Militant Democracy and Rule of Law in Three Paradoxes: The Annulment of the Romanian Presidential Elections

Abstract The article analyses the annulment of the 2024 presidential election by the Romanian Constitutional Court. This unprecedented semi-peripheral exercise in militant democracy has received worldwide attention. The Romanian event was represented by various foreign officials and dignitaries (President of France, President of Poland, Vice President of the United States, etc.) as a bellwether for trends that are interpreted in diametrically opposed ways. Militant democracy is a concept that corresponds to specific constitutional instruments for the protection of democracy from radicalism. The notion is routinely understood as an important practical corollary of the “lesson of Weimar”, whereas the German Basic Law has served as a blueprint for the general philosophy and the specific instruments of democratic militancy in various post-totalitarian systems. After decades of dormancy, the concept and its practical legal and political implications have once again come to the fore of political and theoretical preoccupations. This revival happened in a context marked by the steady erosion of Western liberal constitutionalism, which is placed under threat by radical forces, wishing to upturn it. I use the Romanian constitutional and political developments to showcase three sets of paradoxes that the events illustrate and illuminate: 1. Party bans enforced through constitutional courts as the synecdochic “lesson of Weimar”; 2. Individual militant democracy, as practiced in Romania, and the broader implications of the instrument; 3. The structural preconditions that lead to the perceived need to practice legal-constitutional militancy and the cause-effect correlations involved in the need and the practice.