Vladimir Borțun
After utterly failing to predict the rise of the nationalist AUR party in the parliamentary elections four years ago, this time the pollsters have missed the mark on an epic scale. Not even the bookmakers predicted that the first round of Romania’s presidential election last Sunday would be won by far-right candidate Călin Georgescu, with almost 23% of the vote. If the ongoing vote recount confirms these results, he will face another right-wing candidate, Elena Lasconi of the neoliberal USR party, in the second round on December 8. Springing out of nowhere, without the backing of any major political party, Georgescu has shocked and alerted the commentariat, who are now feverishly trying to elucidate this electoral mystery. How was it possible?
The dominant explanations of the liberal right focus, as usual, on factors that are at best secondary, accelerating rather than causal – from the influence of online (TikTok) and religious networks to Russia’s alleged interference (plausible but as yet unproven). This completely eludes the role played in harbouring the conditions for an anti-establishment candidate by the right-wing economic policies of the last three decades: mass privatizations, under-taxation of the rich, low-wage policy, erosion of social rights, under-financing of public services. Unfortunately for Romanian democracy, Lasconi supports precisely such policies. Was it Brecht who said the womb of fascism is always fertile as long as we live in capitalism?
Left-wing commentators, however, have drawn attention to these links between neoliberalism and the rise of the far right, pointing out that the anti-system vote came from marginalized social groups. Georgescu performed particularly well among young people with secondary education (31%), the social category most vulnerable to job insecurity and lack of access to the housing market. According to recent sociological research, young people are also increasingly skeptical of the democratic system, with 41% of them believing that we should have a strong leader “who does not bother with parliament and elections”. After 1989, liberal democracy came hand in hand with neoliberal economics, and the failure of the latter to create the promised living standards – which means more than GDP growth – has weakened the legitimacy of both. The relatively low degree of support for democracy cannot be isolated from popular dissatisfaction with current material conditions and the chronic hopelessness about improving them. People are disillusioned not only with the present but also with the future, which further whets the appetite for radical solutions.
In addition, Georgescu won over 43% of the diaspora vote, made up largely of people who work hard in difficult conditions – people forced to emigrate economically, who have faced discrimination in their host countries and who perhaps find some sort of lost dignity in the bombastic nationalist rhetoric that promises to make Romania a “proud and strong” country. It is a trend increasingly prevalent globally, but especially in Central and Eastern Europe: economically displaced migrants, disillusioned with both the mother country (which made them leave) and the host country (which does not fully accept them), see in nationalist politicians a vehicle through which they can express that disillusionment. The underlying problem is the socio-economic impact of the post-1989 capitalist restoration, a brutal process that has shattered destinies and communities, driving millions of people out of the country and condemning millions more to a seemingly hopeless precariousness that affects all aspects of social life in Romania, from housing to jobs to hospitals.
These objective realities could not fail to be reflected, in diffuse ways, in popular consciousness. A survey a few years ago showed, among other things, that more than 90% of Romanians want the state to fund job-creating projects, around 80% want the state to invest more in public services and poverty reduction, and 73% believe the state should take more account of the needs of employees than those of employers. So there is in Romania a large left-wing electorate in the making, at least on socio-economic issues. However, in the absence of a left-wing party with a broad public appeal, capable of mass campaigning around these issues (not only in the run-up to elections, but especially between elections), part of this electorate will be seduced by reactionary “anti-system” candidates who promise a change from the status quo, however vague it may be.
At the same time, however, Georgescu’s popularity among the popular classes should not be overstated. However, the more than 400,000 votes obtained in the diaspora represent less than 10% of the Romanian electorate abroad. Moreover, these elections had the second lowest turnout rate, around 52%, of all presidential elections since 1989. In other words, almost half of eligible voters were not inspired by any of the candidates to go to the polls. It is a common mistake among mainstream political scientists and commentators, including many on the left, to overemphasize the role played by the so-called “left behind ” in the rise of the far right. It is a mistake born out of pluralist, liberal assumptions about the centrality of the electoral act in a capitalist democracy, which ignore the structural and disproportionately large power that certain social classes have over others both economically and politically.
The near-exclusive preoccupation with the voter profile of the far right, shared these days by many on the Romanian left, risks obscuring the class character of this far right and, in particular, of the elites who lead and/or finance it. From Orbán to Trump and from Meloni to Bolsonaro, the far right is, despite its populist and anti-elite rhetoric, the political vehicle of certain privileged social groups who want more political influence. As I have argued elsewhere, the forces of right-wing populism tend to represent the interests of those sections of the capitalist classes that either feel their hegemonic status under jeopardy (fossil fuel industry) or believe that they have had more to lose than to gain from neoliberal globalization (domestic capital in peripheral countries). This is a struggle for hegemony between rival factions of the elite. And Georgescu’s case makes no exception from this global phenomenon, nor can it be understood outside it.
His eclectic ideology and elucubrations on exotic themes tend to blur the socio-economic agenda he puts forward. Contrary to some liberal commentators about the supposed incoherence of his socio-economic vision, Georgescu’s vision is in fact more coherent than that of most candidates. His manifesto leaves no doubt about the class interests he wants to promote:
“Small and medium ownership must be encouraged, protected and supported as a priority. We will not have to deal with a nanny-state that will redistribute wealth in an egalitarian way, as per the socialist model, but with the spread of associative forms of productive property (over land, tools, educational resources) and easy access to cheap capital. The economic success of sovereignist-distributist Romania will be based primarily on the capitalization of the small producer”.
Georgescu’s economic vision is, in fact, a petty-bourgeois utopia – a country of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, in the village and city, in which neither the working class nor big capital (Romanian or foreign) seems to have any clear role to play. This is not the classless society of the communists, but of a single class – the national petty bourgeoisie.
On top of that, Georgescu proposes capping the single tax rate at 10%, including on corporate profit (which currently stands at 16%), but which would drop to merely 2% for companies with an annual turnover of over €1 million. Other tax breaks would be offered to agricultural businesses. We don’t know how the resulting budget hole would be covered, which effectively means more austerity. Georgescu admits this explicitly when he advocates “the immediate reduction of the state apparatus, by relocating them (sic) to the private sector”. Although the state would hold a minimum 51% stake in “all natural resources exploited on Romanian territory”, these resources will not revert to public ownership, but will continue to be subordinated to the logic of profit.
Thus, in contrast to what a majority of the Romanian electorate and very probably even his own electorate wants, we find nothing in Georgescu’s programme about increasing salaries and pensions (still the lowest in the EU); nothing about improving workers’ rights; nothing about regulating the real estate market and building affordable housing for the common man; nothing about the infrastructure that Romania urgently needs; nothing about regulating the energy market or the financial market, which have made record profits in recent years in Romania. It is a right-wing economic programme at the service of the rural and small-urban petty bourgeoisie, which currently does not feel sufficiently represented politically.
Last spring, Georgescu was elected president of the newly-formed Alliance of Entrepreneurs and Farmers party (although it is not clear whether he still holds this position). The party’s self-characterization as “the reaction of the business community against the aberrant way in which politicians govern” captures the petit-bourgeois anger fuelling Georgescu’s political project. At a structural level, the petty bourgeoisie is a social class caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, the working class, which wants better wages and rights; on the other, big business, which constantly threatens to drive it out of the market and receives preferential treatment from the state. In times of crisis, however, when small and medium-sized businesses close down and the political establishment does not come to their aid, the petty bourgeoisie mobilizes politically in a reactionary direction, seeing enemies in both the subordinate classes and the state at the service of big business, hence the anti-statist dimension of Georgescu’s program (and that of AUR and USR). One of his TikTok clips is telling in this respect: “Do you know how many companies close every day? In Bucharest alone, 1,500 close down every month; obviously, all of them are Romanian, the foreign ones are the corporations, which, in turn, don’t pay taxes and declare zero profit.” So, as the analysis of the Socialist Action Group rightly points out,
“The rise to power of Călin Georgescu and the far right is based on a series of objective phenomena, one of the most important being the expropriation of the small and middle bourgeoisie by transnational capital. These bourgeois strata, constantly threatened with proletarianization, come to see the bourgeois national state as a barrier to the most predatory actions of transnational monopoly capital. They will politically support anyone who comes up with a series of interventionist and protectionist measures likely to delay their dispossession – which is what the far right is doing.”
Of course, a political project with hegemonic aspirations cannot rely on a single social class, but on an alliance of various classes and class factions. In this case, we seem to be dealing with a coalition between the underprivileged (especially among the youth and the diaspora) and the domestic petty bourgeoisie, but a more precise mapping of the social bloc behind Georgescu will have to wait. For the time being, there is some anecdotal evidence that he also benefits from the support of certain factions of the secret services (oversized and overfinanced by all post-1989 governments, a major problem which Georgescu’s manifesto says nothing about) or businessmen close to Russian capital (an economic connection that we also find in the case of the Orbán regime).
But Georgescu himself has a professional background associated with pro-Western governmental and intergovernmental institutions, such as the National Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Global Sustainable Index Institute. What then explains his “sovereignist” turn? Perhaps the answer is easier to find in the trajectory of his wife, Cristela Georgescu, a staunch supporter of his political project. After a 15-year career in the Romanian branch of Citibank (the fourth largest bank in the US), where she rose to the rank of vice-president, Cristela Georgescu has made a professional change and is now a small entrepreneur in the field of “natural healthcare”. The timing of the transition seems to have coincided with the bank’s 2012 decision to drastically reduce its operations in Romania. Perhaps the career change may not have been as voluntary as it might seem at first glance. After all, the petty bourgeoisie is liable not only to proletarianization, but also to recruiting from the ranks of the downgraded members of the comprador bourgeoisie – the social caste of natives who represent and mediate the interests of big foreign capital. In Poland, for example, the rise of the nationalist right (Law and Justice) in the previous decade was aided in substantial ways by comprador bankers angry that the local branches of Western banks were not offering favorable loans to domestic companies.
So, beyond rhetoric and psychological profiling, we need to better understand the social forces that support Georgescu and stand to benefit from his rise. It is in this alliance of disenfranchised elites who want to seize political power where the essence of the political project of the nationalist right lies. This is also where the source of the antidote lies: the contradiction between the real problems of the ordinary people who vote for Georgescu and the class interests of the elites he actually represents. The petty-bourgeois utopia of a man with a quarter of a million euros in the bank is not the anti-system alternative that the poorest and most unequal country in the EU needs.
Photo: The cover of the Călin Georgescu’s programme page (source)
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