Rachel Marsden: Farmers just won a presidential election victory — and promptly had it stolen from them

PARIS — Farmers are redrawing Europe’s political map with one electoral victory after another — and the establishment is in full panic mode. What the heck did they expect?

If current mainstream narratives are to be believed, a Romanian “far-right” politician, Călin Georgescu, who once committed the thought crime of referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “true leader,” seemingly came out of nowhere, and went from 5% in the polls to winning the first round of presidential voting last month with 23%. How did he manage that? Well, the 62-year-old gamed TikTok like a teenage influencer — because Russian President Vladimir Putin was basically running his account. Or at least that’s what the European establishment suggested in successfully arguing for the country’s constitutional court to cancel the results in favor of a do-over.

They refused to even entertain the possibility that Georgescu’s success could have anything to do with the fact that he’s positioned himself as a champion for farmers, with Politico comparing him to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s health secretary pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in being “all about good food and helping farmers,” and underscoring that Georgescu was trying to “capture rural voters.”

Georgescu is literally a farming expert, an agronomist with a doctorate from the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest, at a time when Romanian farmers have been trying to fight European policy that dumped cheap Ukrainian grain into their market. As recently as October, the Romanian agriculture minister was pleading with the European Union to ban Ukrainian eggs and poultry, saying that Romanian farmers straitjacketed by EU regulations simply can’t compete.

So an actual farming expert comes along to run for president and suddenly it’s a big mystery why he’s a hit in Romania — “Europe’s Nation of Farmers,” as Bloomberg calls the country.

How could he possibly win the first round of an election in the European country with the highest number of farmers — about 3.5 million, according to the European Union's own estimates — and with the farming industry employing nearly a quarter of the country's entire workforce, and the highest percentage among all EU nations?

Such a head-scratcher.

But no, it’s TikTok’s fault. It’s the young Romanians who are apparently just brain-dead zombies doing whatever Putin tells them to do on social media. Yeah, that’s not totally insulting to voters or anything. Hey, here’s a thought. What if the young people and the farmers aren’t actually mutually exclusive demographics? Because based on the field work that I’ve done over the past year, following the farmers’ protest movements across Europe, many of the most politically engaged farmers are young, articulate, driven and educated entrepreneurs. In France, for instance, the 50,000-member Young Farmers union has been leading the charge in protests to defend their livelihood and industry from regulatory encroachment and climate change diktats. Most of them have little to say about Putin, but they sure don’t have to be told what to think about their profession and what the globalist establishment, running their own country and Europe, has been doing to it.

Surely it’s just a coincidence that the election do-over demand came after the third-place candidate, who was out of the race altogether in the first round, was none other than the current prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, who was over at NATO headquarters right before the election on Nov. 19. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte put out a press statement talking about how Romania handed over one of its two operational Patriot missile systems to Kyiv. Maybe Romanians thought that was kind of stupid?

And it turns out that the second place candidate, who was set to head into the runoff with Georgescu, apparently figured that the best place to appeal to Romanian voters would be in the Kyiv Post — marketed as Ukraine’s global voice — while trying to appeal to voters who weren’t Ukrainian.

The mainstream has described Georgescu as “ultranationalist” and “pro-Russian,” which usually just means that his focus is more on the folks at home and their own problems rather than on obsessing over how to stick it to Putin. European officials’ rejection of an election result they don’t like could also be considered a form of anti-democratic meddling.

If Georgescu’s win was such an outlier that it could only have been the result of foreign interference, then how did the populist right-wing end up coming a close second in the country’s parliamentary elections earlier this year, with 18% of the vote compared with the party of incumbent Ciolacu’s 22%?

Keep it up, guys. Farmers and their supporters have been driving populist right-wing electoral victories across France, Germany, the Netherlands and now Romania. Denying democracy under the Orwellian pretext of defending it will surely work out well.

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Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. rachelmarsden.com.