examining when constitutional courts may invalidate elections. The Commission emphasised that annulment should be a measure of last resort, reserved for exceptional circumstances and supported by clear evidence. Under international democratic standards, the Commission stressed, results should only be annulled when irregularities can be shown to have directly affected the vote’s outcome.

That is a high bar, and the Commission noted it is especially difficult to meet when the alleged irregularities concern online campaigning rather than voting or ballot counting. It added that online political speech is generally protected by freedom of expression standards, making it “currently hard to see how the form and content of campaign messaging of candidates could amount to a violation of electoral law that may lead to the annulment of the elections”.

How feasible, then, is it to demonstrate that the irregularities in campaigning invoked by Romania’s Constitutional Court determined the voting results? Luciana Alexandra Ghica, a political science professor at the University of Bucharest, argues that the challenge is notable. Establishing such a causal link requires long-term technical data, sustained multidisciplinary cooperation, and, above all, political will.

“This might be the most difficult part,” she explained, adding that success depends on “the mechanisms needed to support such an effort.” In her assessment, Romania currently lacks much of that institutional capacity, with “too little coordination, too little recognition of experts, and too many appointments based on personal connections”.

What the evidence shows

In its decision to annul the election, Romania’s Constitutional Court concluded that the electoral process had been “compromised throughout its entire course” by irregularities that “distorted the free and fair nature of the vote,” linking it to a coordinated foreign interference operation.  Yet the ruling did not explain why annulment was a proportionate response, nor did it attempt to demonstrate how the alleged irregularities concretely affected the outcome.

Subsequent investigations have strengthened the case that Romania was indeed targeted by a sophisticated influence campaign. In September 2025, the General Prosecutor’s office published a report that Dan presented to European leaders the following month. The report exposes a coordinated Russian-linked operation of considerable scale. It states that companies including AdNow, MGID, Geozo, and AdsKeeper built a large online influence network using fake social media pages, AI-generated content, and native advertising, as well as cloned doppelgänger websites designed to mimic trusted news outlets and public institutions.

Neither the prosecutor’s report nor the Constitutional Court’s original ruling demonstrates how the interference altered voting patterns, or whether less intrusive measures could have been taken to address the situation.

More than 2,000 Facebook pages and coordinated Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, and clickbait ecosystems were allegedly activated to identify and grow receptive audiences by manipulating vulnerable individuals, spreading anti-government information, and eroding trust in institutions ahead of Romania’s 2024 elections.

Then, closer to polling day, the same pre-built ecosystem was reportedly “activated” or repurposed more explicitly for electoral influence, with content shifting toward coordinated messaging that supported Georgescu and amplified political disinformation during the campaign period.

These findings are substantial, but they do not resolve the question of proportionality. Neither the prosecutor’s report nor the Constitutional Court’s original ruling demonstrates how the interference altered voting patterns, whether Georgescu’s performance depended decisively on the operation, or whether less intrusive measures could have been taken to address the situation.

Lingering questions

Two considerations make the proportionality case harder to establish. One is the question of why voters supported Georgescu in the first place. While official explanations for the annulment have focused on foreign interference, analysts argue domestic political and social grievances also played a significant role in boosting his appeal. “External interference overlapped with internal anxiety, with Russia’s hybrid campaign exploiting a level of weakness within our own democracy,” stressed Ioan Stanomir, a political science professor at the University of Bucharest.

A key component of this anxiety was socio-economic dislocation. According to Stefan Hofmann, the head of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) in Romania, large segments of the electorate felt “isolated and shut out from opportunity”, particularly amid widening inequality. Georgescu was able to harness those frustrations by offering voters something more visceral than policy: a sense of belonging, identity, and recognition. “A discourse like Georgescu’s addresses the disorientation and fear people felt,” Hofmann said.

The second consideration is that this pattern was not unique to Georgescu.  Elena Lasconi, the runner-up of the first round of the 2024 election, also sat outside the mainstream political establishment and made the corruption and failures of the political class a key theme of her campaign.

That both frontrunners emerged as vehicles for anti-establishment sentiment points to a broader public dissatisfaction that predated the election and cannot easily be attributed to foreign influence alone. “When voters want to channel their frustration, to put it mildly, they turn to options outside the political mainstream,” Hofmann said.

The stronger the role played by genuine domestic grievances, the harder it becomes to demonstrate that foreign interference was a decisive causal factor in producing Georgescu’s success. Hofmann notes that Romanian authorities could have considered a more targeted measure, like disqualifying Georgescu, while allowing the second round to proceed. Such an approach would have addressed concerns surrounding him without invalidating the votes already cast by millions of Romanians.

Whether that or other alternatives would have been legally viable or politically preferable, remains open to debate.

The counter-narrative

In the absence of a fully consolidated public justification, the annulment has not settled into a single authoritative interpretation. Instead, it has become a contested political reference point, increasingly shaped outside formal institutional channels. Many Romanians doubted from the outset that the circumstances justified the Constitutional Court’s decision. An IRES poll conducted shortly after the annulment found that 62 per cent of respondents considered it a bad one.

Public trust in institutions has continued to decline since then. An INSCOP poll comparing July 2025 with January 2026 showed trust in the presidency falling from nearly 35 per cent to around 28 per cent, while trust in Parliament dropped from 14.5 per cent to just under 12 per cent.

At the same time, support for far-right parties and figures has grown. A January 2026 CURS poll found Georgescu to be the most trusted political figure in the country with an approval rating of 36 per cent. Following him were George Simion – another far-right figure who lost to Nicușor Dan in 2025 – at 32 per cent, and Dan at 31 per cent. Meanwhile, an INSCOP survey on parliamentary voting intention placed the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) – the party founded and chaired by Simion – at around 38 per cent, significantly ahead of any competitor.

For AUR and Georgescu, the annulment has become a central mobilising narrative, framed as evidence of systemic illegitimacy: the 2024 election was “stolen”, Georgescu is the rightful president, and all Romanian elections are vulnerable to manipulation. In response to Dan’s report presented to European leaders, AUR published its own assessment, describing the annulment as a “state coup” carried out through “unconstitutional means”.

In AUR’s framing, Russia’s intervention in the election was used as the pretext to justify the coup. The report concludes that Romania is “not a democracy”, and that “the coup has exposed the general vulnerability of state institutions and of the oligarchic system governing the country”. In November 2025, when speaking about municipal elections in Bucharest, Georgescu argued that “all these elections are a farce”.

In 2026, he once again claimed that the annulment was an act of “desperation” because the Romanian people were about to “take back their country”. He added that the Constitutional Court’s decision was conducted with “external colleagues, namely the European Union,” thus inverting the foreign interference narrative to implicate Brussels rather than Moscow.

According to Ghica, the narratives being pushed by Georgescu and his allies are unlikely to fade quickly. Voters who feel they were deprived of a rightful president do not simply absorb that grievance and move on: they carry it forward. What makes this particularly hard to reverse, Ghica argues, is that the audiences most exposed to these narratives are also the least equipped to scrutinise them: people with “limited digital and functional literacy, heavily reliant on social media, and affected by considerable social and economic inequalities.”

Voters who feel they were deprived of a rightful president do not simply absorb that grievance and move on: they carry it forward.

Dan’s quicksand

While the “stolen election” narrative has provided AUR and Georgescu with a powerful mobilising tool, it does not fully explain their sustained popularity. Anti-establishment sentiment has been further reinforced by a broader climate of political instability that Dan’s first year in office has done little to change.

Dan, a former mayor of Bucharest, came to office as an outsider candidate, promising reform and a break with established political practices. That positioning made him vulnerable to any perception of indecision or continuity with the system he had promised to change. His first year as president has supplied critics with considerable material.

The most significant test came in early May 2026, when a no-confidence motion brought down the government of prime minister Ilie Bolojan. The procedure was initiated by the Social Democrats and AUR over painful austerity measures and tax increases introduced to address Romania’s fiscal deficit, the largest in the EU at 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2024 and 7.9 per cent in 2025.

For the Social Democrats, this was also a political escape from the costs of staying in power as unpopular fiscal measures hit their voters and patronage networks, while AUR used the moment to amplify its anti-austerity, anti-establishment message.

Dan declined to publicly back Bolojan, arguing that his role was that of a mediator. Critics, however, say Dan’s position implicitly validated the legitimacy of the Social Democrats’ move. They are also openly questioning whether the president’s passivity in this and other matters can bring stability, or whether it surrenders control over key political outcomes to other forces, such as the Social Democrats.

Amid heightened political turmoil, the no-confidence motion passed.  Dan subsequently sought to reassure the public, insisting that Romania remained stable. But as weeks passed without the confirmation of a new government, his assurances rang increasingly hollow.

“President Dan is in a delicate situation,” stressed Professor Stanomir. “One year after his election, he is compelled to rebuild a parliamentary majority. Such a challenge is likely to affect the years of his mandate that lie ahead.”

The rule, not the exception

Romania has not been the only target of Russian electoral interference in the EU. Ahead of Poland’s 2025 presidential election, minister of digital affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski publicly warned of an “unprecedented” Russian attempt to influence the vote via cyberattacks, sabotage, and disinformation. Yet the elections proceeded.

In Croatia’s 2025 presidential election, researchers found that Russian-linked bots and disinformation campaigns favoured the anti-NATO candidate, Zoran Milanović, spreading pro-Kremlin narratives on social media platforms to sway public opinion.

The EU has begun responding. In December 2024, the Commission launched a formal investigation into TikTok under the Digital Services Act, following the release of Romanian intelligence reports suggesting the platform had been used to facilitate foreign interference.

In an email exchange, a Commission spokesperson confirmed to me that the proceedings remain ongoing. The outcome of this initiative could have lasting implications for the role of major tech platforms in electoral processes and, more broadly, for the influence of privately owned tech companies on democratic institutions. Nevertheless, the Commission has been careful to define the limits of its role. “The organisation and conduct of elections is a national competence,” the spokesperson said. “Elections have always been and will always remain in the hands of the citizens.”

That delineation matters. The EU can pressure platforms to “protect the integrity of elections through the Digital Services Act” and sanction individuals linked to disinformation campaigns. It can also support member states through bodies like the newly established European Centre for Democratic Resilience, which aims to help EU countries build their capacity to detect threats to democratic processes and strengthen resilience.

What the EU cannot do is answer the questions that Romania’s annulment continues to raise. Those questions remain Romania’s to resolve.

Can the loose ends be tied?

This is why the long-promised presidential report matters. Its most important task is not simply to establish what happened, but to explain why the response that followed was necessary and why less intrusive alternatives would have been insufficient to protect the integrity of the democratic process.

But even a report that does so convincingly may not be enough to reverse the continued decline in trust in institutions or the rising support for anti-establishment forces in Romania.

A detailed account might settle some of the concrete disputes that have festered since the annulment, like Georgescu’s claim that he is the rightful president. Rebuilding trust, however, will require more than evidence alone. “To get back some level of trust, people’s feelings have to be acknowledged and understood,” KAS’ Hofmann said, both in relation to the 2024 election and the broader dissatisfaction that preceded it. Romania’s traditional parties, he suggests, need to confront their own record more openly, even when doing so means acknowledging uncomfortable truths.

Ghica sees the structural obstacles as even more daunting. Trust in democratic processes and electoral integrity could be re-established, she argues, only through sustained, coordinated effort. “Time is not on our side in this hybrid war. The levels of social polarisation, digital and functional illiteracy, as well as economic inequality, which generates frustration toward others and toward authorities, remain very high.”