The new election is scheduled to be held on May 4, with a runoff planned two weeks later on May 18.
In early February, Romania’s outgoing liberal president, Klaus Iohannis, stepped down amid the acrimony. “I have never violated the Constitution,” he said in his resignation speech. “From here, everyone loses, no one wins.”
Adding to the brouhaha, top figures in the conservative U.S. government claimed that Romania’s electoral crisis was an example of Europe allegedly cracking down on democracy and free speech. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance blasted Romania’s highest court for its winter ruling.
“When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” Vance said.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or God forbid vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance added.
Tech billionaire and X owner Elon Musk — who is a close adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump — also lashed out at the Constitutional Court judges, calling them “tyrants.”
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