I don’t follow European politics too closely, which is to say that I don’t follow the politicians, political parties, policy, scandals and such. Doubly so for the smaller nations of the EU.

What I do keep an eye on are the fundamental aspects of the place: immigration, law and order, energy, economics, national security matters (of which the military is just one part), because those tend to be the drivers, with the politicians often being mere spectators even when they, as a group, have enabled some madness or other. Sooner or later, those fundamental things blow up in very obvious ways.

So it is with the recent news that in Romania the country’s constitutional court last week annulled the results of the first round of the presidential election, claiming that the winner had been enabled by Russia. The Grundian reports further:

[A]mid allegations of Russian interference, [it] is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.

Aside from the breathless reporting of “cyber-attacks”, there’s nothing there about actual ballot manipulation, which is literally what counts in an election. No, all the reporting is about influencing the voters using the now dreaded “misinformation / disinformation” streams via Tik Tok accounts and other nefarious means of avoiding the Trusted MSM, funding “Far Right Groups” to give them a louder voice on issues, and so forth.

The folks at Samizdata summed it up well in mocking the headline “Wakeup call for democracies”:

When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.)

Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.

Not explored is the presentation of yet another example of the judicial system over-turning democracy and the question of what the limits on that should be?

After all, there is a solid argument that allowing a judicial system in the first place automatically nullifies pure democracy but that this is a good thing when you see examples from history of the results of allowing Edmund Burke’s “swinish multitudes” to have their way, like the six Athenian Admirals executed despite their victory at the Battle of Arginusae, because the mob turned from celebration to anger when they found out about all the drowned Athenian sailors who had not been rescued, and voted for the ultimate punishment of those responsible.

But having a judiciary that uses the law to limit democratic results that produce unjust outcomes for individuals or minority groups is very different to nullifying a general election, especially on such insubstantial grounds.