Whatever happened to the notion that, faced with the enemies of democracy, we should fight their ideas but, equally, for their right to express them? The answer, unfortunately, is that it died an ignominious death on Sunday, as Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau, with the full support of the European Union’s liberal establishment, banned far-Right candidate Cǎlin Georgescu from running for president.
What makes this cherished principle’s death personally unbearable is that I detest the likes of Georgescu, just as I oppose with every sinew of my body the Nationalist International of which he is a part. So, why the pain? Because I cherish my right, and duty, to defeat them at the ballot box — and I shall challenge to my last breath the liberal totalitarians who deny me this right, this duty.
Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau justified its ban on Georgescu with the allegation that the candidate “violated the very obligation to defend democracy”. This is preposterous. The right to vote and to stand for election is exactly that: an unearned right automatically afforded to anyone with the correct passport and the capacity to breathe. Unlike a medal or a university degree, it is not an award or a privilege to be earned. The moment anyone — a judge, a commissioner, even a wise philosopher king — acquires the power to limit that right, a new power is created to restrict the franchise which is by definition anti-democratic.
Before anyone reaches for the “naïve liberal” or “useful idiot” labels, hear me out. I grew up under a fascist totalitarian regime. I know ultra-Rightists better than most. As a kid, I watched them beat my mother, abduct my father, and imprison my favourite uncle. If given the chance, these people will happily set up authoritarian regimes while luring the masses with toxic delusions of grandeur. Yet nothing reinforces them more than the sights and sounds of liberal totalitarianism at work: ideological judges and electoral commissions banning them as if to prove that everyone is in on it, and that democracy is just a cover for the stealthier form of authoritarianism.
To those who are prepared to turn a blind eye because Georgescu is allegedly a Kremlin plant, I have a question: can you really not see what a magnificent gift this ban is to Putin? How he is loving the spectacle of liberal Europe copying his methods of eliminating a political opponent? And to those who fear Trump more than Putin, I have another question: how smart was it for the EU, weeks after JD Vance accused Europe of endorsing the dissolution of Romanian democracy, to vindicate him?
For the UNHERD site, where this comment was originally published, click here.
