Sidney Seminar: Silvia Suteu

5 June 2025

This Sidney Seminar saw Professor Silvia Suteu (European University Institute and UCL) deliver a talk on Romania’s 2024 presidential elections. She traced the sequence of events leading to the Constitutional Court taking the unprecedented step of annulling the first round of the presidential elections and ordering a rerun.

Professor Suteu explained that the Court’s annulment was issued ex officio and represented an expansive interpretation of its competence under the Romanian Constitution. The two main grounds for annulment invoked by the Court were algorithmic abuse and disinformation and breaches of campaign finance rules, with the former in particular on shaky evidentiary ground. Professor Suteu also examined the Court’s earlier October 2024 judgment disqualifying a candidate from the race, which explicitly used the language of militant democracy and set the stage for more forceful judicial interventions in the presidential electoral arena.

Professor Suteu then questioned whether militant democracy was the most appropriate analytical frame for understanding these developments. She referred both to Karl Loewenstein’s classic conception and its transposition in constitutional models such as the German Basic Law, as well as to more recent attempts to forge militant tools to defend constitutional democracy. Alternatively, Professor Suteu proposed that the situation might be better understood through the lens of successive institutional failures. She pointed to the need for more nuanced frameworks of analysis, such as Michaela Hailbronner’s work arguing that institutional expansion must be assessed in light of the ‘failure of others’. She ended with a call that only such a deeply contextual yet comparatively informed analysis can hope to illuminate the Romanian presidential election story.

Professor Suteu’s presentation was followed by an engaging discussion from members of the audience. The event was chaired by Dr Oliver Gerstenberg (UCL Laws).