NATO’s Democracy Deficit

Since its creation in 1949, NATO has been a source of great pride for U.S. and European officials. They not only present the alliance as a capable military organization for transatlantic defense, but they routinely portray it as a league of armed democracies and a potent symbol of freedom.  

NATO Is No Democracy Perfection 

That carefully fostered image has never been entirely accurate. One of the 12 founding members, Portugal, was an outright dictatorship ruled by Antonio Salazar. Greece saw its democratic system overthrown in a 1967 military coup, and a brutal junta remained in power until 1974.  When Turkey joined the alliance in 1952, its democratic credentials were already suspect, with more than a little evidence that the country’s military was the real authority behind the scenes. Ankara’s alleged commitment to peace and democracy took another hit in 1974 when Turkish troops invaded Cyprus and conquered nearly 40 percent of its neighbor’s territory—an outrage that remains to this day.

The Challenge Ahead for NATO (Not All Russia) 

In recent years, the internal behavior of several NATO members has become less and less democratic. 

The hostility on the part of European “establishment” center and center-left parties toward any “right wing” rivals has become decidedly more intense and pervasive over the past decade.  

Support for censorship measures directed against the policy positions of rightist factions also has become notably more common.  

Retaliatory sanctions for “hate speech,” and “disinformation” (inherently vague and subjective offenses) have become so extensive as to silence even moderately conservative social positions, especially on such matters as immigration policy or lifestyle issues.      

Following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the suppression of conservative dissenting views became pervasive regarding foreign policy issues as well. EU authorities did not hesitate to ban RT and other Russian media outlets. Political parties and ideological movements that appeared to be even mildly sympathetic to Moscow’s perspective came under hostile scrutiny and even harassment from their more conventional rivals.

In several European countries, the hostility of establishment forces toward conservative, populist figures is leading to the adoption of policies that threaten to make a mockery of any reasonable concept of a democratic system. The commitment of Washington’s European allies to democracy is increasingly fragile, if not hypocritical, as Vice President J. D. Vance highlighted in his February 2025 speech to the Munich Security Conference. 

Enter Romania 

That problem is most acute in Romania. In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Caliin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party, unexpectedly led the field.  The response of the beleaguered establishment forces was to get the country’s election commission, which the two parties of the governing coalition, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL), dominate, to nullify the first-round election results.  

Romania’s Constitutional Court, which the PSD and PNL also control, ratified the election commission’s edict just two days before the runoff round was to be held in December 2024.  The Court rescheduled that round for May 4, 2025.  

Both the Commission and the Court alleged that the election had been tainted by “Russian interference.”  However, neither body cited tangible evidence of such interference on Moscow’s part, much less established that the alleged meddling was sufficiently egregious to nullify the election results.  

As New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins concluded: “The court’s intervention came after Romania’s security service released declassified intelligence reports that pointed to possible Russian interference in the election campaign but provided no solid evidence of that.”

Eugene Doyle, a reporter for New Zealand’s Solidarity.com, cites evidence that Russia was not even the likely culprit. The social media campaign apparently originated with a botched PNL scheme to siphon off votes to Georgescu from other establishment competitors, especially the PSD nominee.

Subsequently, Georgescu has been subject to extensive harassment from police and prosecutors controlled by the current government. Equally troubling, he has been disqualified from the election rerun. It also is increasingly apparent that a related goal is to send him to prison and bury him politically over the long term. Those actions have triggered massive anti-government demonstrations by angry Georgescu supporters in Bucharest and other cities.

What Happens Next for NATO? 

As worrisome as the developments in Romania might be, though, they pale in comparison to emerging signs of authoritarian crackdowns in two of NATO’s leading European powers.  

There is a growing campaign in Germany to outlaw the populist conservative party, Alternative for Germany (AfD) as supposedly fascist or neo-Nazi. That effort is especially important because the AfD finished in second place in the country’s February 2025 parliamentary elections.  

Germany Leopard 2 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Outlawing the second largest political party in a major European democratic country would be no small matter.  Perhaps of even greater concern is the decision made by French authorities to disqualify right wing leader Marine LePen from the country’s upcoming presidential election and to ban her entirely from politics for five years. Polls had shown her to be the leading candidate and probable winner.  

Genuine democracy must mean something more than a guaranteed political monopoly for centrist and center-left factions.  Yet that is the ugly picture that seems to be emerging in multiple NATO countries.  Vance had every reason to be alarmed.  

About the Author: Ted Galen Carpenter 

Ted Galen Carpenter, is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at 19FortyFive.  He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).