Accusations rejected
Romania’s cancelled presidential elections from 2024 again stir controversy.
Bogdan Matei, 05.02.2026, 13:50
Tensions between Washington controlled by the so-called Republican elites, who gravitate around the unpredictable president Donald Trump and the Brussels of the so-called self-invested elites have been on the rise for a year. The legal committee of the US House of Representatives accuses the European Commission that it frequently interferes with the election process in the EU and candidate member states, including in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, an ex-Soviet state with a majority Romanian-speaking population.
The documents presented to the legal committee, which are not public, allegedly demonstrate that pressures are regularly exerted to put Europe’s conservative or populist parties at a disadvantage. According to an interim report, quoted by the Bucharest media, the most aggressive censorship measures were adopted during the presidential elections in Romania in 2024, when the Constitutional Court annulled the entire presidential elections whose first round had been won by the populist independent and by then little known candidate Călin Georgescu.
The decision was taken after the country’s intelligence services said Russia secretly supported Georgescu via the Chinese TikTok network. Internal TikTok documents presented to the American committee seem to contradict this version of events, the report also notes. TikTok allegedly also informed the European Commission that neither found nor was presented with proof supporting the allegation of the authorities in Bucharest with respect to Russian interference.
The team of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, quoted by Radio Romania’s correspondent in Brussels, categorically rejected censorship allegations. The Commission says it never interfered in national elections and EU legislation does not limit freedom of expression, it also seeks to prevent slippages or coordinated interference that can manipulate voters online.
In Bucharest, president Nicușor Dan also said that the decision to annul the elections was an internal act of justice protecting constitutional order. The preliminary report of the US legal committee would only make strictly contextual references to Romania as part of a wider debate about freedom of expression. He underlined that the document partially reflects the reaction of a single private company, TikTok.
Also in Bucharest, the nationalist opposition has again accused the self-declared pro-western authorities that they seriously deteriorated Romania’s relations with the United States, although the two states are linked by an older strategic partnership. Even voices from the current parliamentary majority say the US report contains extremely serious accusations against Romania, which must be clarified. It is also the opinion of the media, who consider the 2024 elections the most obscure and embarrassing episode in the almost 4-decade history of Romanian post-communist democracy and which dramatically eroded citizens’ trust in state institutions.
