Right-wing politicians are being shut out of Government across Europe, says Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator, as so-called ‘progressive’ elites in politics and the judiciary effectively rig what are supposed to be democratic elections. Here’s an excerpt.
Alarm grew as opinion polls indicated [Calin] Georgescu would win the second round [of Romania’s Presidential election]. Something had to be done, and it was. A couple of days before the decisive vote, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round because of alleged Russian interference. The court had perused some declassified intelligence documents that claimed 800 TikTok accounts had been activated shortly before polls opened. There was no evidence of voting irregularities in the election itself but the fact Russia had been active on social media was enough for the court to intervene.
At the time, Georgescu likened himself to Donald Trump: an anti-system candidate who was the target of Establishment ‘lawfare’. The Trump administration has subsequently cited Georgescu as an example of the EU’s creeping illiberalism.
In a speech at last month’s Munich Security Conference, Vice-President J.D. Vance expressed his astonishment “that a former European Commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian Government had just annulled an entire election… these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears”.
The Commissioner in question was Frenchman Thierry Breton, who in a television interview in January boasted that “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary”. He was referring to the upcoming German election and the possibility that the Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) might win.
As it turned out, simply annulling Romania’s Presidential election didn’t derail the Georgescu bandwagon. Quite the opposite. He picked up momentum and polls showed that he would romp to victory in May’s re-run election. As I predicted in January, Romania’s elite wouldn’t allow this to happen.
And they haven’t. At the end of February, Georgescu was detained by police as he drove through Bucharest to file his candidacy in the election. He was indicted on six counts, among them false funding sources and false information in his last campaign. He was also barred from leaving the country and creating any new social media accounts.
Now he is barred from standing for President, a decision he has called a “direct blow to the heart of democracy worldwide”.
It’s part of a disturbing illiberal pattern, says Gavin. In Germany, the AfD came second on 20% of the vote but has been shut out of Government in favour of the Left-wing Social Democrats, despite having had their worst performance since 1945. In Austria, the anti-immigration Freedom Party won the election last October but still finds itself shunned by the other parties who have colluded to keep it side-lined.
And in France on March 31st a court will rule whether Marine Le Pen will be barred from office for five years over a charge of “misusing EU funds”.
This doesn’t end well. The issues that these politicians represent – and simmering public anger about them – obviously aren’t going away, least of all while Left-wing parties cling to power despite losing elections and refuse to address them.
Worth reading in full.
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Liberal governments are afraid they will lose their power to the “populists”.
They are called “populist” because they have popular policies.
Liberals don’t like freedom of choice or freedom of speech.
The sooner we have a “populist” government in the UK the better.
Populists have policies that are popular with the people. Wouldn’t it be nice if “liberals” had policies based on the concept of individual freedom (of thought and speech in particular)?
God forbid that governments actually do things that are popular. That would be a direct threat to democracy.
No wonder all the left-leaning wokerati in the UK want us to rejoin the EU.
What is happening in Romania might end up happening elsewhere in Europe but for now the “problem” faced by “right wing” parties in other parts of Europe is that not enough people are voting for them, for various reasons.
There’s a multi-level strategy at work here: This first line of attack is always against the electorate. Fool or coax them into voting against their own best interest by state propaganda and threats.
If this fails – and it’s more likely to fail in states where people can actually vote for something other than parties, eg, heads of government – the next level is to get rid of election results considered inconvenient. A practical example of that from Germany would be Bodo Ramelow (SED/ PDS/ Die Linke) remaining first minister of Thuringia despite the Thuringian parliament had elected another candidate in the absolutely proper way. But a decisive part of this vote had come from the AfD and hence, the newly elected first minister was ‘convinced’ to stand down immediately after his inaugural address and new elections were held with the other parties who had voted in favour of the defenestrated first minister abstaining. The annulled Romanian elections would be another example.
Lastly, we get to the third level: If neither propaganda nor cancelling election results worked, the offending politicians are simply arrested using a more-or-less good pretext (there are certainly irregularities during election campaigns on all sides) and thus prevented from standing as candidates. Happened in Romania, is in the process in France and at least planned for in Germany, with German celebrities calling for the AfD the be banned from standing in election because “In my opinions, it’s just not a real party!” (paraphrase of a quote from a famous German football player aka woke establishment whore from a few weeks ago).
Indeed. It would be nice to see the establishment forced into more and more extreme action, which would hopefully expose them for the anti-democrats they are.
Do those rape allegations hold any weight against Trump….I have heard claims and counter claims but with everything happening so fast get lost in the information. I could see how easy it could be to make these accusations where consensual sex happened then years later, got at as a tool to get him off the ballot paper.
They tried a few things
The woman that accused him wrote rape fantasies, but Trump was never allowed to bring that little fact up in his defense. Trump’s entire trial was set up for his conviction. Then he when he questioned the accuser in public, he was sued for defamation. The whole trial was a set up. Everyone that voted for Trump knew that.
And then what? God will strike them down with a thunderbolt from the sky?
These people aren’t democrats, they just like posing as such, and our party, that is, special interest group controlled republics are not democracies. As in all republics¹, the mass of the governed have some very limited political input² and that’s tolerated for as long as it produces outcomes within the range of what’s considered acceptable. When it doesn’t, it’s sidelined to ‘protect democracies’ from unwise voter decisions. This phrase really says it all on its own. A democracy can never be protected from the demos, that’s a contradictio in adiectio³. If something like this is even possible, the demos obviously doesn’t rule.
¹ From the Latin res publica — public affairs. Obviously not really a translation as the same Latin word appears in both but even in 2025 AD, the Roman Empire still shapes our everyday lives.
² Very much limited input as they may neither select candidates for public offices nor have any direct input on policy. Typically, the may just vote in favour of a cooked list of decision maker candidates who made some non-binding noises about policies they plan to implement.
³ Literally, contradiction in apposition, more modern phrase contradiction in terms.
I seem unable to believe in God.
“Then what?” Then more people will wake up. Maybe.
They’ll then be put to sleep to protect democracy or something like that.
I realize that’s a bit gross as a statement but I don’t think the 2020 – 2023 period of redefining people as pathogens who have to be dealt with accordingly was an accident. I’m free to write this because nobody important believes it matters.
I tend to agree it wasn’t an accident. I think they overreached though. I console myself with the thought that those responsible will bring downfall upon themselves through arrogance.
“Establishment forced into more extreme action”. Yes that would be my guess for what what will happen, but it will just enrage the populous even more. Eventually something will have to give. Maybe more Exits,or even the end of the EU itself.
Very few people I know are enraged. People are so enraged in the UK that 80% of those who voted supported left wing Uniparty candidates.
We already know they are anti-democratic. We’ve known for a long time.
They did in Romania! Looks like they will stop at nothing where only brute force of numbers will dislodge the little tyrants.
Some people think the 2020 US Presidential Election result was illegal tampered with.
Yes didn’t the Dems get around 20M extra votes in 2020, interesting. It hasn’t been properly investigated since the Supreme Court refused to look into it. There were very suspicious ballet dumps going on at the time. I guess the margin for a ‘steal’ was harder because of the large turnout for Trump.
There is a mountain of evidence the DemoTwats stole the 2020 presidential election and that they also interfered with the 2022 midterms when it was almost certain to be a swing to the Republicans. While the 2024 election was too big to steal they were at work to keep the Senate and House majorities low and at risk from the leftie RINO scum. Because judges, attorneys general and secretaries of state are political appointees, they worked hard to stop electoral fraud cases being heard in court. And of course some of these are RINOs so did the DemoTwats work for them.
You are right. I was thinking just the same myself.
Nanny knows best. Inside every progressive is an illiberal control freak itching to get out.
Meanwhile this side of the Channel, Reform practices scoring own goals.
The Elites gain power and eventually gain absolute power. But as the aphorism asserts absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In the Western world the Liberal Elites have ruled for decades and are now perhaps into the ‘corrupts absolutely’ phase which apparently includes undemocratic behaviour. This makes the non-Liberals appear attractive.
““We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary”.
So they are not even hiding it now…..Pull back the curtain to a brick wall!
Here is Mark Steyn on the same story, with a bit of Farage scandal thrown in’
https://www.steynonline.com/15101/welcome-to-post-democracy
I’m sorry, what? Creeping?
I don’t know what it is, whether it’s not fully grasping what is going on, or trying not to be alarmist but what has happened in Romania is not “creeping illiberalism”. It’s an outrageous assault on western democracy.
This gentle approach to describing what we are experiencing isn’t helpful. It allows people who are in their comfortable little lives and don’t want to kick up a fuss in the hope that things more or less stay the same, claim it’s not that big of a deal and carry on in their illusion that they live in a “liberal democracy”.
If we fail to call a spade a spade, we’re in real trouble.
Throwing people in jail for online posts is not creeping illiberalism. It’s tyrannical, it’s totalitarian.
Cancelling election results and taking out a political leader on trumped up charges isn’t creeping illiberalism, it’s the stuff of Banana Republics.
FFS
While I agree with your comment regarding the inappopriate tone, there is no such thing as democracy in the west.
Parliaments are a monarchical institution. Prior to the advent of the modern, administrative state, monarchs had no way to collect taxes/ tributes of any kind from population save cooperating with some kind of local representative (usually, local nobleman) who was willing (or not) to collect the money and send it to the king. So, periodically, a gathering of representatives was called where court cases were handled by the king in parliament and issues of taxation and tax collection were discussed until some agreed upon scheme had been devised which would remain in force until the next parliament.
Over the course of centuries, methods for selecting representatives gravitated towards them being chosen by vote of the people and the power of parliament grew at the expense of the power of the monarch. In the first quarter of the 20th century, a great revolution took place almost all over Europe when the nominal monarchical heads of government where either chopped off, sometimes by violent foreign invasions from countries where parliaments were already self-governing (in particular, it took a US invasion to abolish monarchy in Germany …), or the monarchs were reduced to mere celebrity figureheads. But this doesn’t make the resulting headless monarchies democratic as it’s still the so-called representatives who decide everything as they see fit and not the people and they still ultimately rely on state violence to enforce their decrees.
NB: This is not an argument in favour of something like “completing democracy” as that’s totally impractical at the scale of current states. Just an attempt to denounce these rotten oligarchs who rule us and don’t give shit about their own so-called principles because they have the power to change them at will as what they are. A system of government doesn’t become democratic just by being extremely inefficient and partisan and loaded with systemic friction which more often than not really just prevents anything from getting done.
“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield”
George Orwell
If Marine Le Pen is “misusing EU funds”, what on earth is Ursula von der Leyen doing?
America managed to swerve Kackling Kamala & Dementia Joe but Europe has these type of freaks in charge everywhere including the UK where it’s actually worse !