Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be here for our regular Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is (for this month only, due to time-change disparities) an hour earlier across the Atlantic: 7pm Greenwich Mean Time, and 8pm in western and central Europe. Hope you can swing by.
~I've written and talked for some years now about the emerging "Post-Democratic Era". But it has advanced significantly in recent months. On Sunday, Romania's "Central Electoral Bureau" ruled that Călin Georgescu was ineligible to be on the presidential ballot on the grounds that he "doesn't meet the conditions of legality" because he "violated the very obligation to defend democracy, which is based precisely on fair, honest and impartial elections."
Mr Georgescu is ahead in all the polls. From the most recent:
New polling (MKOR, Feb 25-28) shows Călin Georgescu dominating with 44.1%, far ahead of establishment-backed candidates.
That's getting pretty close to a majority in a field of over ten candidates.
So in Romania "the very obligation to defend democracy" and "fair, honest and impartial elections" means removing the leading candidate.
In fact, Mr Georgescu should now be beginning the fourth month of his actual presidency. He won the first round last November and was expected to win the second. But then, at the behest of Nato and the European Union, Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the results of the first round and cancelled the second round. On what grounds? As Gavin Mortimer puts it in The Spectator:
The court had perused some declassified intelligence documents that claimed 800 TikTok accounts had been activated shortly before polls opened. There was no evidence of voting irregularities in the election itself but the fact Russia had been active on social media was enough for the court to intervene.
So now we know how to get an election result tossed out in the interests of "defending democracy". A week before the big day - in France, Sweden, Australia, America - just open, say, 900 new Facebook or Twitter accounts. It'll only take you ninety minutes or so. That way you'll save democracy for chaps like Project Fearmonger-in-chief Mark Carney who, without benefit of anything so footling as a seat in parliament, will this week take over as Canadian prime minister.
Călin Georgescu appealed the annulment to the European Court of Human Rights, who said they lacked jurisdiction - unlike, say, every case of an Albanian gangster in the UK who can't be deported because his kid doesn't like the taste of chicken nuggets at the Tirana McDonald's.
The former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton could not restrain himself from boasting about the Eurocrats' ability to overrule the voice of the people:
We did it in Romania and of course we will have to do it, if necessary, in Germany.
As things turned out, it was not "necessary" in Germany. But it was in Austria. As JD Vance told his fellow bigwigs at the Munich Security Conference:
I was struck that a former European commissar went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election...
Now these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.
M Breton, the ECHR and the Romanian court assumed that the masses would get the message. Instead, polls showed only that it had made Mr Georgescu even more popular. So, on his way to register his candidacy for the new vote, the coppers arrested him for "incitement to actions against the constitutional order" - by which they mean offering himself for election. He is forbidden to appear on TV and radio or to give interviews to the press - and he is additionally enjoined from launching any new social-media accounts before the election.
I should say I have no particular dog in this fight. It is the longstanding policy of SteynOnline to favour not a Romanian president but, after my brief acquaintance with the late King Michael, the restoration of the Romanian monarchy. However, if a supposedly sovereign nation wishes to elect its head of state, the choice should not be determined by Nato and the European Commission.
There will be a lot more of this ahead.
~In my GB News days, The Mark Steyn Show was preceded by Nigel Farage and followed by Dan Wootton. Mr Wootton, my Steyn Cruisemate, has now done an exclusive interview with Rupert Lowe, addressing Farage's various smears - including his supposed "dementia". Dan is very even-handed, so he also speaks to another former GB News colleague and Farage ally, Alex Phillips, as well as Katie Hopkins, who falls somewhere in between:
This tweet from Morgoth caught my eye:
Farage has canceled more right-wing careers than Labour, The Guardian, and Hope Not Hate combined.
That's true. Another tweeter got Grok to list them:
Rupert Lowe, Ben Habib, Howard Cox, Catherine Blaiklock, Alex Stevenson and 11 other councillors, Andrew England Kerr, Louis Stedman-Bryce, Michelle Ballantyne, Annunziata Rees-Mogg...
And more:
Suzanne Evans, Patrick O'Flynn, Alan Sked, Neil Hamilton, Gerard Batten...
As Morgoth subsequently observed, every one of those Nigel has had cancelled is to his right. So the principal effect of Gatekeeper Farage, under cover of the hail-fellow-well-met saloon-bar routine, is to mire the British right in defeatism. His assertion that "if we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose" implicitly accepts that it is now too late for the UK to challenge the demographic ascendancy of Mohammed - just as his earlier remarks about the inevitability of a "united Ireland" applied the same thinking to his so-called parliamentary allies in the Traditional Ulster Voice, not to mention supposed friends such as popular Steyn Show guests Kate Hoey and Arlene Foster.
He does that to everybody: No one who knows Nigel likes him.
~We thank you for all your kind comments about SteynOnline - and especially thank those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in this coming year.
