Romania's Hybrid Regime and Its European Accomplices
A personal note on the report published today by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Brussels (MCC Brussels) is publishing today a report on European Union interference in national elections.
It is a great honour for me to have been invited to present a part of the story that is largely ignored by the mainstream media: the reality of the interference that led Romania to become a hybrid regime1 — the first of its kind in the European Union and, unfortunately, perhaps not the last.
I invite you to read the report compiled under the direction of Richard Schenk. Three cases are examined: Romania, the Czech Republic (a subject I had previously had the opportunity to work on) and Poland. All three countries have recently held elections marked by interference from European forces that should, on the contrary, have consolidated and defended the sovereignty of their peoples and member states.
It was a pleasure to work with Richard Schenk, to engage in a dialogue of mutual respect and to see my contribution fully respected. A report of 4,500 words was expected from me for the chapter on Romania. After struggling alone with my first draft to bring it down to 12,000 words, I sought Richard’s input, and upon reviewing that version, he nonetheless chose to keep everything, even though it was far longer than originally planned. This mattered, because what happened in Romania cannot be reduced to the intervention of a single actor — which is one of the reasons I named this chapter “Romania’s Hybrid Regime and Its European Accomplices.”
I should mention that I first came across MCC through the excellent reports written by Thomas Fazi and Norman Lewis. Along with Pascal Clérotte (co-author with Thomas Fazi of the Twitter Files France report), they are among the rare European journalists and intellectuals who have taken on the task of documenting the architecture of censorship and propaganda.
After the Fazi and Lewis reports published by MCC, the third time I heard about the Mathias Corvinus Collegium was following the intervention of Romanian researcher and intellectual Adina Marincea — who also serves as a trusted flagger for the Wiesel Institute in Romania — and who was apologising for having participated in a conference organised by MCC, presumably because some mob or lecturing hall-monitor had made it clear to her that one does not speak to these people.
I, for one, will continue to speak with everyone, and to accept publication from anyone who respects my editorial freedom. The question of censorship — whether blunt or wrapped in modern mechanisms designed to make the unacceptable acceptable — is a fundamental, first-order problem. Ideally, we should be able to disagree on everything and yet agree on not censoring one another.
That censorship has now become one of the mechanisms the European Union deploys against free expression and against the democratic free choice of the peoples who comprise it represents another dimension of the problem… It is a profound betrayal of what the European Union should be.
No country should be subjected to foreign interference, and Brussels should be committed to guaranteeing the sovereignty of member states — including when that interference originates from within the Union itself.
This position should not be a partisan one. It applies to all peoples, regardless of their political choices: Hungarians must be free to express their preference at the ballot box, and that preference — whatever it may be — must be respected, including by their European partners. I express the same wish for all the peoples of Europe, including, of course, the French.
Claiming Russian interference, repeating it without providing evidence — as was the case in Romania — without documentation, without case studies, is extremely dangerous. If interference exists, the tools to block it are there — let us not pretend otherwise.
Above all, accepting without flinching interference that is plainly visible and well documented — whether French interference in Romania, for example, or interference channelled through European Union mechanisms — that is the height of hypocrisy.
May the member states, political parties — of whatever stripe — and citizens of the European Union take full measure of the mechanisms being deployed against the sovereignty of European peoples, that is to say against their ability to live in genuinely democratic spaces.
The Economist downgraded Romania to “hybrid regime” status in its Democracy Index 2024, primarily due to the annulment of the presidential election without valid grounds.