From Ottawa to Bucharest, the global far-right offensive failed—but the fight is far from over.

How Democracy Dodged a Bullet

May 19, 2025

Not the time to breathe a sigh of relief.

Time to high-five. Hard. Fast. And right across the face of every doomsday prophet who said democracy was finished. June 2024 to June 2025—that was the window. The Kremlin’s golden year. The moment Putin had banked on to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the democratic world and crown his authoritarian empire.

When MAGA swept the November 2024 U.S. elections, the glee in Moscow was palpable. They knew that one win could tilt the entire board—toward nativism, isolationism, tariff walls higher than iron curtains. For the first time in decades, Putin wasn’t fighting alone. Someone else was doing the heavy lifting. Helping him dismantle the democratic order he’d spent his life trying to unscrew.

And Putin’s team wasn’t wrong. Trump wasted no time stirring chaos in Canada, pushing Pierre Poilievre like a man possessed. Right up to the last day, he was in the trenches, trying to hand Ottawa to the populists.

While Trump worked the northern front, his billionaire benefactor, Elon Musk, was busy across the Atlantic—fanning the flames in Germany, propping up the far-right.

This wasn’t coincidence.
It was deliberate.
It was calculated.
It was premeditated.

First, the Germans shut the door—hard—on the far-right in February 2025. Then came April, a double blow. Australia rejected the populists at the ballot box, and Canada slammed the gate on Trump’s personal crusade to install Pierre Poilievre.

But the MAGA machine wasn’t done.

With Germany a failure and Canada out of reach, they turned their full attention to Romania—a country sitting right on the geopolitical fault line between Western democracy and Eastern authoritarianism. If they couldn’t win in the strongholds, they’d try to break through the soft underbelly of Europe.

And this time, it wasn’t just about quiet support. They went loud. They went global.

Donald Trump Jr., ever the family business mouthpiece, stormed onto social media and declared Romania’s Constitutional Court decision to annul the December 2024 presidential election results a “Soros-Marxist attempt to falsify the result.”

The Court’s ruling came after overwhelming evidence emerged that the first-round election—where far-right candidate had won—was compromised by widespread foreign interference, including coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns and illicit funding channels tied to Kremlin-linked organizations. No irony. No pause. Just straight-up rallying Romanians to defy their own legal institutions in defense of a tainted result.

Elon Musk, the ever-helpful billionaire sponsor of global chaos, chimed in right on cue—branding the annulment “tyrannical behavior” to his millions of followers.

And then came U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, standing on the global stage at the Munich Security Conference, shrugging off the annulment as nothing more than “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.” Translation: Ignore the intelligence warnings, ignore your own Constitution, and carry on with the authoritarian experiment.

This wasn’t just commentary. This was a full-throated, transnational campaign telling Romanians to rise up against their own Constitutional Court.

The MAGA world hasn’t just been dabbling in foreign elections—it’s been desperately trying to hijack them. Canada. Germany. Romania. One failed attempt after another, but don’t mistake failure for lack of strategy.

This isn’t random chaos. It’s smart. Ruthlessly smart.

Every time a right-wing party wins anywhere in the world, the global far-right ecosystem expands. More populist podcasters sprout up. The short ones. The long ones. More misinformation factories churn content. More grift, more recruitment, more cash flooding the pipelines. And as that ecosystem grows stronger abroad, the MAGA machine back home grows even more powerful—its narrative reinforced, its base re-energized, its coffers overflowing.

And fueling this global push? A familiar crowd.

The billionaire class. Some out of Silicon Valley. Many from the murky depths of the social media empires. All of them with a vested interest in pushing the planet toward deregulation and chaos. Deregulation is the golden ticket for exploitation.

App stores don’t want the EU Commission telling them what “fairness” looks like. Because let’s be honest—fairness doesn’t boost earnings per share, does it?
Social media platforms pocketing billions from vaccine misinformation campaigns don’t want regulators knocking on their doors, telling them to clean up their toxic mess. Being the arbiter of truth doesn’t buy that third oceanfront estate.

And child safety? Please. These guys wrote the algorithm on how to ignore that problem while cashing in.

So, lining up for this golden window from June 2024 to June 2025 were three well-known predators: Putin + The MAGA-Right + The American Bro-ligarchs.

It’s no wonder the MAGA world zeroed in on Romania. It was a strategic, calculated play. They tried. They went all in. And they failed—gloriously.

In a stunning political upset, Romania rejected the hard-right tide and elected a centrist president, defying weeks of predictions that the country was on the verge of joining Europe’s growing populist bloc. After a bitter and highly charged campaign, voters delivered a clear mandate to the moderate mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, who staged an extraordinary comeback to claim victory.

Dan secured a decisive 8-point victory, winning 53.8 percent of the vote compared to Simion’s 46.2 percent—a margin that left no room for doubt. Simion, who had prematurely declared himself the winner on Sunday night, was forced to concede early Monday morning as results solidified.

With Romania holding the center, Europe now gets a stronger hand to box in Putin’s proxies inside the EU camp. It also strengthens Europe’s ability to respond to Putin’s threats—and to stand firm without flinching at MAGA politicians screaming across the Atlantic.

Putin, despite his economy under increasing stress, is working hard to make Trump believe he’s stronger than he really is. He’s mocking him. Every time Trump talks to him or his team holds important meetings with the Kremlin, Putin escalates his attacks on Ukraine. It’s a show of fake power.

And so far, Trump has kept taking the bait.

The whole thing is a mirage. A carefully staged performance of strength masking deep fragility. But Putin isn’t trying to win through brute force. He’s playing for influence—believing that if he can keep Trump exactly where he is now, or better yet, drag him further away from Ukraine, the rest will collapse under its own weight.

And the truth is, Europe and Ukraine do have worrying dependencies on the United States. Critical ones: Patriot interceptors. Intelligence feeds. Satellite internet. These aren’t luxuries; they’re the backbone of Ukraine’s survival. Remove them, and defense becomes harder, slower, and far more costly—but not impossible.

That’s Putin’s plan. Exploit those dependencies. Use Trump as a battering ram inside the Western alliance. Create just enough doubt, just enough hesitation, to manufacture his own version of victory without ever firing the final shot.

Now imagine for a moment if George Simion, the openly pro-Putin, anti-EU candidate, had won Romania’s election yesterday. The picture would look dramatically different. Simion would have immediately joined forces with Putin’s existing proxies in Europe—Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, Simion in Romania. A new hardline Eastern Bloc.

If Trump pulls U.S. support for Ukraine—and Europe tries to close the gap with that critical €40 billion aid package to hold Ukraine together, those three would have stood in the way. They would have stalled it. Blocked it. Politicized it. Made every step toward unity and action infinitely harder.

But now?

That scenario is off the table.

Europe didn’t just avert a disaster; it seized an opportunity. With Romania holding firm at the center and reaffirming its pro-EU course, Europe is now on the strongest possible path to push back against Putin’s internal sabotage, strengthen its cohesion, and prepare for the hard road ahead with an unpredictable Trump administration.

The Kremlin’s perfect storm didn’t materialize.

And that’s worth more than a sigh of relief.

That’s worth a victory lap.