Putin's meddling plan blocked: Election annulled over Russian interference
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Welcome to the World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Toby Gillis, and today I'm joined by Alex Dibble. On yesterday's World in 10, we covered how Russian meddling in the first round of the Romanian presidential election had been so successful...

that it appeared likely to send a pro-Russian candidate, Kalin Georgescu, who had started almost as a no-hoper, all the way to the presidency. The runoff vote was due to be this coming Sunday.

Today, however, an incredibly drastic development. The story initially came out when intelligence documents were declassified. Those papers have now been analysed by judges at Romania's top court, that's the Constitution Court, and they have annulled the result, they've cancelled Sunday's vote entirely and ruled there must be a rerun. That might not happen until next year. The

The Times correspondent Tom Kington is once again our guest to discuss this. Tom, yesterday you made the point that Romania had stopped short of saying Russia was behind this meddling. Is this ruling now unequivocally saying that though?

No, I think it's them just proceeding on the basis of doubt and the likelihood that Russia was involved in backing Kalin Georgescu. That seems to have been enough for the Constitutional Court, which took all those findings, which came from Romanian security agencies midweek, and sort of chewed them over immediately.

this morning and came back and said that's enough for us to have real concerns about the first round of voting in the presidential election, which was on November 24th. So we'll just scrap the whole thing. That took people by surprise, I think. Many had thought that the court might eventually

rule against it, but would wait at least until the runoff had been held, which was due to be held on Sunday. So this is the court kind of accelerating things and just saying, no, no, no, we're just going to stop the whole thing now. No voting on Sunday. It's back to the starting line. We will now order the first round of voting to be held again.

Tom, how extraordinary do you think this ruling is, given both what you've said there about expecting it to be delayed potentially after the second vote, but also globally? Because I'll be honest, I can't think of any previous election anywhere which has been scrapped because of outsider influence. Right. I had the same impression.

The same thinking just before you came on. The only example I can think of which really isn't similar at all was back in 92 when Algeria scrapped an election because an Islamic party won the election and

the powers that be in Algeria thought, well, we don't want that, so we'll just scrap the election. That's hardly similar. That wasn't outside interference. So that gives you the idea of how unprecedented this is. And where do we go from here? How has the ruling been received? Well, the ruling was literally just announced, so there'll be a lot more comment coming out during the day, but immediately,

Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Celac, who said that he thought this was a very good idea, the correct decision to make. Rather more predictably, the candidate who was up against Georgescu in the runoff, the centrist candidate Elena Lascone, has said that it was a bad idea that the runoff should have been held to give Romanians the chance to have their say and

back her. What Georgescu's supporters will...

be saying, I would imagine, is that this shows that if an outsider comes in into the electoral system, and he certainly was an outsider with his hard right, very nationalist, NATO-sceptic views, the powers that be, the deep state, if you like, will promptly scrap the election. So this is kind of food for their... It's ammunition for them.

I'd like to explore that sense a bit more, actually, Tom. Does this court have any political partisanship, like, say, the US Supreme Court, that might have been swayed by the actual outcome? Or is this a genuinely neutral ruling based solely in law?

I think that the supporters of Droghetsky will certainly argue that this was a partisan political decision, bearing in mind that the constitutional court judges are nominated by parliament and by the presidency. So, yes, in much the same way that the Supreme Court in the U.S.,

is open to accusations of bias, given that those judges are political appointments too. You said it was unsurprising that Elena Lascone was critical of this decision. Given the polling that has her some way behind, I wondered if the extra time to devise a strategy to beat someone she'd never expected to compete against might be something that she would welcome.

Don't forget that in the first round of voting, she beat out, surprisingly, the Social Democrat candidate who was the favorite. And so I suspect that she'll be thinking that this is her moment and that if the whole thing is restaged, that could give time to the Social Democrats to regroup and nose past her in the next round of voting.

I imagine as a democracy, this decision won't prevent Georgescu running again. Yet if he can, hasn't Russia kind of already done its job for him? I mean, he's been catapulted to public consciousness from nowhere and coupled with this renewed sense of injustice, I guess, surely his victory is now a foregone conclusion, isn't it?

Definitely. It sort of backs to the wall time. It's them and us. It's really, yeah, you're right. It fuels that kind of tendency in that part of the political spectrum to feel that everyone's got it with you. You've got to fight back. You're being cornered because you're right. And therefore, you've got to fight even harder. Yeah.

Perhaps his opponents will be thinking now that they have a breathing space to try and tell Romania that they think that this guy is siding with Russia. They can wheel out allegations about how he would...

He would split Romania away from the kind of EU-NATO path. They can try and portray this very stark choice for voters between Georgescu, meaning closer to Putin, and them, meaning closer to the European Union. That's something that they didn't do before the first round of voting on November 24th, because no one assumed that he would be in with a shout.

No one took this up with Georgescu because no one had heard of him. And just finally on that, when you interviewed Georgescu last week...

You said he didn't want to cover his Ukraine policy with you. Before today's news came out, there was another interview published by another organisation where Georgescu admitted that he would remove funding for Ukraine. I wonder how that will play now, that there's more time for concrete policies like that of his to almost ruminate amongst Romanians before the election is rerun. I got the feeling that...

Many of the Romanians who will have voted for him were voting for him because they were fed up with Ukrainian refugees pouring into Romania and this perception that they were getting a better deal on benefits than Romanians.

I think that that helped him a lot. Whether they would also agree with him on cutting all support to Ukraine and perhaps therefore helping to allow Russia complete its conquest of the country is another thing. I don't know if that will resonate with Romanian voters as much as the question of benefits.

Tom Kington, in your shared office, thank you for joining us. The widespread criticism of this decision continues to increase. More comments are coming out all the time. This one stuck out to us. The leader of one hard-right party, Uniting Romanians, has branded it a coup d'etat, adding that the judges are running scared of a candidate...

outside the system. One to watch for sure. It is also worth us noting that there has been significant developments today in Syria as we planned this episode. A reminder that Monday's episode provided some of the background to the rebels uprising there and we'll be looking at the situation in more depth on The World in 10 next week. That is it for today. Thank you for spending 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. See you tomorrow.

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