Romania

On 6 December 2024 the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential election, whose first round had been won by Călin Georgescu with 22.94 per cent of the vote, on the basis of co-ordinated manipulation identified on social networks and financial violations related to one candidate’s campaign. Georgescu, a far-right politician, was barred from the repeat election, which Nicușor Dan won on 18 May 2025 with 53.6 per cent of the vote against George Simion of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) found that fundamental freedoms of association and assembly were respected throughout the campaign, providing voters a genuine choice, but that in the run-off defamatory rhetoric, a lack of direct debates between the candidates, biased coverage by some media outlets and the persistent use of inauthentic behaviour online limited voters’ ability to make an informed choice. Georgescu is on trial in two cases, including one concerning actions against the constitutional order, and has been in pretrial detention in a separate fraud case since 29 September; on 13 October a court ordered his transfer to house arrest, but the ruling is not final, and he remains in pretrial detention pending the hearing of the prosecutors’ appeal on 23 October.

A coalition of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the National Liberal Party (PNL), Save Romania Union (USR) and the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) installed Ilie Bolojan’s government in June 2025 to cut a budget deficit that reached 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2024, the highest in the European Union. PSD quit the coalition in April 2026, and on 5 May a censure motion tabled by PSD, AUR and PACE – Întâi România passed by 281 votes. Bolojan has since led an interim government with limited powers, while one prime ministerial candidate gave up his mandate and Parliament rejected the cabinets of two others, in June and September. On 15 October the fourth, the independent prime minister-designate Luca Niculescu, submitted to Parliament a cabinet of PSD nominees and independents; the investiture vote is scheduled for 20 October, with PNL and UDMR pledging support. The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law chapter finds that no further measures have been taken to ensure the effective investigation and prosecution of corruption offences in the judiciary.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks Romania 49th of 180 in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, with a score of 67.71, compared with 55th place and 66.42 in 2025. It notes that political parties can obtain favourable media coverage in return for opaque media funding and that the number of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) has been growing. In 2025 eight parties received RON 232 million in state subsidies; of the RON 244 million spent from state subsidies, RON 117 million, or 48 per cent, went on press and propaganda, and the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) and the International Press Institute (IPI) report that PSD and PNL still refuse to publish their political advertising contracts with the media. The Commission notes that, according to stakeholders, public authorities award funds to media outlets without a tender and with no general oversight of allocations.

After the investigative outlet Recorder published “Captured Justice”, a documentary on the judiciary, in December 2025, its journalists faced attacks from television channels that tried to discredit them, and in February 2026 the National Audiovisual Council (CNA) fined România TV RON 100,000 for news and debate programmes aired in December 2025 that spoke of alleged coups. The CNA’s members proposed Valentin-Alexandru Jucan to Parliament as the Council’s president in March 2026, but by September Parliament had yet to validate him, and the MJRC and IPI find that political pressure on the Council continues and that Romania made no progress towards implementing the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) in the year to September 2026; the Commission notes that the Government has set up a working group on aligning public service media governance with the EMFA but that a draft has yet to be issued. The investigative journalist Emilia Șercan received death threats in January 2026 after reporting on alleged plagiarism in the Justice Minister’s doctoral thesis. An anti-SLAPP law, Law 193/2026, published in the Official Gazette on 7 October, extends safeguards against abusive civil lawsuits to domestic as well as cross-border cases, with a fast-track procedure for dismissing manifestly unfounded claims and judicial fines of RON 10,000 to RON 100,000 for abusive claimants.

State Media Monitor maps three media organisations in Romania: the public television broadcaster Romanian Television (TVR), the public radio broadcaster Romanian Radio Company (SRR) and the national news agency Agerpres. All three have been classified State-Controlled (SC) in every review cycle since 2022.

Parliament appoints the boards of TVR and SRR, and the MJRC and IPI find that their boards and heads are still chosen along party lines. After the Constitutional Court ruled the appointment of the boards chosen in November 2025 unconstitutional, the Permanent Bureaus of the two chambers installed interim heads on 8 September 2026, Sorina Matei, proposed by AUR, at TVR and Răzvan Dincă, proposed by PSD, at SRR, chosen with the votes of PSD and AUR. Both broadcasters depend on annual state budget allocations, and their allocations for 2026, RON 500 million for TVR and RON 470 million for SRR, rose by 3.34 and 5.45 per cent, increases that the MJRC and IPI consider below inflation, meaning that both budgets have fallen in real terms.

Politically determined appointments and dependence on annual state budget allocations make all three organisations structurally vulnerable to state influence, which underpins their continued SC classification. The evidence of editorial control is more limited: ODIHR found that TVR provided all contestants in the May 2025 election with fairly balanced and neutral coverage, before the change of leadership in September 2026; no documented case of direct state instruction over SRR’s output was identified for 2025 and 2026; and the finding that Agerpres’s editorial decisions are influenced by state authorities rests on State Media Monitor’s interviews from 2023 to 2025. The three classifications therefore remain under review.

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