Romania’s 2024 election crisis: neo-legionarism’s revival of the “Judeo-Bolshevism” myth and the jouissance of punishment

The article argues that Călin Georgescu’s success in the first round of the 2024 presidential elections was a result of both economic and cultural resentment materialized in a collective will to radically punish the traditional political class. In attempting to explain the resurgence of fascism’s seduction in Romania, with the contribution of a captured and highly polarized media system, it draws parallels to the interwar period. Today’s far-right and neo-legionary “sovereigntists,” like past ultranationalists, channelled public anxieties and resentment generated by social transformations and multiple crises into a reaction against modernity, framing democracy and liberal values as a foreign product of the West, that is imposed on and therefore threatens national(ist) identity. By updating and recirculating interwar antisemitic, anti-communist and anti-liberal myths such as that of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and “Judeo-Democracy,” today’s neo-legionary movement that Georgescu is part of is claiming an ideological continuity with the mindset of the interwar fascist Legionary Movement. The “sovereigntist” neo-legionaries’ declared fight against “neo-Marxism,” “globalism” and “progressivism” can therefore be read as a modernized sequel of a century-old ultranationalist ultraconservative reaction against modernity’s offspring.