One way you can recognize a rotten Ancien Regime desperately running out of road is by how boorish and transparent its methods of repression get.

By that standard, Romania and with it the EU must be on the verge of revolution. Because it is really hard to imagine a cruder set of dirty tricks than what has been deployed there to suppress the most likely winner of the next presidential election, Calin Georgescu.

By now, the hounding of Georgescu by the Romanian establishment (and that of the EU) is quite a saga. A short recap will do: Last December, Georgescu, an insurgent nationalist-sovereignist surprise candidate, won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. Instead of holding the second round, as foreseen by law, the Romanian establishment resorted to crass lawfare: Bucharest’s constitutional court cancelled the run-off, which Georgescu had very good chances of winning. Or rather, because Georgescu had very good chances of winning.

The pretext the court used was ludicrous then – guess what? “Russian interference,” again – and by now even Western mainstream media have had to acknowledge that the so-called “evidence,” a file cobbled together by the Romanian security services, is a bad joke. Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, stately stalwart of German Russophobia, has long admitted that the claim of Russian meddling was a “myth” (read: lie): “The governing class in Bucharest has made a show of the Russian bogeyman to distract from the failure of its little power games – and to have a pretext for annulling elections that did not suit it.”

Worse (yes, they can do even worse in EU-Romania),........

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