Revanchism, misrecognition, and spatial configurations: capital integration and the electoral geography of Romania’s cancelled 2024 elections

This article examines how territorial inequalities shaped electoral options in Romania in the annulled 2024 presidential elections. Anti-systemic mobilisation did not emerge from deindustrialised or economically ‘left-behind’ zones, but, we argue, from regions of domestic-led industrial growth embedded in broader territories dominated by foreign capital. These localities, central to production yet marginal in national imaginaries and policy voice, illustrate a condition we define as blocked centrality, the disjunction between economic contribution and political incorporation within advanced peripheral economies. Here, foreign direct investment structures accumulation and governance, while domestic production enclaves remain symbolically excluded. Methodologically, the study proposes a multi-stage spatial modelling strategy combining spatial error models, seemingly unrelated regressions, and principal component analysis. This approach operationalises symbolic misrecognition as a spatial mismatch between structural participation and representational visibility. The results challenge binary framings of growth vs. decline and urban vs. rural. Revanchist mobilisation is shown to stem not from economic abandonment, contributing to debates on peripheral capitalism, political blocs, and the spatial politics of recognition in Europe’s advanced peripheries.