At the same time, Georgescu insists he doesn’t want to withdraw from the alliance.
“I do not want out of NATO, I do not want out of the European Union,” Georgescu said last week. “What I want, however, is to take a stance, not to kneel over there, not to take everything. Like I said, we should do everything in our national interest.”
Even were Georgescu inclined to withdraw from NATO, that would be a difficult aim to achieve as the far right doesn’t have a majority in the country’s parliament. It could also rile Romanians, 88 percent of whom support membership in the alliance, according to a recent poll.
But under Romania’s French-style political system, the president is the head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and in charge of foreign policy. Having a NATO-skeptic in the Cotroceni Palace, therefore, could create big problems for the alliance; Georgescu could copy Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s playbook, for example, and act as a pro-Kremlin spoiler within NATO.
A dramatic political shift in Bucharest, then, could undermine Romania’s role as one of the military alliance’s major regional security players. The country is one of the alliance’s top spenders, flies F-16 combat jets, is buying M1 Abrams main battle tanks from America, and aims to open one of the largest air bases in NATO. It also deployed troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
That growing military might comes on the back of over two decades of fast economic growth that has transformed the country from a Balkan basket-case into an increasingly prosperous nation that has even bested old rival Hungary in terms of GDP per capita.
