In spite of its institutional and legislative intricacy, its complex and at times obscure procedures and overly ambitious objectives and strategies, the EU’s role as a democratization promoter has seldom been questioned. The gradual system of democracy promotion embodied by funding, twinning, benchmarking, monitoring and sanctioning has been regarded as a successful case of top-down, external intervention in Central and Eastern Europe. In the case of Romania, as a reiteration of its tempestuous accession, the year 2012 fired up the public discourse by bringing back notions such as “coup d’état”, the politicization of the judicial sector, endemic corruption and governmental ineffectiveness. The January riots, the attempt to impeach the Romanian president and the Constitutional Court’s debated decisions regarding the organization of the referendum have triggered alarmed reactions at the EU level, with repeated requests for political stability. The objective of this paper will be to place these turbulent events into the larger context of EU integration and to respond to the question: has the EU pre- and post-accession conditionality mechanism indirectly encouraged the establishment of a mechanical democracy in Romania? As such, while tracing back and analyzing the Romanian political and judicial context of 2012 and the subsequent EU response, we will use a rational choice framework that connects individual actors to dysfunctional institutions – an avenue explored in previous works by Terry Moe and Garry Miller.
