After the first round of the presidential elections, held on November 24, we spent many days dissecting the online antics of Călin Georgescu, the surprise winner, as well as the malfunctions of TikTok and social media platforms in general. This reaction is understandable to a point, given the shock of the results and the astonishment of those only now beginning to grasp the mechanisms for exploiting the opaque algorithms of the Chinese platform, step by step.
The genuine bewilderment of well-meaning citizens, struggling to comprehend how such an outcome was possible, has been further exacerbated by the paralysis and ineptitude of state institutions. These institutions, generously funded in times of stability, proved not only incapable of responding effectively during a crisis but actively worsened the situation. The collapse of the Johannis regime—plagued by moral corruption and political schemes orchestrated with the help of secret services—unfolds with a dramatic, almost cinematic flair, akin to a rococo spectacle of decadence. For Western partners, the extent of this decay beneath the polished veneer of pro-European alignment is probably even more shocking.
Romania’s law enforcement, cyber-security, and intelligence apparatus, well-funded by the national budget and EU projects, tried to explain Georgescu’s rise with variations of “we didn’t see him; he flew under the radar.” This is partially true. Georgescu’s success is rooted in the profound imposture and negligence of institutions laden with epaulettes and public agencies filled with their undercover officers and clients. These entities are preoccupied with political scheming—creating and dismantling parties—and colonizing sectors of business and policy where European funds circulate, leaving little attention for their actual mandates: the threats to the Constitution. On the contrary: sources from the inside tell us that in the summer of 2024 the Directorate for Defending the Constitution of the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) was dismantled; and the same happened with he Hybrid Threats Unit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Perfect timing, as they say.
But anyway, who has time to focus on their actual job—namely, identifying and reporting threats to the constitutional order—when the secret service is preoccupied with engineering governing coalitions, under the order of the president, exclusively staffed by graduates or dropouts of the SRI Intelligence Academy (i.e. the whole current leadership of the Social Democratic and Liberal parties)? The police (under a Liberal minister) are busy raiding citizens over trivial Facebook posts; the president of the Electoral Authority (AEP), a hapless figure drifting through his responsibilities, prioritizes battles with the media and civil society to obscure party campaign finances, all while failing to notice the leading candidate reporting zero campaign expenditures. Adding to the chaos, the secret services engage in squabbles over the definition of a cyber-attack, which may or may have not occurred during the elections. They convene the president and civilian ministers for a meeting of the Supreme Defense Council—and not the other way around—only to produce superficial discussions. The cherry on top is their amusing conclusion: the global tech giant TikTok, rooted in China, doesn’t heed communiqués from Romanian electoral authorities. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
In reality, it is not true that Georgescu came in under the radar. An EFOR report based on monitoring with dedicated instruments shows that he has been on the offensive on TikTok since September. As a phenomenon, this has precedents: last year around this time, Ana Maria Gavrilă, a member of parliament separated from the radical party AUR, as discreet as Georgescu in real life, who is building politics on the same conspiratorial pattern, was spiking on the same TikTok according to another EFOR report. It’s no coincidence that the two have clicked with each other for Sunday’s elections, with Gavrilă’s POT party now officially Georgescu’s vehicle for the parliamentary elections.
It is hardly surprising that TikTok, the most secretive and controversial major online platform, has experienced explosive growth in Romania across all age groups in recent years—even among the elderly in rural villages. The platform skillfully circumvents the rather lenient provisions of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). While TikTok does forge partnerships with civic organizations to launder its public image, its reputational risk remains minimal. After all, it is a multinational entity with a Beijing-rooted corporate culture, a minimal local workforce of just a few dozen employees, and bags of money behind it. Faced with Romania’s digitally inept authorities, who, for over a year, have failed to even familiarize themselves with the DSA they are supposed to enforce, TikTok finds itself in an environment ripe for exploitation. This creates the perfect conditions for figures like Georgescu—”human holograms” who thrive in such unchecked digital spaces—to flourish.
The other day EFOR and its partner, the civic organization ApTI, sent an open letter to the national regulator ANCOM and the EU Commission, with requests and details about what should be done. But it is already late: in Romania the two parties in the governing coalition have been decapitated by resignations, leadership is lacking, and the institutions that are supposed to push back against TikTok are running around like headless chickens and make procedural blunders (see here); there is little to expect from them.
Most importantly, everything mentioned above represents only half the story of Georgescu’s insurrection at the ballot box. The other half lies far from the digital realm, spanning years of relentless grassroots activity. He has methodically built networks within networks in diverse communities where he has been physically present, forging direct emotional connections. These include pseudo-cultural circles in provincial towns, churches of various denominations, disillusioned entrepreneurs with eccentric ideas, retirement associations, and high school and college students left confused and misled by a subpar educational system. Instead of equipping them intellectually to recognize Georgescu’s duplicity, this system legitimizes him by employing him as a professor in state universities.
Beyond these groups, he has reached countless individuals who feel overlooked and yearn not so much for someone to speak to them but for someone to truly listen. Georgescu, with his steady gaze and unrelenting patience, has become that listener. The question is, how many more parishes or frantic parent associations in schools have already welcomed him into their closed WhatsApp groups?
Călin Georgescu is a product of the late Ceauşescu regime and the Securitate of that time. His self-description on a website is fabulous: “after graduating in 1986, he consolidated his experience through missions in the United Kingdom and the United States”. We are asked to believe that in 1986 a young graduate of a second-rate university in Romania, the North Korea at the Black Sea, went on his own to the USA and London to improve his life experience! After the fall of Communism in ‘89, this protegee of Securitate (and later SIE, the external intelligence service, most likely the pro-KGB wing) and of the political technologist / academician Malița was immediately employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also joined the loose network of the Club of Rome, whose support group in Romania is led by the BNR governor Isărescu, and generally inserted himself into the frame with whichever influential figure he encountered in the corridors of power during the chaotic early years of transition, displaying the carefree confidence of someone slightly unhinged.
He secured a few patronage-based appointments (ironically, around über-globalist institutions like the UN, which he demonizes today) where he left little impact but acquired just enough polish to impress provincial admirers back home. After that he returned to Bucharest, where scientific imposture and rambling rhetoric pose no barrier to securing positions in state universities or QUANGOs funded by public money, all while pontificating on sustainable development. (Another irony is that he led Agenda 21, the source of the “15-minute city” concept, which he now frames as part of the global conspiracy he claims to oppose.) He has since aligned himself with toxic business networks and circles of former Securitate operatives perpetuated by their offsprings. More recently, his connections to the pro-Kremlin political scene in Moldova have also started to emerge.
In essence, Georgescu represents a quintessential product of the 1980s cultural milieu patronized by the Securitate, an environment which shaped him. This environment combined national-legionary (the interwar extreme right) anti-Western ideology propagated by the magazine Săptămâna, the official mouthpiece of Ceaușescu’s Ministry of Interior, with protochronism and pseudo-science peddled by the weekly Flacăra. The latter, under the poet and later PSD senator Păunescu, glorified a bizarre assortment of scientists and inventors who championed ideas like propeller-driven cooking pots, cancer-curing “living water,” and knife-sharpening energy pyramids—claimed as world-first breakthroughs allegedly sabotaged by Western occult forces.
After 1989, this peculiar sub-cultural complex flourished in the newfound freedom of the press and the fantastical novels of Pavel Coruţ, another retired intelligence colonel and, arguably, the most popular author of fiction during Romania’s early post-communist transition. To this mix of mysticism and pseudo-science, religion, once officially suppressed, was reintroduced. Two decades after Ceaușescu’s death, as Georgescu began positioning himself as would-be prime minister at every political opportunity, the socio-cultural fabric woven by Balkan communism had already laid the groundwork for his emergence. The resulting under-educated, superstitious social base was primed to embrace a leader embodying national pride: what they saw as a modern-day Ceaușescu, albeit one accompanied by clergy, witches, and anti-vaccine activists. Georgescu fit this mold perfectly, aligning his image with their aspirations.
It could have been any of the many contenders who tried to seize the moment, but Georgescu’s stars seemed better aligned. Politics is not purely a matter of science and calculation; it also requires a certain flair, emotional resonance, and a touch of luck. The national-legionary-herbalist milieu was not searching for an administrative leader but rather a spiritual guide, a guru, and Georgescu has embraced that role with zeal. When addressing people in small-town cultural halls or through his online sermons, he doesn’t deliver political speeches but rather a Christian-social mission. His rhetoric is a New Age patchwork, blending references to Jesus with flower power ideals, the organic nation, and his wife’s druidic rituals. This concoction creates a deeply personalized message infused with the rhythms of self-help and spiritual awakening.
Georgescu’s rise has been anything but accidental. It is the product of years of painstaking work, during which he built recognition and emotional connections across countless communities. His sermons focus on immediate concerns: social welfare, traditional family values, small-scale farming, outreach, self-help in local communities, and a nostalgic return to an idealized golden past of organic group identity, all presented through a mystical and irrational lens. In essence, Georgescu has meticulously crafted a network with social-religious roots, which he now leverages for political purposes, mirroring the strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood. The alternative state he envisions includes an education system centered on faith, cleansed of secularism and evidence-based science; a healthcare system rid of modern medicine and dominated by quackery; and a property system stripped of Western influence, reverting instead to collectivist “zadruga”-style communal ownership.
The TikTok offensive, largely ignored by both Romanian authorities and EU-funded response mechanisms, found fertile ground in communities where politics has had little presence beyond the mayors of the two clientelistic mainstream parties running the government in the last years. Without his real-life, secretive networks, Georgescu’s online popularity might have remained confined to TikTok, without translating into electoral support. After all, there are others with even larger followings on the platform, whom people view merely as curiosities, sharing their content for amusement but never considering them politically credible. What set Georgescu apart was his ability to combine his online and offline efforts effectively. Together, these initiatives filled the vast political vacuum created by the discredited Johannis regime.
This regime, characterized by a grand coalition of leaders who were incompetent, corrupt, deceitful, and with large holes in their biographies, was deeply unconvincing to voters. The president’s plan to monopolize the political arena for the next decade relied on two parties practicing South American clientelismo: de-ideologized, cynical entities focused on controlling territories and voters through the distribution of favors. These parties use mayors as enforcers, keeping them loyal with preferential budget allocations to those who kowtow (EFOR has been documenting this arbitrary budget allocations for more than a decade; see here, here and here). Georgescu’s strategy exposed and capitalized on the weaknesses of this system, transforming his digital presence into a powerful political movement.
This plan collapsed like a house of cards in November 2024 because those who devised it failed to grasp a fundamental reality: in times of crisis, the frustrated masses (including the Romanian diaspora in Western Europe) do not flock to the caviar-Socialists merely because they are fed hypocritical populist rhetoric. Instead, they gravitate toward those who project a genuine connection to their struggles; often these are the far-right actors. And in the last days of the campaign the situation has been spiraling completely out of the control of the extensive security apparatus that Johannis and his PSD-PNL allies have long relied upon, continuing a tradition deeply rooted in the militarized Romanian state.
Here we are, after years of Pakistanization in which the intelligence services have tightened their grip on politics, attempting to build a parallel state: a caste system granting the law-and-order apparatus extraordinary privileges financed by the national budget, plus control over sectors of business and EU funds for personal enrichment. Lip service to the pro-Western agenda, coupled with skillful doublespeak on the international stage, successfully misled foreign partners and the media about these domestic developments for an extended period. But here we are today: squarely landed in what can be called the Arab dilemma. On one side is a state adorned with the trappings of power—secular, in principle loyal to the West, but on the condition that it has free hand to do as it pleases at home. This includes maintaining practices such as exorbitant special pensions and a highly managed form of democracy, where no government position above a certain level can be held without a prior commitment to serving the interests of the intelligence community.
On the other side, we have Georgescu’s movement, a sect modeled on the tactics of militant political Islam, complete with a mass base, alongside middle-class activists and entrepreneurs drawn to its values, faith, and its critique of discredited public institutions, aiming to establish a parallel state. The fact that Georgescu himself originates from the same elite circles as the reservist Siloviki who now support him is of little consequence, so long as he is perceived by the public as “anti-system.” This even works to his advantage, making it easier for him to infiltrate the state institutions with sympathizers: from the police to the secret services, veteran associations, influential reservists, and even the retrograde Romanian Academy of Sciences. The latter, under the sway of xenophobes and individuals who believe in mystical energies and bodily auras, becomes yet another tool of his strategy, alongside the justice system.
Rumors abound that many in the upper echelons of power or the judiciary take part in pravoslavnic teambuildings at monasteries, candlelit processions and seek enlightenment from spiritualists monks who are guided by the sermons of Kirill, the Patriach of Russia. The institutional chaos of November-December 2024, marked by inexplicable decisions and an apparent inability to establish coherent objectives, speaks volumes about the current state of our governance. Georgescu’s political sect made a bold move to seize power, with the plan to hold afterwards a series of referenda designed to curtail civic freedoms and fundamental rights. Such plebiscites are, after all, a well-worn tactic in the playbook of extremist movements. The growing institutional disarray in Romania only accelerates this process, paving the way for a dangerous consolidation of power under the guise of public mandate.
And much like in some Arab states, the Mukhabarat—the police-justice-secret service complex of the secular state—responds to crises with a mix of brutality and incompetence. This is hardly surprising, given that these institutions are staffed primarily through cronyism and rewarded for obedience rather than competence. Their approach to the threat of a sectarian movement like Georgescu’s resembles their response to a Brotherhood-style insurgency: by stifling democracy rather than addressing the root causes of the problem. Moreover, the suspected complicity with the insurgents within their own ranks not only exacerbates the problem but also heightens tensions and fuels a sense of unease at the top of the state, which is also perceptible.
The Mukhabarat is trying to persuade us, the public and NGO community, much like regimes elsewhere, that when the state’s “best interests” are at stake during a crisis (which they themselves have provoked) and when the electorate votes “the wrong way,” the only viable response is to impose strong-arm measures to control and filter the popular vote, demanding patriotic compliance from us all.
The anti-system sect and its sympathizers rejoice, interpreting each overreach as validation of their conspiracy theories about a deep state allegedly serving a globalist cabal. Moscow, in particular, has reason to gloat. This scenario plays perfectly into its hands, providing opportunities to exploit polarization and disinformation with surgical precision. By periodically feeding the chaos machine with crypto-coins and facilitating networking among the anti-Western local groups, who may be motivated by conviction or self-interest, Russia continues to practice a strategy it has refined in numerous other countries. We are in a chaotic situation, one that stands as the main legacy of the ten years of Johannis presidency.
The original text was published immediately after the first round of elections and before the second round was cancelled by the Constitutional Court, here:
https://www.contributors.ro/haosul-reteaua-gulenista-georgescu-contra-statului-cu-epoleti-inept
Sorin Ioniță is president of Expert Forum (EFOR, independent think tank, www.expertforum.ro). He reads and teaches development and public sector theories. He is Council of Europe expert, consultant on institutional reform and decentralization in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, author of the book Ten Years of Fury and Indignation: How the last decade has changed the European Politics, Humanitas Publishing House, 2021.