Emergency brake: law, history, and Romania’s constitutional crisis

This article explores Romania’s political and constitutional crisis during the November 2024 presidential elections, focusing on the Romanian Constitutional Court’s judgement annulling the first round of elections on 6 December 2024. This judgement is used to trace the current politico-legal issues back to historical constitutional tensions. In a first move, it highlights the gap between liberal constitutional promises and societal inequalities before World War I, and the struggle between fascist politics and constitutional practices leading to World War II. Second, it connects these historical crises to the present situation, showing how fascism’s origins were linked to changes in the constitutional system and opposition to universal rights. Moving to the post-communist era, the article argues that anti-communism has dominated political discourse and constitutional identity, erasing emancipatory politics and enabling the rise of the far-right. It concludes that the Constitutional Court’s attempt to protect liberal democracy, while temporarily effective, obscures the deeper entanglement of Romanian liberalism with the far-right’s emergence as a significant political force.