Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman
“When the Iranian regime disqualifies candidates, everyone who doesn’t believe in the Islamic Republic’s propaganda knows that they are doing it for self-interested reasons, that they are stifling the people and trying to keep them down, that they are behaving anti-democratically. It avails them nothing to explain that they are just following the law. Why then should similar behavior work for Romania, where the courts have been making a habit lately of rejecting far-right political candidates as ineligible for office? The fact that so many of their supporters viewed the cases against Călin Georgescu and Diana Șoșoacă — and against Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and potentially Le Pen — similarly to how we liberals view Iran’s behavior is merely a demonstration of how many people do not believe in the integrity of the law in Romania, America, Israel or France.” (04/01/25)
https://gideons.substack.com/p/disqualification-is-not-a-democratic