Is a Romanian version of “lawfare” — and an Eastern European variant of the “Russia Hoax” — behind the exclusion of the rightist politician Călin Georgescu from the country’s presidential race? Those are the incendiary claims made by Mr. Georgescu. He avers that the accusations against him are “just a copy paste of the accusations made against Donald Trump.” Yet the fears being raised about democracy being under threat in Romania appear overstated.

The best reason to view Mr. Georgescu’s claims with a healthy dose of skepticism is that his most avid cheerleaders appear to be based at Moscow — not exactly a haven for pro-democratic sentiment. The ban on Mr. Georgescu’s participation in Romania’s presidential race was just upheld in a final decision by the constitutional court at Bucharest. The Kremlin says that banning Mr. Georgescu means “trampling upon all democratic norms in the center of Europe.”

“Any elections that will exclude him will be illegitimate,” says President Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. Even putting aside the hyperbole, Mr. Peskov raises a concern that the West can hardly ignore. To deny the voters a choice of a candidate for whom they might vote strikes at the heart of democratic norms. That attempted denial was what made the Democrats’ campaign of lawfare against President Trump in the 2024 race so troubling.

America, though, has been holding elections — some fairer than others — for almost 250 years now, and its institutions were able to withstand the jolts of the people. Lately such shocks have arisen not only in the GOP’s efforts to challenge the 2020 results but also in the Democrats’ failed attempts to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot in 2024 — whether via the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause or by trying to jail the GOP frontrunner on felony indictments.

Romania, by contrast, is a young democracy with a constitution that dates to 1991. For decades after World War II until the fall in 1989 of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania was under the heel of a Soviet-backed communistic dictatorship. Prior to that, Romania’s only experience with constitutional democracy obtained from the 1860s until the 1920s. As a result, the sinews and institutional guardrails of self-rule in Romania are still relatively fragile. 

That fragility was spotlighted in December with the decision to annul the results of Romania’s presidential election. That was after Mr. Georgescu emerged with the most votes in a first round of voting. Authorities pointed to  “declassified documents that showed the electoral process was spoiled through vote manipulation, campaign irregularities, and non-transparent funding,” our James Brooke reported.

Romania’s lame-duck president said that he was “deeply concerned” by intelligence showing that Mr. Georgescu’s campaign was “unlawfully supported from outside Romania,” Mr. Brooke added. The candidate “declared zero campaign expenditures, despite running a highly sophisticated campaign.” Authorities pointed with alarm to Mr. Georgescu’s surge in popularity on the Communist Chinese-controlled app TikTok.

“In the two months before the November 24 first round presidential elections, views of the candidate’s TikTok account jumped to 144 million from a few thousand,” Mr. Brooke reported. He called that “a stratospheric audience for a nation of 19 million people.” It also appears that Mr. Georgescu was using the platform to sow disinformation with a pro-Moscow bent, Mr. Brooke wrote. Was this enough to remove Mr. Georgescu from the race?

Voices on the right have sided with the Kremlin on this head. Italy’s rightist deputy premier, Matteo Salvini, called the removal “a Soviet-style Euro-coup.” Vice President Vance decried the fact that a former top European Union official “sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election.” He wondered if Europe’s elites were “running in fear” from the voters. “These cavalier statements are shocking to American ears,” he said.

Yet with a war raging in neighboring Ukraine, and in light of Romania’s position as a former Soviet satellite, concerns about Russian election interference cannot so easily be cast aside. Ideally, Mr. Brooke tells us, even a candidate like Mr. Georgescu would be left free to fight for votes “in the battlefield of ideas.” Yet it’s crucial in a democracy to ensure that elections are free of manipulation by malign foreign powers, so that the results reflect the voters’ will.