Romanian Constitutional Court chief says 2024 election annulment drew world attention to AI risks

The remarks in Bucharest

On Friday, 6 November, Simina Tănăsescu, president of the Constitutional Court of Romania, opened a working meeting titled "Information society and constitutional democracy" at the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest. The event was part of the three-year presidency programme of the Association of Francophone Constitutional Courts. In her opening address she said the court's decision annulling the 2024 presidential election had drawn the world's attention to the risks that digital technologies and artificial intelligence pose to democratic procedures and mechanisms. She added that the decision was not a singular case in Europe.

She began with a description of what a constitution does, choosing these words:

“A Constitution is built on the values that unite society and that it establishes.”

She said constitutional courts must apply these values as the boundaries of constitutional democracy, in quiet times as well as turbulent ones. In her account, the essence of constitutional democracy is the limiting of political power through the Constitution, which rules out concentrating power in the hands of one person, one group or one majority.

Three European cases

Tănăsescu placed the Romanian ruling alongside two other rulings that she said showed constitutional courts acting on election results or on how a vote was run. The Constitutional Court of Austria decided to rerun the second round of the presidential election of 2016. In December 2024 Romania's Constitutional Court invalidated the entire electoral process for the presidential election, with a full rerun as the consequence. In March 2025 Bulgaria's Constitutional Court partly invalidated the results of the parliamentary elections held in October 2024.

Her comparison placed the Romanian decision among these three rulings, and she said it drew the world's attention to the risks that digital tools and AI pose to democratic procedures and mechanisms. She presented the Austrian, Romanian and Bulgarian cases as examples of courts intervening in the electoral process itself.

The information society

Tănăsescu described the information society as one in which information and technology play a steadily larger role in every field of human life. She said this should lead to a qualitative leap for democracy through wider access to information, and she tied the idea back to the Constitution. Her closing argument was that constitutional justice is the proof of this link:

“Constitutional democracy is not an oxymoron, and democracy is not external to the Constitution.”

She added that constitutional justice is proof of this point. Her remarks were delivered at the opening of the meeting, which was held in the Palace of Parliament.