Vili Yankova, Darik Radio, March 13, 2025.
Vili Yankova: Good day! You are listening to the program “Who Speaks”, I am Vili Yankova. We will be together in the next two hours. You can listen to the show on the air of Darik and watch it on our YouTube channel Darik Plus, as well as on the website www.darik.bg. The sound engineer is Dimitar Yordanov, the video operator is Strahil Mitev.
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Today the Constitutional Court is expected to rule on the case brought on the early general election appeals. It will become clear whether there is a party reshuffle, whether the “Greatness” party will enter, what will happen to the ruling majority. However, a lot of other things happened around this decision, besides the passing of the ball between the CEC, the Information Service Company and the Constitutional Court. The prosecutor’s office intervened in the case, and its actions against the Constitutional Court were described as a coup. We will talk about this topic in the programme after 11 o’clock.
We now turn to neighbouring Romania, where the public and politicians have their own problems following the decision of the Romanian Constitutional Court to ban Calin Georgescu from taking part in the presidential elections.
To tell us more under this topic on our direct Viber link is fellow journalist and creator of the blog The Bridge of Friendship Vladimir Mitev. Hello!
Hello!
What is the situation in Romania in the days after the Constitutional Court has now finally made its decision and confirmed that Calin Georgescu will not be allowed to enter the presidential race?
We are in the last days before the end of the registration of candidates for the elections. There is some intrigue, as the dropping of Georgescu leaves the sovereignist camp in Romania without a clear leader. And in this respect there are several candidates or people trying to position themselves in this camp.
Perhaps it is important to see what happens with the announcement made by George Simion, the leader of the sovereignist AUR party. He said yesterday that he would file papers to run in the elections – both he and the leader of the small party, the Young People’s Party, which is directly supporting Georgescu. And the idea is, as far as I understand, that one of the two will withdraw in favour of the other. This, for example, has been interpreted by some Romanian journalists as a sign that the two sovereignist leaders of a younger generation cannot get along on who should actually lead this trend and are leaving it to the future to sort out by seeing what the circumstances will be.
There are other candidates positioning themselves in this direction. Victor Ponta is one of them, as is an interesting candidate, Anton Pisaroglu, who has been a security consultant for both American and Romanian politicians. So, in a nutshell, what is happening now is let us see who will file the papers and who will represent the sovereignist camp.
Because when Georgescu was a possible candidate, everybody was united behind him. But within that camp, there are probably differences that are going to show.
The contradictions may prove insurmountable to unite in such a common candidacy. However, if this political camp does not find a common candidacy to unite around, is it likely to achieve the success it achieved in the November 2024 elections, which were eventually annulled?
At the moment, no polls have yet come out showing which way the Georgescu vote will spill. There have been some attempts at such polls. There were such questions published recently by a polling agency which, as I understand it, is owned by a person close to Victor Ponta. And of course Ponta’s results were quite good.
That is to say, you cannot quite trust the polling agencies. Each one adjusts its result in some direction that is advantageous to the owner or the one who pays. So best to wait and see who the approved candidates really will be. And then probably the first, hopefully more objective studies will show which ones have the best chance.
There are also the so-called pro-European candidates, and we should take them into account as well. One of them is Crin Antonescu. He is the face of the ruling coalition, these are the major parties in Romania, as well as the Hungarian party. He is clearly a man of the establishment, as are some of the others who were candidates.
But there is one candidate called Nicusor Dan. He is the mayor of Bucharest. He seems to have a slightly different profile, insofar as he has some background linked to the NGO sector. He himself is an Olympic champion in mathematics at world level. He has somewhat piqued the interest of younger people, but his problem is that he is perhaps not very recognisable outside the big cities, and this lack of popularity is also a problem for some of those who are now left to fight for Georgescu’s legacy.
Georgescu was a figure who for decades, I would say, was in the media and was expected to play a role. There was always talk that he was ready to be prime minister, but now that the so-called sovereigntist sector is orphaned without him, the other candidates do not have his scale, his image. They need time to build them.
You said that outside the big cities the leading candidates are not very well known. Does that indicate a big division in Romanian society or are the reasons elsewhere – just that outside the big cities they have other candidates, other preferences?
This division in Romanian society has existed for a long time. It has existed since 100 years ago. There is an elite who have very good connections with Europe or with the world in general, who are educated and at the same time have access to Western money, especially European money. This is a segment of Romanian society that is developing on the basis of foreign capital and links with corporations or the NGO sector.
And at the same time, there are Romanians who are excluded from access to this money or are less connected to it. And they somehow trust more the local connections in Romania, they trust more other people like them.
These people are also often more religious. It’s no coincidence that Georgescu had a certain messianic way of expressing himself, precisely to speak to these people in a language that they probably accept as legitimate. And in fact, this Romania is often referred to as the “deep Romania,” the Romania beyond the big cities. If we go, for example, to towns like Targoviste, Buzau or Bacau, (there were people from these towns at the protests in support of Georgescu), we see towns that are relatively large, they have some economic dynamism to some extent, but there you can feel the more traditional way of life, you can feel the influence of the Orthodox Church, or in some cases you can feel the influence of Protestant churches from the new ones. This is another Romania. There is a Romania that is more liberal and more connected to Western Europe and another Romania that is sceptical of the former and therefore it looks in other directions internationally.
When you said ‘international’, are politicians following a common line, or can this no longer be said of Romania, of the Romanian political sector, bearing in mind, firstly, the electoral success of Georgescu, his emergence and the strengthening of the sovereignist political forces in Romania, but also, for example, last week’s information about the conspiracy for Romania to leave NATO, for which a 101-year-old Romanian was arrested.
These are two issues in May, so I will talk first about the international orientation of Romanian politicians. At least I will share my personal opinion. We can see that there is a change in the world and we can see that the US is somehow relying on Russia for some of its interests, while Western Europe understands its interests in a different way.
In Romania there is both a traditional Euro-Atlantic line that we know in Bulgaria and some of us in Bulgaria admire how right the Romanians are doing geopolitically. This trend has contributed to large foreign investments in Romania, for example from Western Europe and not only. These investments have particularly developed the major cities in Romania.
But I have already mentioned that there is a section of the population that is isolated from this development and from access to these resources. There is also an attitude in Romanian society that perhaps Romania’s interests do not coincide with those of Western Europe, but rather with what is happening between the United States and Russia.
So we have a situation similar to Bulgaria’s? Because that is generally how politicians react to the international context here, too.
Yes, our countries are still on the periphery of the West and therefore we have different influences. I think that our elites at least choose very carefully where to go so as not to alienate any of the major partners. Maybe our countries don’t have the resources to afford to stand up to one or the other of the big Western partners.
We see this in the Romanian line. For example, President Ilie Bolojan has already made several statements about Romania not being able to choose between the US and Western Europe, and she actually wants to choose them both. And this was actually also a line that was also carried out under President Iohannis in other terms. Romania was then basing itself on a united West, that is, on having good relations with both the US and Western Europe. In the current conditions, this is more difficult, but this is being touted by the Romanian President as a foreign policy line.
And now there is a sentiment among the people that is sovereignist. This general, who is 101 years old, and who I think many are convinced does not have the resources to take Romania out of NATO, simply has a certain mindset that may be left over from the 1980s, when Romania was a strongly nationalist country, relying on its own resources, somewhat isolated, even from its region. That mindset has not completely disappeared in Romania. A part, a large part of Romania has connected with the West, but the older generations or people of any age who are isolated from that access to resources or to contacts with Western Europe, they may have some of that old thinking left with them, that Romania should protect its resources, that there should have a verticality vis-à-vis Brussels, i.e. standing up and defending interests, not just saying yes and bowing to Europeans. You have guessed that in Bulgaria, in our country, there are also such attitudes. These are somewhat similar phenomena.
Generally speaking, yes, it even sounds the same to me, the way things are happening and being articulated by certain political forces in this country.
It’s general sovereignism. Among all other things, it also means Romania relying more on itself, on its own resources to some extent. This, in my opinion, is not completely devoid of economic logic, in the sense that, as I said, the model of development through foreign capital has its limitations. I remember that during the presidential election campaign, Mircea Geoană, the former Deputy Secretary-General of NATO, said that 12 urban aglomerations in Romania produced 80% of the country’s gross domestic product.
That is to say, there are large areas of Romania that are barely involved in creating the country’s economic development. The people in these areas also deserve perspective and there must be money, resources and plans from somewhere on how to develop these regions. Therefore, although sovereignism often comes with a far-right line, which is why and not only why it is vilified, at a certain level these people who are excluded from growth based on foreign capital also deserve to have access to resources and their own growth and their own development model. That is perhaps why passions are so high in Romania, because two models, two visions or two Romanias are fighting.
When you said that there is a struggle of two Romanias, I am asking in this connection because things are connected, there were a lot of protests after it became clear that Calin Giorgescu would not stand in the elections. Are the protests now continuing in the capital, and how big are they actually? Are the protests on a large scale or are they more limited?
In fact, Calin Georgescu has done something that may come as a surprise, but he has called for social peace not to be gone beyond. He said that he wanted to be a politician of peace.
That is, to have peaceful protests?
Yes, he didn’t call for his supporters to protest, even when the cancellation of his candidacy was announced. He just reacted peacefully. There are quite serious allegations against him. He faces 20 years or more in prison, if the court agrees with the accusations against him. I think he made the right decision for himself and for the country not to escalate tensions. But it leaves the protesters themselves with a feeling as to whether somehow their energy has been used in vain.
And it really remains to be seen whether this leader will emerge, whether this option will emerge that will give them the sense to continue their struggle. Because Georgescu’s withdrawal casts doubt on everything that has happened so far.
Many thanks for this conversation to fellow journalist Vladimir Mitev, the creator and author of the bilingual blog The Bridge of Friendship. In Romania, obviously, the processes are very similar to those in our country, so it is interesting to see how, in fact, with our closest neighbours, we share the same vices of our democracy. Thank you very much for this conversation.
We have news coming up next, and we will continue after that.
Photo: (source: YouTube)
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