In his highly quoted speech to the Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance singled out a country unfamiliar to many Americans: Romania.

Mr. Vance condemned what he described as Europe’s crackdown on free speech and mentioned Romania’s election annulment.

In December, “Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors,” he said. “The argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections, but I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

The election winner was political outsider Calin Georgescu, who shocked Europe’s elites by winning the first round of Romania’s presidential elections in November. Mr. Georgescu gained notoriety for anti-European Union, NATO-skeptical views and quirky positions such as claiming COVID-19 was a hoax. Many in the mainstream media and the European left and center right tagged him as a “far right” candidate.

Soon afterward, Romania’s Constitutional Court took the unprecedented step of annulling the elections, citing Russian interference. It was the first election annulment in Europe since the Cold War ended in 1989.

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This draconian decision was based on reports of a spike in pro-Georgescu TikTok ads in the weeks before election day. If Russia was involved, Romanian authorities have yet to offer proof.

Since being shut out of the elections, Mr. Georgescu has been harassed by Romanian authorities, including summary police detention and judicial proceedings. On March 9, the Central Electoral Commission barred him from running again. Now, another “far right” candidate has been banned for making declarations “contrary to democratic values.”

In sum, to save democracy, Romanian citizens are being denied the fundamental right to vote for their leaders, which they possess as citizens in a democracy, even if they choose “wrongly.”

As Mr. Vance indicated, Romania’s election debacle reflects a disturbing trend in Europe in which governing incumbents feel at liberty to misuse state power to violate the civil rights of those who oppose them, a page out of authoritarians’ playbook.

Why take such a dangerous risk of undermining the legitimacy of future elections? The reason is simple. Because of its failed immigration and green energy policies, public support for Europe’s center-left ruling elites has tanked. They now face stiff electoral challenges from anti-establishment and anti-EU parties, having lost to them in Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. The incumbents label these parties “right-wing extremists” that “threaten democracy” and thus beyond the pale of political acceptance.

This fear of extremism is selective. Many establishment parties collaborate with communists. Spain’s governing coalition includes the hard-left Sumar party, which lauds the Communist Manifesto. French President Emmanuel Macron had no problem coordinating national elections with Jean-Luc Melenchon, the anti-NATO fan of dictators Fidel Casto and Hugo Chavez. The criteria determining which parties threaten democracy would appear less about defending democracy than about keeping power.

In Poland, the EU-backed center-left government plans online policing for upcoming presidential elections after practically criminalizing the main opposition. Polish conservatives have faced summary imprisonment, harassment by government interrogators and termination of legally mandated state funding to the main opposition party.

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Brussels had no qualms about interfering in Hungarian elections. It threatened to block billions of dollars in economic assistance should voters elect the country’s ruling nationalist government. Former European Commissioner Thierry Breton’s referral to the EU’s Digital Services Act to pressure X not to livestream Elon Musk’s interview with President Trump was a blatant effort to censor political speech.

On Monday, a French court banned front-runner Marine Le Pen of the “right wing” National Rally from running for president. Her crime is misusing public funds, a common occurrence that usually results in repayment of funds and ends there, not in jail time, heavy fines and political banishment. Lawfare a la Francaise.

These trends have hit a nerve with Mr. Vance and millions of Americans whose basic rights were violated by the Biden administration, which also weaponized the government. Thousands were deplatformed from social media for challenging government orthodoxy over the origins of COVID-19. The FBI investigated others for protesting transgender ideology taught at schools or for attending Catholic Latin Mass. Mr. Trump was the victim of multiple politically motivated criminal cases and electoral manipulation to block him from becoming president again.

The implications for European global democracy efforts are serious. How can European institutions decry election interference and political repression in countries such as Russia and Iran while tolerating or even enabling such undemocratic practices at home?

With the barring of popular candidates from Romania’s presidential elections, Europe may have set a new and disturbing precedent: Will democratic principles of free and fair elections be subjective, determined by those already in power? Are Europe’s basic civil liberties under permanent threat, determined by one’s political opinions? Europe may have already crossed the anti-democracy Rubicon.