At the identical time, Georgescu insists he doesn’t wish to withdraw from the alliance.
“I don’t need out of NATO, I don’t need out of the European Union,” Georgescu mentioned final week. “What I need, nonetheless, is to take a stance, to not kneel over there, to not take every thing. Like I mentioned, we must always do every thing in our nationwide curiosity.”
Even have been Georgescu inclined to withdraw from NATO, that may be a tough intention to realize because the far proper doesn’t have a majority within the nation’s parliament. It may additionally rile Romanians, 88 p.c of whom assist membership within the alliance, based on a current ballot.
But underneath Romania’s French-style political system, the president is the pinnacle of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and in command of overseas coverage. Having a NATO-skeptic within the Cotroceni Palace, due to this fact, may create massive issues for the alliance; Georgescu may copy Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s playbook, for instance, and act as a pro-Kremlin spoiler inside NATO.
A dramatic political shift in Bucharest, then, may undermine Romania’s position as one of many army alliance’s main regional safety gamers. The nation is likely one of the alliance’s high spenders, flies F-16 fight jets, is shopping for M1 Abrams predominant battle tanks from America, and goals to open one of many largest air bases in NATO. It additionally deployed troops to each Iraq and Afghanistan.
That rising army may comes on the again of over twenty years of quick financial development that has reworked the nation from a Balkan basket-case into an more and more affluent nation that has even bested outdated rival Hungary by way of GDP per capita.
