Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round | Hacker News Reader

Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round

bbc.com

530 pointsvinni21,106 comments

There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the election". I'm Romanian and I'll provide some more details on this:

The country has been a powder keg ever since the results of first round of the presidential elections, with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.

The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law.

There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.

With TikTok being owned by China and their imminent ban looming in the US, there is strong suspicion that state actors are behind this, pushing Calin Georgescu through the algorithm, though this is tricky to prove.

This is not a strong grass-roots movement supporting this guy, it was a targeted effort of massive network of bots spamming his name & tiktok page on random videos on Romanian tiktok videos to push his popularity (this comes from the Romanian equivalent of CIA & other security structures). Tiktok themselves when asked to comment have investigated themselves and found nothing wrong, though they do agree that there are bots on their network and they've removed millions of fake likes & followers in Romania.

In a video posted this summer, Calin Georgescu expressed anti-NATO sentiment which he recanted after winning the first round of the elections. He has also previously declared that we could do with some "russian wisdom" and he's a big fan of the Iron Guard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard), which killed a bunch of political figures in Romania during their time. This organization as well as other fascist groups are illegal in Romania.

Candidates have to declare their assets as part of transparency and it seems Calin Georgescu has not declared all of his assets, which is illegal. There's also suspicions about money laundering, with a house he bought for 250K in 2006 and sold for 1M in 2011 which is unusual. This is somewhat besides the current discussion, just adding some context that this guy is not exactly squeaky clean.

A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security. This is right now in the first stages with no single person being put under indictment.

> he candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law

Does Romania have the equivalent of US PACs? In the US an organization not related to the campaign/party can receive donations and make flyers, ads, etc.

No, this is not a thing in Romania.

Not really, and all the money needs to be declared anyway. I'll give you an excerpt of relevant law text, some stuff removed as there's a lot of fluff:

Election campaign expenses shall comply with the following conditions: a) come solely from contributions by candidates or political parties; b) they shall be incurred only with the prior approval of the competent financial trustee; c) they must fall within the limits provided for by this law; d) to be made by electoral competitors only for the promotion of their candidates and electoral programs. (2) The collection of electoral contributions and the payment of electoral expenses may be made only through bank accounts notified in advance to the Permanent Electoral Authority. [...] (11) Candidates' contributions for their own election campaign or that of the political party that nominated them may come only from donations received by candidates from individuals, from their own income or from loans taken by them from individuals or credit institutions. [...]

In the event of the commission of an offense provided for by this Law, in violation of this Article, the sums of money related to the electoral expenses incurred in violation of this Article shall be confiscated and paid into the state budget

The financing of the electoral campaign, directly or indirectly, by natural persons who are not Romanian citizens or by legal entities of a nationality other than Romanian, is prohibited, with the exception of financing by citizens of Member States of the European Union who are domiciled in Romania and are members of the political party to whose electoral campaign they are making a financial contribution.

Translated with DeepL.com

Thank you for doing the research. There seems to be an awful lot of people that just can't get the fact that other countries can have different laws. ...and that the EU has many different countries, too.

This is not a thing in most of the developed world.

PACs are one of the biggest problems with the US system. Thank god most democracies outlaw them.

What if a rich supporter prints flyers and buys ads without telling the candidate? If that automatically disqualifies a candidate, his enemies have a strong incentive to do the same.

It's possible but spending has to be reported to the electoral authority, which it wasn't.

If i spend money on all the other candidates and don't declare it, will they get disqualified? Or is this a rule that only gets applied when the wrong person wins=?

You would be in legal trouble for breaking electoral law. Based on what happened today, if there is proof that the electoral process was tainted, the elections can be annulled by the constitutional court.

>You would be in legal trouble for breaking electoral law. Based on what happened today, if there is proof that the electoral process was tainted, the elections can be annulled by the constitutional court.

So, your stance is that any foreign nation can disqualify any candidate they like by running a few ads for them?

Think seriously about what you're saying.

This is not a "stance", I'm mostly talking about the law, and that's something that judges decide on, not myself.

Foreign nations are not allowed to be involved in the electoral process in Romania by law and could lead to the annulment of the electoral process, which is what happened. The process will start again from scratch, nobody was disqualified.

Yes. That’s how it is in North America too. “A few ads” probably no, but if it’s enough to be significant then yes.

Since political advertising is and needs to be regulated, it needs to be regulated. What platform allowed the unauthorized ads to be run and who are we putting in jail? Local TV, radio and print gets held accountable, but a stick needs to be taken to foreign owned social media companies to make them acknowledge their social responsibilities.

But why would the result of the new elections be different unless they disqualify that guy? It's not like there is a way to somehow force his voters to forget the illegal ads etc.

look, the law requires this declaration of funding. There is a constitional article in which the elections must be correct. By doing this, there is an unfair situation and the corectness of the elections is no longer guaranteed. Also, there is no natural growth of a candidate from 5% to 22% in two weeks. It was a massive attack on the people minds with very well crafted messages, practically saying what the people want to hear. This is no work of a person, it points out to a state actor with such vast resources.

Yeah but the consequences would be for that rich person, wouldn't it? Not the candidate themselves

So any third party can spend a bunch of money without the knowledge of the candidate that they purport to support, purposefully not report it, and then that candidate can be disqualified?

If that's how the system works, it incentivizes abuse.

No, you would still be on the hook for breaking electoral law by not reporting spending, even as a private individual not part of the election. This wouldn't be relevant for making a few flyers as the law won't come after you for that, but spending hundreds of thousands on tiktok bots will definitely cause a stir.

Right, so what about if I don't like a candidate and I intentionally pump 1 million euro into her campaign so she gets disqualified? This is what the parent is asking about.

I don't have a clear answer on that for you, but nobody was disqualified in this situation as the election was annulled and will restart from scratch.

This hypothetical situation though is a bit unlikely, as we're talking about quite a lot of money to pump into someone's campaign and anyone doing this will still be subject to attempting to manipulate the electoral process if they do not abide by the law, which could land them in jail and lead to an annulment of the electoral process.

Sure, but right now we're talking about a situation in which quite a lot of money has been pumped into someone's campaign! This situation is proof that people are willing to interfere in the election. The problem is that once you introduce the idea that the election can be "annulled" a bunch of people are going to be motivated to hack the election to get it "annulled" in some way.

> a bunch of people are going to be motivated to hack the election to get it "annulled" in some way.

There will be trials for this, and both the people who bought the ads (if they can be found), but more importantly the media publishers who pocketed the millions will have to answer questions to prove this was legal.

You can't unilaterally "pump some millions" to buy some electoral ads. Someone pocketed some millions and will need to show receipts.

As you well know since you are Romanian there are not many cases of people tried and in jail in Romania for corruption. Now take a state actor and imagine that they are responsible. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend there will be repercussions for this mess except - if possible - make people trust even less the 'system'.

Not many cases? There are many people tried and jailed for corruption, including previous mayors, senators, ministers, more than one prime minister even. Of the many possible critiques of Romania, not jailing corrupt politicians is among the weaker ones.

Most of those cases of even the prime ministers were just for show. Getting a suspended punishment while not having to pay anything back from bribery and no repercussions. This is equivalent to how I punish my kid, stay in the corner for five minutes and promise you don't do it again.

If you also relatively think the couple that are actually in jail they are too few for the amount of politicians or general corruption that is in prevalent Romania.

>and lead to an annulment of the electoral process

That would be the goal.

"but nobody was disqualified in this situation as the election was annulled and will restart from scratch" - how is this logical?

Nothing will change from the annulled election to the new election (candidates will not be invalidated, TikTok will still be there). So if the annulled election was invalid on whatever criteria, the new election would also be invalid on the same criteria...

Honest candidate will just report your spending. :-/

Perfectly fine, as long as the supporter and candidate are not part of the same well known group of interest.

Was it so?

Salient point

What you're missing is that in this particular case the outside interference seems to have been the only support he had

He's claimed zero expenses and his whole stated strategy was "my rise is God's will"

Romania's NSA surmises in this case "God" may have been Putin

So, to answer your question, your spending needs to do some 100% of the heavy lifting in their campaign to match this precedent. In other words, you'd have to be the only guy propelling them. Which nullifies the hypothesis of a candidate you'd want overthrown

> There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the election".

I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN too.

(I am also curious whether Dang et al. use any relevant monitoring tools.)

Don't know about the latter, but I notice your question seems mighty grey… I'd be shocked if HN, of all places, was exempt from internet meddling. It seems to me to be fruitful ground for manipulation, and for years now I've seen an interesting 'double face' of Hacker News: on the one hand, inclined towards techno-optimism, but on the other hand, the pressure to manipulate viewpoints seems nearly Reddit-like in its focus and determination. It's a bit like Fight Club: the first rule of downvoting suggestions of interference is that you must downvote any suggestion of coordinated interference even before you use voting to push any other desired purpose.

I think this is salient to the question and to the fact that it's a discussion on the subject of interference causing a Romanian court to annul the results of an election, but I'll accept correction if my observations are out of line even in this conversation :)

HN is full of all kinds of fun influence, and Dang swears it doesn't exist.

Are you aware that every HN user account associated with a YCombinator company is visible as an orange username to every other HN account associated with a YCombinator company? They sell this as a "Perk". It's a secret club.

"and Dang swears it doesn't exist."

Citation needed. I am aware of statements, that influence campaigns are not as elaborated, as you would expect. Not that it does not exist.

It certainly has a strong Randian influence, despite that particular ideological leaning being beneficial only to a tiny fraction of the population. That could be indicative of tech culture in general though and not necessarily outside influence.

TBH I'd be surprised if any high-traffic public forum isn't heavily influenced by foreign or ruling-class interests at this point.

Libertarianism is rampant here but it's due to demographics: geeks, (actual or wannabe) entrepreneurs, skewing young and male.

It kinda comes with the territory :-)

It's primarily due to the high net worth or high income of people here. Right-libertarian ideology is more than just a set of economic views, it's also a moral framework that places them at the top. It tells them they are intrinsically good for accruing as much wealth as possible. People seek out tribes that morally elevate themselves, and then retrofit made-up reasons.

Bound to be some - I was debating a pro Russian guy a couple of days ago. But there doesn't seem to be an organised campaign as such as far as I can tell.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of "useful idiots" willing to recite straight up Russian agitprop, usually associated with more extreme political views. On the far right, there's a whole subculture of people who seem to sincerely believe that Russia is some kind of "proper Christian country", whatever that means. On the far left, some people will simp for anyone and anything so long as it is anti-US and anti-West - in that retelling, Russia is somehow "anti-imperialist".

In Russia itself there's also no shortage of people who genuinely support the government and its outlook, and some of those people hang out on Western platforms (often, ironically, using VPN).

Which is to say, you're certainly bound to encounter a certain amount of rabidly pro-Russian takes even in the absence of any deliberate targeting.

>pro Russian

doesn't necessarily mean

> Russian influence

>I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN

What exactly is the worry? Undeserved downvotes?

> What exactly is the worry? Undeserved downvotes?

The Russkies must not get our precious bodily fluids.

I think the steelman for this would be something like: people hear factually incorrect assertions with enough frequency from enough different sources and become convinced that these assertions are true. This is basically of the idea of sockpuppeting/astroturfing. Given that both major political parties in the US deploy such tactics, it is not unreasonable to think that they are effective. And when these tactics are deployed by a hostile foreign power we should be even more upset than when they are used by domestic sources.

OTOH, looking for subtle signs of Kremlin influence in every comment is not without its costs either, one of which is that it tends to make people impervious to evidence or arguments that our policy is too hostile towards the Kremlin.

Depends on what you consider "influence". There are certaimly pro-Russian, or at least anti-American, posters. As for the idea that it is being targeted by a campaign of bots or payrolled humans, this seems unlikely - HN is good at sniffing out LLMs and to date we have no indication that Russia can find and afford competent English writers in bulk.

There is a curious human tendency since the earliest days of the internet to refuse to believe in the possibility of organic disagreement. The most stereotypical and funny instance of it are perhaps 4chan arguments carried out by insinuating that all opposing posts are actually made by the same person (or, recently: organised by some Discord channel), but the belief that niche comment sections all over the world are flooded by Chinese or Russian government farm comment slaves who are perfectly literate in the local language and culture and would never stand out were it not for their talking points is now being affirmed even by (formerly?) respectable mainstream institutions. I guess this produces the convenient effect that your populace gets strong memetic antibodies against any dissident positions, even as the proposition is transparently absurd. Where are all those people supposed to come from? Even lifelong techies from Russia have telltale quirks in their LKML posts, and little needs to be said about English text in Chinese docs.

Based on my reading of many controversial threads around elections, politics and the Russo-Ukrainian war, the entire internet, including HN is infiltrated either by Russian agents or their useful idiots.

The more likely reality which is confirmed by votes to anti-establishment candidates is that many people in Europe and the US don’t like the political direction, no matter how much it’s presented as moral and democratic.

I appreciate the details, but ultimately I still don't buy it. The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves. Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign. But they still have agency, they liked what they were being presented with, and made the final call themselves on who to vote for.

That's not what's being disputed and I completely agree with your sentiment. The issue is that electoral campaign law was not respected and thus the elections were not considered "free and fair", but tainted by this shady candidate.

I feel this is kind of stretching the phrase "free and fair". The election e.g. in Venezuela earlier this year was not "free and fair" because the votes simply weren't counted and made-up tallies were published. This is not what's happening here. Here, there is no doubt that people wanted to vote a certain way and the votes were accurately counted to reflect that.

You don't get to use your own definition of the phrase "free and fair" here. Romanian law prescribes that political campaigns need to be transparent in source and funding. They weren't, as per the Romanian court. End of discussion.

Yes, I do.

By your argument if a country (e.g. China?) outlaws competing political parties then the rubber-stamp single-party elections are “free and fair” because they are in accordance with law. In general the whole point of a “free and fair” election is that the government can’t just change the law and rules to get the result it wants. There is an independent notion of “free and fair” election that is rightly independent of country specific law.

No. There is not. Canada also has campaign spending rules because most civilized nations recognize that equal speaking time is required for a fair election. Otherwise you can’t consider the people to be well informed.

There is no “independent notion of a free and fair election”. Personally I think your idea of a fair election is highly unfair and unethical.

All right so we just get the Russians to spend some money funding the conservative party of Canada via tiktok and then when they win the election we can say ha ha that’s illegal!

The conservatives claimed precisely this about the last election, but investigators deemed the interference was not significant enough for a redo.

Foreign interference is one of the biggest threats to democracy today. I’d absolutely support a redo of an election, even if my party one, if it was found to be significant enough.

More broadly I think all democracies need to thinking about ways to handle this problem as it’s only getting worse.

Nobody ever expects the triple reverse wag-the-dog!

IMHO, you are trying to say «if a foreign hostile nation will unlawfully influence election process in Canada, then election will be unfair, ha ha!»

.. probably yes, it would become illegal. I don't think that this is the absurdity you believe it is. It can even be the solution. If

* we want candidates to spend ~the same amount of money on campaign and

* Russia interferes

then the state, Canada or Romania, should block TikTok propaganda. What else?

Also I think that if the "same amount of campaign money" rule is proven to be wrong, and they want to go in an "anything goes" way instead, then they should redo the election, and they shouldn't accept the results with unfair conditions.

> so we just get the Russians to spend some money funding

Ya, that's illegal. If any political party conspired with a foreign state actor to get secret funding and targeted propaganda campaigns on Canadian citizens? You're ok with that?

I think you meant to say, if the foreign state actor independently without the local party conspiring with them, chose to back them up by targeting Canadians with messaging against the other parties and in support of the one they want to win, and you say that's illegal, that would seem wrong.

That I agree. But it still leaves a problem that Canadian have all been manipulated and deceived. At least if it is found out, people should know just to what extent the information they were fed was curated to them by foreign actors to influence you in aligning with their interests. And after that information comes out, if it was that a majority amount of it was, I think it would be fair to have a redo election. Now people could vote conservative again, if they assume that even with that knowledge, they still feel strongly about it.

I'd also add, for future elections, it really shouldn't be possible for foreign actors to target and curate information like that to local citizens, there needs to be safeguards of some sort.

It is absurd that you are equating Chinese one-party rule with spending transparency laws and asset documentation.

Not any more absurd than claiming that nobody has the right to challenge the definition of what "free and fair" according the laws of a specific state (regardless if one agrees with that definition or not).

The fair bit requires everyone following fair election laws.

Think of it like a game, it’s only fair if the rules are unbiased and everyone to follow them. There’s a wide range of possible rules for a fair game, but allowing one player to cheat is equivalent to unfair rules.

So sure, you can have fair elections where no candidate needs to disclose their net worth, or fair elections where everyone is registered to share their net worth, but you can’t have a fair election where some people are registered to share their net worth.

> you can’t have a fair election where some people are registered to share their net worth.

Didn't he do that? As for the election spending even if he's lying about the spending they can't prosecute and convict him without delaying the elections for many months if not more.

At this point any outcome seems like a huge failure of the Romanian electoral/political/legal systems.

I don’t actually know the specifics. I brought it up as a possible silly election law that could still be considered “fair”.

I was arguing against the specific claim that a "free and fair" election is one that is consistent with the laws of the country the election is being run in.

In fact, I think your response proves my point. What you're saying is that the specifics of the laws matter - i.e, whether or not a election is "free or fair" depend on _what_ the rules of the game are, not only on the fact that they are the rules.

Just like the umpire at the tennis match can grant victory to player X, and then take their title away when the doping tests come back.

His electoral campaign posts weren’t marked as electoral material. As a voter I thought they are not paid but true opinions of journalists/ influencers that I respect. It turns out that they were actually paid and not marked properly. So he broke the rules. Now I am going to change my vote.

So, you agree with the opinion stated in electoral material if it is marked as official campaign material but disagree with the same opinion if it is marked as paid marketing material?

I would like to quote Spock here: "Fascinating..."

That’s not what was said

More likely he wants paid advertising to be marked as such. For whose benefit do advertising regulations exist ?

Different person: I might give weight to the word of someone I respect, then change my mind when I find out that person wasn't saying it due to conviction but only for a payout, yes.

I completely understand and fully agree with this idea even if I still have to see one political with a strong conviction that are not paid out in a way or another.

Anyway, if the ideas illegally disseminated through this campaign material convinced the voter to choose this candidate over another, what other choice does he have ? Vote for someone that he wouldn't vote in the first place because of his opinion ?

May be I'm wrong assuming people vote for ideas and opinion...

People will vote for Hitler if you dress him nicely and make him seem to care for your personal problems (Trump die that really well).

The thing is - in a fair election media scrutiny applies to all candidates. This guy flew under the radar, so media couldn't expose him. Therefore it wasn't a fair choice people were given because the mainstream candidates all received significant more scrutiny.

I don't even think you need to dress that person nicely. The film "Look who's back" had an actor in the role of Adolf Hitler talk to random people in the street in unscripted sequences. He readily pulled them over to his side by relating to their everyday problems.

As crazy as the premise is of Hitler getting inexplicable transplanted into the 21st century, the film manages to demonstrate the appeal of these dangerous populists.

I'd argue that if you accept that the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign" then the means by which they achieved their objective are not above scrutiny. Elections are a mean for obtaining as fair (that is, unbiased) a measure as possible of the "true" will of the people, and yet we're starting from "yes, the sample has been altered maliciously, but...".

There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke. If the courts throw their hands in the air and say "whelp, what can you do?" they would be setting the precedence that foreign election interference is only wrong when you lose.

Of course, the analysis rests on fair authorities trying to do good which is a high bar to clear. But letting a cheater get away with it in plain sight doesn't seem fair either.

Who scrutinizes the result? If the people actually voted for that candidate, they won’t trust anybody to look behind the outcome to assess whether it was “fair” or not.

I feel like a large swath of the developed world has forgotten why we have elections. We do it because we don’t trust each other, we don’t agree what’s “fair,” etc. So we establish elections as a way of resolving disputes between people who don’t trust each other. It’s exactly like software security. You create a minimal trusted kernel—the machinery of voting and counting the votes—and then build decision making off the forced consensus generated by the elections.

If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections.

- "If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections."

Lawrence Lessig (well known to HN for his open source law work) proposed that the US Electoral College was created with the purpose of second-guessing elections. (He didn't like the outcome of the 2016 one and was trying to rationalize mechanisms of overturning it).

Lessig:

- "The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that "the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president]." But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people's choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people's choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton's words, "a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice" — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about "winner take all." It says nothing to suggest that electors' freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule "the people" or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-constitution-let... ("The Constitution lets the electoral college choose the winner. They should choose Clinton")

I actually think the electoral college is a solution to a problem so obvious to anyone living then that no one really thought to name it: validating an election.

It’s 1789, and you’re designing a voting-based system. You’ve decided each state gets votes proportional to its population in the presidential election. How do you validate that the result you got from Georgia, two weeks’ travel from NYC, is trustworthy? Seals? They can be tampered with. What about special messengers? Someone could impersonate them.

Solution: send dignitaries that can vouch for each other. The elite of neighboring states is likely to know each other, and you establish a chain of trust up and down the coast. Great!

Except these are people with better things to do than to be errand boys. There has to be something in it for them. Solution: they get to cast the final ballot for President. They are electors.

(This is a theory that I have not validated at all, to be clear.)

An adjacent point is that states are free to run their elections as they see fit with relatively few rules. For example most states have a winner-take-all result for presidential elections where a guy who gets 51% of the vote get 100% of the 'seats', so to speak. But that's not necessary - Maine and Nebraska, by contrast, have proportional systems, where they split their vote proportionally.

So how to interpret the results from one state could be quite different (and potentially subject to rapid change) even if you know the results were genuine. So the results of states always would need to be converted, by the states, into e.g. 15 final votes. So the electoral college emerges quite naturally in this context.

Slight correction- Maine and Nebraska do not have proportional systems; they both use the Congressional District Method. Each congressional district votes plurality for an elector, and the 2 remaining electors go to the statewide plurality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...

EC was, first and foremost, an easy way to bolt the (already-agreed for the House) 3/5 Compromise onto presidential elections.

He’s not wrong in that point. But in modern times, electors are chosen by the party or the candidate. Historically, they were chosen by elected state legislatures. Either way, there was a pretty short chain of trust between the voters and the electors.

That trust isn’t there when the oversight is from random people at an election commission or law enforcement agency.

And yet we still have laws surrounding what constitutes fair participation in the election.

If those laws are grossly violated and the candidate wins… then what? “Sorry nothing we can do” just means you’re a sucker if you follow the rules.

All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en masse. Enough voters to swing most elections vote primarily on vibes more than anything resembling a coherent or informed political philosophy.

Drought caused food prices to rise? Better kick out the current guy. Random weakening of our biggest trade partner’s currency causing lower prices of goods? The current guy is a genius!

> All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en mass

This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.

I’m not saying what we have isn’t an improvement on that. But it’s also maybe uncomfortably closer to that than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. And it is terrifyingly fragile.

Spread the right kind of vibes and misinformation and you can get enough of the population to believe anything. Hell, upset enough people and they’ll start to do it themselves.

We’ve already seen several countries essentially vote themselves into dictatorships based on misinformation. This may have been a near miss.

> I'd argue that if you accept that the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign" then the means by which they achieved their objective are not above scrutiny.

No influence doesn't exist in any country. In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media. In 2016, almost every news outlet in the country were vocally against Trump. Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate. Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced. So people and factions try more and more to impose what is the supposed correct outcome of elections or the definition of democracy.

There are levels to influence. Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election. This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level.

You think that having bad press, as Trump had, was bad - that's not true at all, there is no such thing as bad press. The fact that the media in the US all went against him was just a freebie for Trump in terms of exposure.

Here, on the other hand, no media outlet reported on him, which is very different - yet mysteriously he got 20% from TikTok alone.

So yes, it's good to remove him.

Second guessing an election result based on handwaving like this is completely insane. You do not have a functional mental model of how and why elections work.

Yeah, luckily I don't live in the US where you get a crazy billionaire to fund a certified madman into office, both clearly for money and power reasons that have nothing to do with 'the people' and then let that be valid. No thanks.

>clearly for money and power reasons that have nothing to do with 'the people'

Wtf? Not sure in which Fantasy land you live, but all political candidates everywhere receive campaign money from billionaires specifically "for money and power reasons and not to make life better for the voters", otherwise they wouldn't pay and elections would be worthless to them.

You're just pissed trump won, and ignoring that Kamala received 3x-5x the campaign money from wealthy donors than Trump did. So who's the one being influenced by mad billionaires more?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...

I don't mean the funding, I mean 'free speech' X prioritising everything in favor of Trump just so Musk (not necessarily Trump) ends up with more power for himself and his businesses. I didn't think Kamala was any good either, but this is a shitshow and I'm happy that in RO we don't do that, no matter what all the 'scamming ignorant/dumb people is democracy, so let it run!' people say; lying to people to get votes is not democratic. We saw how great it worked with brexit and we'll see how great it will work out with trump; the people who voted in both cases had no clue what they are voting for (unless you are rich looking for tax breaks and regulatory de-pressuring, then of course you knew what you voted for; moa moneyz); they are lied to and it will be their undoing.

What are you on about? Kamala's campaign has the same free speech access o X as Trump did.

Same with Joe Rogan. He even invited Kamala for a talk and she refused. But Trump didn't and then people blame Joe Rogan for "helping Trump win the elections". At what point is the Democratic Party gonna admit they fucked up every step of the way to connect with the voter, instead of blaming everyone else?

RO is even worse since we're ruled by the same cabal from the communist regime and their chronies and descendents who are basically in every political party. So it doesn't matter who you vote for, the same people will end up profiting off corruption.

At least the US cabal has some entreprenourial billionaires who create top companies and great jobs boosting their economy. RO politics is just thieves stealing from the economy, so we depend on the EU and their companies hiring here for jobs and economic growth.

>the people who voted in both cases had no clue

Please speak for yourself. I voted for Trump and I knew exactly for whom/what I was voting for.

It's funny that democrats are still in denial after loosing big time against an orange felon :))

Instead of taking a cue and learning why they lost, they double down that they were right and everyone else (the majority of voters), was wrong.

So they'll have to keep loosing voters until it sinks in.

> Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election

Based on the media coverage? Building a narrative around a character is done over time, that's what PR consultants do, in hand with journalists and newspapers owners and advertisers.

> This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level.

This is very common in elections. Trump was supposed to lose by a large margin in 2016. Polls aren't votes.

They are saying he was unknown, not that he was unpopular in the polls.

In both elections Trump running by was the aberration. His wins have been a function of the electoral college in action.

Pretty sure Trump won the national popular vote this last time around though? And there’s a strong (politically neutral) argument that Clinton could have pulled off an EC win in 2016 if she had taken Trump more seriously - eg: she never once campaigned in Wisconsin [1].

Going back a bit further, and somewhat tying into the topic of the thread, 2016 Trump owes his GOP nomination (and thus indirectly the Presidency) to a Clinton/DNC op designed to weaken the Republican field.[2] That’s not to say that Trump didn’t eventually resonate with the GOP base, but the powerbrokers of the RNC absolutely didn’t want him and yet their counterparts at the DNC were heavily in favor of putting Trump front and center everywhere.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/clinton-losing-wisconsin-res...

2. https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig...

I think there’s a very strong argument Clinton could’ve won the EC in 2016. There was almost no EC bias this year. Trump won the tipping point state, PA, by 1.8, and the popular vote by about 1.5. The country swung 5-6 points right from 2020. But Harris pretty much just parked herself in PA, MI, and WI and kept the swing in those states under 3 points. If she had won, she very well could’ve done so while losing the popular vote.

It also shows that the counterfactuals are misguided. Campaigning makes a bigger difference than the typical margin of the popular vote. Candidates only campaign in the swing states (if they’re smart) so we don’t know what would happen if they were trying to win the popular vote.

Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2016. It looks like I was wrong for 2024.

Trump won the popular vote and swept all the swing states.

Not the popular vote in 2016.

Stuff like that is pretty common in Eastern Europe, though. Combine very high levels of apathy and distrust with not very mature party systems plus all the corruption and incompetence (not that it’s that different in some Western European countries these days) and you regularly get random unknown guy/party winning just because they are an outsider and are promising to fix everything (e.g. Zelenskyy is probably the most extreme example of that)

He was clearly known by election day, otherwise they wouldn't have voted for him.

That the establishment and traditional media didn't know him doesn't mean that he was unknown.

Then he would show in the polls

He showed up in the one that matters.

I’m sure that zinger felt good to write.

But it doesn’t address the actual question, or point.

And I’m not your opponent.

If it’s important to earn the personal point to you, I’m happy to leave it here.

If it doesn’t show up in the polls, either it’s an impressive polling failure - which is a high bar that has to be passed.

Or it’s something else.

Manipulation also poses a very high bar that must be passed.

Occam's razor here.. Polling failure and it's very clear from the actual amount of people voting for the guy. Yes you can make a conspiracy theory but it's a bit ridiculous.

Most Romanians that work in IT(and post here) live in their own bubble (because they make 5-10x average Romanian salary) and are totally disconnected from the common folks and can't now believe that the person making less than minimum wage that is serving their 3 euros expresso is not loving it.

Those common folks are similar to the rest of Eastern Europe with strict religious beliefs and very conservative so it's not a surprise they vote for someone that they resonate with.

Similar stuff happened in Brussels where a radical islamist party won seats in the parliament by using TikTok tactics. He did not show up in the polls either.

Young people are won over on TikTok, nothing weird about it.

I don't know any of the TikTok people and yet many peers call them celebrities.

This guy broke some rules around elections spending and he will be punished, but calling it Russia interference just because of his politics doesn't have any weight behind it.

If the secret service tells the president it's Russian interference, then it is what it is. The report was declassified and the Constitutional Court has acted on some of the interference complaints, of which there were at least three after the report was published. It has unanimously voted to cancel the election. This is part of the checks and balances of a functioning democracy.

First of all, the secret service did not tell the President it was Russian interference. They said they suspected foreign interference.

Legal decisions can't be based on hearsay from the secret service. Courts take decisions based on proof presented in front of them. For extraordinary decisions, they are supposed to look for extraordinary evidence. The declassified documents are pointing at irregularities, and perhaps a campaign finance violation by one individual. That is a far cry from overwhelming evidence.

I've read the actual reports, they contain facts and details, with names blacked out, not suspicions. They point to Russian interference. They state that the campaign is similar to the ones in Ukraine before the invasion and the one during the ellectrions in Moldova. And the Constitutional Court obviously knows better given the fact that all the judges voted for the same outcome: to annul the election.

You should read them again. They do go into some detail, and they find the following facts:

- CG's campaign was well organized, on Telegram, by many dedicated people (at least some of which are Romanians, such as those identified but blacked out in the MAI report); at least some of these people have a history of extremist and pro-Russian views, but the documents make no mention of any direct Russian connection

- the campaign used large numbers of fake or dormant Tik Tok accounts, and accessed these from many IPs

- Romanian influencers were paid to promote pro-CG messages, and they mislabeled much of the paid promotion videos; some Romanian corporations that funded this are identified but blacked out in the MAI report

- Russia led its own disinformation campaigns in various ways, unrelated to CG's campaign (the SIE report documents various Russian activities, not a single one mentioning CG or any other candidate or party or group of parties)

- the SRI documents mention some data breaches and published passwords; the STS documents vehemently deny that any cyber actor made any successful attack on the core electoral infrastructure

- the shape of the campaign, from content to infrastructure (mass numbers of dormant Tik Tok accounts being resurrected, coordination over Telegram, etc) is veryalmost identical to known Russian campaigns in Ukraine and Moldova

- there is exactly one, non-specific, claim that "a state actor" coordinated with the CG campaign; here it is quoted in full, from the second SRI document:

> the activity of the accounts was coordinated by a state actor who would have used an alternative communication channel to "roll" messages unto the platform

That is the only specific claim that some state actor, and Russia is not mentioned here despite being mentioned in many other places in these documents. So again, only a suspicion of direct Russian interference in the campaign.

And, while these documents suggest those services have more detailed proof of many of the suspicious activities they represent, the Court has not seen any of that proof: they have only seen these documents, as mentioned in their motivation, which constituted hearsay.

But the same Constitutional Court already validated the election results one week ago. It was published in Monitorul Oficial (official publication of new laws and regulations, etc., closest equivalent to US Federal Register). At that time, The Supreme Council of National Defence had access to the documents. They read them and did nothing.

They did not have acces to the declassified reports then and the initial complaints were for something else, voting irregularities in a few named polling stations.

> the secret service tells the president … then it is what it is

That’s an extremely Soviet/Russian mindset. Blind trust is what leads to authoritarianism. Really the opposite of what you’d want in a functioning democracy.

> Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election. This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%.

You can say exactly that about Macron in 2017, he never was elected before candidating for the presidential election. His only public role was as deputy secretary-general of François Holland who was at the time French president.

That is not true.

He was also the Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016. A very public role indeed.

Having an assumption that those 5% were real is showing one is far from the reality of sociological "probing". Especially in Eastern Europe. It is far from a precedent and it has happened many times already in the past 20-30 years that the agencies are blind for certain candidates because... they're not paid to see them.

> No influence doesn't exist in any country.

There are laws to limit this, whether they limit campaign funding or the involvement of certain persons. In the Romanian case, the argument is not whether the right candidate won, it is whether campaigning laws were broken.

> In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media.

This canard again. Prove that something unlawful happened, and then you can talk. If you are butt hurt because Marine cannot win an elections then be relieved: she’s likely to become ineligible for 5 years and a candidate that might be able to win the damn thing will have some room instead. If your pet politician is Mélenchon then lol is all I can say. He’s a reason why France is in this shite in the first place.

> Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate.

This is completely off-base and intentionally misleading. The media endorsing candidates is nothing like state actors at play.

> Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced.

Yeah. Not for the reasons you mention either. The fact that so many people keep repeating these bullshit arguments is part of the problem. Macron would not have had a chance had the others not thoroughly undermined the system for at least a decade before he showed up.

> In the Romanian case, the argument is not whether the right candidate won, it is whether campaigning laws were broken.

> Prove that something unlawful happened, and then you can talk.

Why this double standard? In the Romanian case, nothing has been proven. There are precisely two one-page long reports from secret services saying there were irregularities favoring this candidate. This is barely enough evidence to even start a prosecution, nevermind issue a final judicial decision to overturn an almost finished election.

I'm as happy as anyone with half a brain that Călin Georgescu is not our next President. But the way the courts went about this is undeniably illegal.

> I'm as happy as anyone with half a brain that Călin Georgescu is not our next President.

Aren't you worried about actually getting him (or some pal of his) as president due to the Streisand effect?

I don't know much specifically about Romanian politics, but in general this kind of thing can help rather than harm a politician. He can now claim to be a martyr of the establishment and an opponent of authoritarianism.

In principle, I agree, which is one of the reasons that I think this was a horrible decision.

On the other hand, the court has just shown that it's willing to redo the entire electoral process if the elections don't go the right way. Călin Georgescu will certainly not be allowed to run again. One of the other hard right wing candidates (Diana Șoșoacă) had already been disqualified, for even flimsier reasons, and I don't expect she will be allowed to register either. There is only one far right candidate left (George Simion) - I suspect that they can find reasons to exclude him too.

Whether people might rise up against this or not is unclear. I was dreading some violence last night, but not even a handful of those who had voted with Georgescu, or the far right parties, have taken to the streets (thankfully) so who knows.

> In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media.

> This canard again. Prove that something unlawful happened

Nobody can prove that, but it wouldn't be the first time that alien powers would interfere in French elections, beginning with USA. There is a long list of US interferences in France on Wikipedia [2] and CIA was very active recently in France [3]

* in XXth century: Monnet, Bastien-Thiry, Guy Mollet, Antoine Pinay, Maurice Faure, Jean Lecanuet, François Mitterrand [0], Algiers putsch [1]

[0] https://www.revueconflits.com/soft-power-de-gaulle-washingto...

[1] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/rendez-vous-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_France

[3] https://wikileaks.org/cia-france-elections-2012/

One is legal and open the other is illegal and covertly.

Why are you using the media as an example? They are at least based in the country they operate.

More damning is stuff like AIPAC, or British Labour's material support for the Democratic party in the last election. Foreign lobbies openly "interfering" in an election in ways less favoured countries never would be allowed to.

seems like a bit of a leap from

There are...campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke

the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign"

I'm surprised all the discussions here missed an obvious point, even if it's implicit and not explicitly stated: the shady support this candidate had was the only support he had

He's declared 0 campaign spending. For all we know, the only way he was promoted was by a swarm of foreign-controlled accounts bypassing TikTok's own anti-swarming policies, knowingly or not. The growth in his account was not organic. He had practically zero other exposure to justify his growth

Accepting him as president is tantamount to Romania accepting a president chosen by someone very high up in another state. That, for me, is Romania becoming a puppet state of that power, be it Russia, China or both working together

No, thanks, I'm happy with a borderline legal decision by Romania's Constitutional Court. There were enough red flags in the way this candidate conducted himself for his case to not stand as precedent if a legit candidate is challenged in the future for minor (and even maybe significant, but not exclusive) foreign support

Flip the actors and imagine how you might feel. Imagine in Hungary if Orban was defeated by a radically pro-NATO, pro-EU guy. And then courts in Hungary ruled that said person was unfairly promoted by Google, Instagram, et al. And so the election had to be completely redone. And then some reason was found to exclude this individual from the next election (as will certainly happen here, or he'd probably just win again).

There would be 24/7 headlines about tyranny, disregarding democracy, and more. The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU. Yet when the wrong candidate wins a democratic vote, suddenly everything is entirely different. The 'rules based order' becoming a joke is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.

Nicely said. The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him. Yes, he might have had help in spreading that message, but the message still landed and people chose him.

To now say that the election was invalid when people actually chose him is extremely risky. My guess is it will reinforce a lot of narratives about how evil the west and the USA is. This will only make things worse, and will put the winner in an even stronger position.

>The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him.

Indeed, that's what a lot of the middle upper class urban Romanians with corporate jobs don't understand, that a lot of the people, especially the older less educated ultra conservative ones, resonated with him and his message so they voted for him.

TikTok didn't hypnotize and mind control them to vote for him, they stil had free will, they just like his message the most. Sure his message was full of lies and pandering but that's every single politician.

Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority? Then what's the point of democracy? You keep repeating elections till your preferred candidate wins?

>Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority?

Why do people on this thread keep hammering on this ridiculous point? He is discarded for breaking the law in multiple points, not because he is "undesirable by the urbanites" or whatever ffs. If it was the "soy globohomo candidate" or whatever you'd call it that was breaking these laws, he should also be suspended.

This is the only conclusion I take from this: you are so anti-democratic that you cannot fathom following the rules impartially, that indeed if a court determines that a candidate broke the law it must be because it is trying to manipulate election results. Because this is what you would yourself do if you had that power, protect "your" guy and persecute the "other" guy?

People did not choose him nevertheless. He only got 1/5 of the votes and passed to the second round with another candidate. In the second round he would probably loose, but it is not the point.

The point is that he broke the election law. That is not negotiable.

>Yes, he might have had help in spreading that message

Modern mass social media isn't just "help spreading the message", as everyone on this website must surely be aware. It's not a guy handling out pamphlets. It's a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush.

Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.

I stress: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views......

> Modern mass social media isn't just "help spreading the message", as everyone on this website must surely be aware. It's not a guy handling out pamphlets. It's a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush.

I still don’t understand why anyone willingly subjects themselves to mass social media, there’s absolutely nothing of value and disinformation runs rampant.

I know I have blind spots in my knowledge and believe stuff that isn’t true, but I do my best to avoid being misinformed.

Why do people gamble on the roulette? Why do people get addicted to cigarettes or to heroin?

Good point, it’s the dopamine. Having your beliefs reinforced feels great.

This is exactly right.

While I think it would be suboptimal you could imagine "rerun the elections if the winner breaks campaign finance law or gets support from abroad" as an established norm in western democracies, but that's not the world we live in and the EU would not accept these shenanigans from a populist right wing government.

Developed countries never rerun elections because of stuff like that.

Yes, I think we agree!

Maybe they should. You can cheat all you want but as long as you win, you win. What’s the point of campaign finance laws if they can be broken with no meaningful consequence? The candidate’s campaign gets a “fine” that they pay out of campaign money anyway. But they still can win.

No, they shouldn’t. Holding people liable for finance law violations can still provide signals to the public, which may affect their voting. But you can’t allow unelected criminal justice officials to override elections. That’s a path straight to hell, as has been proven time and again in Asian countries that do that.

How would you suggest they be held to account here?

Keep in mind that their ill-gotten gains include votes, and that a criminal's ill-gotten gains of a crime must be disgorged to hold the criminal to account.

Voters can take it into account. But you can’t elevate legal technicalities above democracy. People will not trust the people administering the election laws over the people they voted for.

It’s a “who watches the watchers” problem. Many countries have tried to impose the legal system on elections and it invariably results in destruction of trust in both elections and the justice system.

Your suggestion that voters can take information into account is precisely what is happening here:

Prior to the election, the information was illegally kept secret, so voters couldn't take it into account.

Now, in a new election, if this candidate stops illegally hiding the information, voters will be able to take the information into account.

This from a personal view is one of the main current issues with America.

The rules often appear to exist to punish the just and law abiding, while the unscrupulous simply ignore the laws, win their current sportball match, and then rewrite the laws afterward to legitimize whatever the results were. Really common theme with corporate America.

A lot of campaign finance laws are almost flagrantly ignored, or superficially followed, with a light slap and a candy treat afterward. Corporate laws are almost amazing when there's a fine that "actually" matters, and not just a round-off error "cost-of-doing-business." Company makes $10^11 - $10^9 revenue per year, gets a $10^7 - $10^6 fine a decade later? Right, that was like 100th to a 1000th of a single year revenue fine.

Look, that’s a fine point for corporate laws. They should be rigorously enforced.

But election laws are completely different. Enforcement of election laws inherently allows unelected lawyers and judges to second guess voters. It puts the justice system above the electoral system, which is corrosive to democracy. What are the checks and balances on the people enforcing those elections laws?

It happens all the time. The US supreme court stopped a recount of the elections in Florida in 2000. In Berlin, the 2021 state elections went so wrong that they had to be repeated two years later. And so on.

> Enforcement of election laws inherently allows unelected lawyers and judges to second guess voters.

Um, legal enforcement of almost any standard allows unelected lawyers and judges to second-guess "the popular will" — for example, in buying goods and services, many people vote with their dollars for the cheapest option as opposed to quality (as airlines have learned). Without enforcement, this "revealed preference" can drive a cost-cutting race to the bottom on the part of producers — adverse impacts on society be damned (e.g., pollution and other negative externalities).

And voters, in particular, can be subject to buyer's remorse: see, e.g., the recent polling about the increase in the number of Brits who voted for Brexit and now regret it. [0]

[0] E.g., https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/politics/brexit-poll...

You are wrong, the same thing happened in Austria in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Austrian_presidential_ele...

That’s different, the austrian example was about actual mistakes in the way votes were counted, cast, who were allowed to vote etc. Not the same as «we blame foreign bots» and someone may have broken campaign finance laws.

No two cases are exactly the same. But annulling an election due to irregularities or campaign law violations is a possibility in any democracy.

Developed countries have laws which oftentimes are even applied, like exactly in this case. Some HN audience has obviously a very naive understanding of what a "law" is and that "disrespecting the law" can have consequences.

Very well said.

All they have done is giving his supporters a martyr to support. Do they actually think that the mainstream candidates will get the votes of the people who voted for this man?

If anything, this will reinforce their anger and distrust in the system.

The anger and distrust in the system are valid. But do you want Sauron to fix it?

I only want to politicians to do their jobs. is that too much to ask?

We had that in the 1920’s in Spain, where only a group of oligarchs (named caciquism) were dictating whom the persons under their wing where voting for. Needless to say, there was collusion among the leaders and only puppet governments in place

So be it, if Google, Instagram, et al. are influencing a campaign, and it is deemed to be illegal with proof, the results of the elections shall be repeated.

> Flip the actors and imagine how you might feel.

The same. If "my" candidate wins in a way that in the long term undermines democratic values, it's still a net negative and I don't want it. That would just empower the "they are all the same" narrative that autocratic politicians use to get to and stay in power.

democratic values

Like “he who gets the most votes wins, even if the powers that be don’t approve”?

> he who gets the most votes wins, even if the powers that be don’t approve

Through fair elections, yes. No election is ever 100% flawless as perfection isn't practical. However, what happened here is blatant cheating involving shady funds.

> he who gets the most votes wins

Aren't you forgetting the essential "while playing by the rules"? Getting the most votes by cheating - and it looks like that was certainly the case here, no doubt about it - is the opposite of democracy. Winning by cheating just happens to be the staple of the very country suspected of interfering. Are you promoting the same "values"?

> the powers that be don’t approve

You are right here. I personally consider it completely normal if the democratically elected powers that be don't approve when someone claims to have won an election - which nobody actually won since the process didn't finish - despite cheating. Winning by cheating is the opposite of democracy. If breaking the law to win is considered democracy, then why is legally restarting elections to win any less so? Hypocritical or trollish preferences aside.

“Cheating” means “manipulating votes.” It cannot mean “persuading voters through means I don’t like.” That opens up a Pandora’s box you cannot close. There’s no limiting principle to draw clear lines about what’s proper influence versus improper influence.

The difficulty of drawing a line is not a killer argument against drawing a line. Both choices suck, but you can still decide what's the lesser evil.

I understand what you are saying, but this is also historically how authoritarian regimes are enshrined, by persuading people in misleading or corrupted ways.

I feel your attitude is a bit defeatist. I think there are mechanisms that can work to protect from deception. For example, transparency of funds, or origin of the message. It's similar to asking for candy bar makers to disclose the true ingredient list and calorie count. It's not a Pandora's box to require this transparency from all politically inclined parties.

And I'm sure other mechanisms could be thought off.

To me, putting in place mechanisms like that and valuing them above even your current opinion of who to vote for matters as much as free speech. It's in the same category. Free speech is another mechanism that even if you don't like what's being said, you should value the right to free speech above it. I think mechanisms to prevent deception are just as important to value even above your personal choice, if you care to keep democracy free.

The scale at which information can be manipulated now, it's easy to be consuming more ideas that are coming from outside your country than inside it without even knowing that all the posts, blogs, tiktoks, tweets, news, memes, and ads you are seeing are not representative of what people in your country are thinking or saying in any proportion, but instead coming from outside your country, orchestrated by rich or organized groups, trying to make you think this is the current discourse, until it becomes the current discourse.

I disagree with that definition of cheating. Manipulating people is cheating. Everyone cheats, just this guy seems off the charts and you have to draw the line somewhere.

Too many people on this thread think in black and white. Because everyone cheats/lie it’s ok to cheat/lie as much as you want.

Very defeatist, as the other commenter said.

> “Cheating” means “manipulating votes.” It cannot mean “persuading voters through means I don’t like.”

How selective, rayiner. But really "cheating" means not following the rules of the activity you engage in. Those rules are thankfully codified in election law and not an internet comment.

Just to give you some food for though, I could poison my opponents. Which doesn't "manipulate votes", it just “persuades voters through means others don’t like”. By your carefully thought out definition, I did not cheat, fair win.

On the other hand I could take a whole load of dirty hidden money (from foreign actors) against what the law demands, and use that money to... "manipulate votes", because effectively I manipulated and lied to the people giving me the votes. So, as you'd say, I cheated.

I have no expectations that you're here to let your mind be changed though, because I don't think many of the hundreds of "troll" like comments here come from genuine misunderstanding.

If you reduce it to just this then Russia is also a democracy since Putin got most of the votes. This is obviously not a sufficient condition to call something democratic.

Well, if that pro-NATO, pro-EU guy declared having spent no money on their campaign while their Face being plastered all over the place and other proof that someone spent money on a campaign for that person, and there's a law that spending and sources of money for elections must be made transparent then the election should be 100% nullified, just like here.

Feelings are one thing, but breaking laws like here cannot just be brushed of as some people having hurt their feelings.

What I do not really understand is why this hasn't been handled before the election, i.e., why was the candidate with seemingly zero monetary transparency even allowed to be on a ballot?

There is a lot of middle ground between "brushing it off" and cancelling a whole election and throwing the choice of millions of voters to the trash.

In Spain there are violations of campaign laws all the time (and I'm talking by major traditional parties) and they are investigated, but typically the outcome is a fine, or maybe some jail time in severe cases, not invalidating a whole nation-wide election. And I suppose it's the same elsewhere because otherwise we would see news of invalidating elections left and right. Shady campaign financing is not exactly uncommon across the world.

> There is a lot of middle ground between "brushing it off" and cancelling a whole election and throwing the choice of millions of voters to the trash.

If elections are rigged, the results cannot be accepted under any circumstances. Using shady, undeclared capital in elections amounts to cheating and invites outside influence. This is a serious issue because we entrust the governance of nations to those elected by the people.

Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought. While no system is ever 100% immune to corruption, blatant disregard for election laws cannot be taken lightly.

If irregularities occur, people can vote again. Yes, redoing elections costs time and money, but if voters still choose the same leaders after understanding how they gained power, then that's democracy in action.

For me, the line is very clear because I've seen it blurred so many times in Turkey, where I come from, and I’ve witnessed the devastating consequences.

>Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought.

Then by definition absolutely every democratic country/society does not function, because guess what: It takes truly stupid amounts of money to win an election. Ergo, you need to buy the election.

Every single candidate and party and reform movement who have argued for removing money from democratic politics have all lost/failed without a single exception. You absolutely cannot win an election without money, without buying it.

The only saving grace is that the guy who spends the most money doesn't always win.

We can go on for years about how it's stupid you need money to win an election, how the amount of money is despicable, how the world is unfair. Whatever: We aren't living in ideal dreams, we're living in the brutally unfair and practical reality.

Yes, you need stupid amounts of money to win, and I see that as normal in capitalist countries given how significant winning is. However, there's also an obligation to disclose the funding sources so people can decide whether they agree with them.

Some may downplay the importance of this, but I see it as absolutely crucial.

It poisonous to say elections are “rigged” unless you can prove votes were manipulated. Otherwise you’re opening the door to wide ranging grievances to second guess election results. By your logic, the U.S. should have redone the 2020 election because U.S. intelligence agencies pressured Facebook and Twitter to suppress information that could have hurt Biden. Do you really want to open the door to claims like that?

There are a few seemingly minor details missing from the conversation above: - his support seems to have come exclusively from externally coordinated online campaigns - his support increased dramatically within the last 2 weeks before the election

Supporting point 1, remember that he declared zero campaign expenses and never explained how he ran his campaign

Regarding the second point, the urgency under which his campaign took off and the proximity to the elections allowed him to elude mass-media scrutiny. A lot of shady details were unveiled since he became popular, which arguably would've made him unpalatable for a lot of his voters

ISW has a fairly good synopsis of the findings from the Romanian secret services here: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/likely-kremlin...

If you want a comparison to the US political situation, this is not your "Twitter did something shady which bumped Trump's result by 2 percentage points"

A better translation is: Chase Oliver wins the White House! (If you wonder who that guy is, Google him - that's what Romanians had to do with CG after the election night; he was on the ballot and you didn't even know it). All while declaring zero expenses. NSA and CIA suspect foreign interference. His only campaign was on TikTok. Looked eerily similar to Ukraine, Georgia (the country) and Moldova's Russian influence campaigns. He eluded TikTok's swarming detection algorithms. He was unknown until late October - the campaign started in earnest 2 weeks before Halloween. Oh, and he actually looks like RFK jr., talks like RFK jr., just didn't have the same notoriety going into the election

> It poisonous to say elections are “rigged” unless you can prove votes were manipulated

The votes were grossly manipulated through undisclosed funding. This would cancel the results in any democratic country.

> Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought

but if a South African gave away $1M a day to support his candidate in the US, would that be foreign interference?

Is this South African also a US citizen? I think that matters.

he was an illegal immigrant, but he bought his way to citizenship. would that make a difference?

The above posts presented no evidence that the candidate or his campaign spent any money on the election. Obviously someone spent money, but why should that disqualify the candidate.

Should news media companies that report positively about one candidate or negatively about another be required to file in-kind donation reports? Can we disqualify their favored candidate if they don’t?

If we statistically see that there are a lot of social media posts for or against a candidate, should we require all social media posters to file in-kind donation reports?

If poor university students with nothing more than time and access to a photocopier be required to report in-kind donations for posting flyers?

I’m sure in any election we could and would find plenty of “unreported” donations, and if the penalty was removing the offending candidate, it would be weaponized to remove candidates from competition.

There is no “fair” distribution of information. Allowing courts to interfere in elections with the assumptions that they can remedy that fairness is a recipe for tyranny and manipulation.

The only reason courts should step in is when legally established processes related to registration and casting of ballots (objective, observable processes) are not followed correctly.

I think the problem is, you man’s it black and white.

Because 100% fair and transparent is not possible, anything should be allowed.

Democracy is not just the fact that people can vote. While manipulation always happens at some level, even between 2 human beings, I believe there should be a limit for an election to be democratic.

I also believe, based on the facts being reported here, that this candidate was far ahead in terms of manipulation.

Although, in his favour, I’d say I haven’t seen a list of facts on all the manipulation the other candidates have done so far, as I’m sure it’s not nothing.

And the theory that TikTok was in on it seems unlikely, they basically burned themselves with a lot of governments with this. I mean, every single established politician in the whole world will take note that TikTok is a threat to him or her and will throw its weight behind banning TikTok.

> The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU.

It's fucking hilarious that this is your argument when in fact blocking opposition candidates and stacking courts and centralising powers and receiving shady money and prosecuting freedom of speech is precisely what Orban has been doing for the past 15+ years, with the EU doing exactly... fuck all about it.

It's like the EU can't win here: if they do something some scream bloody murder interference. If they don't do anything, it's again damn bureaucrats siting on their asses. And it's not always different people holding those different attitudes.

To concur, the US and EU are screaming they’re required to report their foreign influence in Georgia — the same as FARA in the US. They deployed their NGOs to influence and led riots in the streets to block transparency about foreign funding. [0] While at the same time in the US prosecuting a media company for not reporting foreign money. [1]

“Rules Based Order” is anything but based on equally applied rules.

[0] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/09/georgia-foreign-influenc...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Tenet_Media_investigation

> the same as FARA in the US.

WRONG https://civil.ge/archives/591175

I really like how you start from an hypothetical scenario, then extrapolate even more ridiculous hypothetical scenarios to make it sound outrageous...

Of course if you can prove someone cheated an election it should be scrutinized no matter the side.

What even is your point here? That we shouldn't care because you imagine that your political enemies would do the same thing? What kind of argument is that

> is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.

Anti establishment? Like Trump, Orban, Miley, Fico, Meloni? Lmao the only people saying they're anti establishment are themselves and their propaganda, as soon as they're in place they're very happy to milk the establishment and serve their own interests

I'm the first to criticize the EU but if the only way out is through Russian puppets I'd rather stay in until we find a better solution.

Hungarian state propaganda is already painting the pro-EU pro-NATO guy (Péter Magyar) as an agent of Brussels so don't speak too soon.

I don't claim to know all about this situation, but I do discern a recurring pattern that many IT professionals don't (want to?) realise:

Information technology is giving all kinds of actors leverage to exploit our human brain's fundamental shortcomings.

In this case, it's a fscking nazi sympathiser jumping to the fore of a presidential election from nothing.

Remarkable and ironic to me, these actors weaponise the powers of technology while often spitting at the scientific method underpinning them.

> In this case, it's a fscking nazi sympathiser jumping to the fore of a presidential election from nothing.

Why do you call him "a fscking nazi sympathiser" ?

The russian govt are basically the nazis of the 21st century. And hes a sympathizer to them. Hence: Nazi sympathiser.

This equation is just wrong, as applies to both Putin and Orbán.

And (ironically) simply convinces people that those who are concerned about Putin's arguably fascist (as opposed to actual Nazi) inclinations are just hyperventilating and overreacting.

Thus, promoting his (and Orbán)'s longevity.

> This equation is just wrong, as applies to both Putin and Orbán

Why is this wrong?

Because Putin isn't a Nazi. He's something new.

> Because Putin isn't a Nazi. He's something new.

Huh... you know, I never tought about it like that. But I don't disagree with with this statement. thanks

"In 2022, a case was opened against him for promoting individuals guilty of genocide and war crimes after various comments on interwar far-right Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and former PM and marshal Ion Antonescu."

- https://pressone.ro/exclusiv-legaturile-secrete-ale-lui-cali... - https://www.g4media.ro/exclusiv-cine-e-eugen-sechila-aghiota... - https://www.g4media.ro/video-calin-georgescu-miscarea-legion...

Sorry, you'll have to deal with translating yourself, but current browsers make it easy

For context, Romania's fascist movement, prominent in the late 30s, was called "legionaries"

There are many steps between "no scrutiny" and "overturn the entire months long electoral process two days before it was supposed to end based on hearsay".

The right thing to have done here was to let the process continue, have the fascist investigated by the relevant authorities for his likely crimes regardless of whether he won or not, have him stand before a judge, and convict him - and, if he had won, have Parliament suspend him and strip his immunity so that this can all happen.

We have laws and established legal frameworks for all of this. The CCR can't just overrule all other procedures and base its decisions on hearsay.

This 'state actor' stuff only comes up when it's someone you don't like.

Is Ukraine being influenced by a state actor? Is Israel? Is Taiwan?

I agree. he can be prosecuted for not reporting his spending probably, but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake ballots it doesn't warrant cancelling the election. the authorities should put a stop to the interference, and if the interference to influence was his advantage, the 2nd round, without interference, would have him lose. Just let the people vote.

I still believe that the main "problem" was that the front runner party that has been in the 2nd round for 10s of years and which has the prime minister as the candidate, didn't make it to the 2nd round. Someone wanted this fixed. Obviously the prime minister who was 3rd in the 1st round made declarations in support of the ruling.

"but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake ballots it doesn't warrant cancelling the election."

Why do you think you can decide for romanians? They made their voting laws - he violated them. They sort it out.

Why are you even commenting here if you don't believe that people should ever share their opinions on anything?

But yeah not a great look for Romania and its political system either way if they have to invalidate the elections and throw away the votes of a significant proportion of the population to stop them from electing a pro-russian/fascist candidate...

If they want to elect him, they can do so the proper way the next time.

Say he violates voting laws and becomes president as a result. Do you get a situation like in the USA where the police just say “well, you won so all crimes are effectively expunged,” or do you have the even more insane situation of the president being prosecuted for violating electoral laws during his campaign?

Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected? "Tough luck, it's too late now, should just stand by and watch the country get taken over".

No.

I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science front, on the logical consistency front.

After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's sleep.

Someone should document the amount of absolute insanity that the candidate was and maybe then you'd get it. I just feel relief at this point.

> I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science front, on the logical consistency front.

We're in the same place in the US.

> After 2 weeks of frantically trying to convince people not to vote for him, I am exhausted and just want a good night's sleep.

How many of us felt after the US election.

I never thought I would say this, but this guy was, honestly, way way worse than Trump. Not to diminish your torture. But it was off the charts insane. Like... A compendium of conspiratorial beliefs.

In a broader sense, the exhaustive storm of BS is deliberate: When the people are too damn tired to care about which story is really true, it changes the playing field to favor whoever is willing to tell the most-pleasing lies.

That is classic Russian disinformation isn't it? Fill every channel with contradictory information, until no-one knows what to believe.

Eventually it dovetails with the dynamics of: "The way you have to pretend to believe/avoid my obvious lies is a demonstration of my power and an implicit threat to others."

Then: "By forcing you to publicly sacrifice your integrity, I've poisoned any future resistance with mutual doubt."

> He thought: the worst thing about Vorbis isn’t that he’s evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. You can’t help it. You catch it off him.

-- Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

Yes, it is known as Hypernormalization.

My understand of Hyper Normalisation is that it is the construction of a fake reality that everyone agrees on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

Which is different to flooding the channels with contradictory information, so that no-one knows what to believe.

The film 'Hyper Normalisation', by Adam Curtis, is well worth watching, BTW.

Well, that fits as well for the CG crowd.

CG?

Calin Georgescu, the candidate that hasrussian support. Kind of how US abbreviates Donald Trump as DJT.

>that everyone agrees on

(or, at least, pretends to)

Flooding the channels is step one. Construction of the fake reality follows. I also recommend that documentary, it details "how we got here".

I don't think this is what's happening. There is no confusion.

Europe is going down the drain due to the lack of innovation and over-regulation making people poorer and poorer. Refugees cause crime on the street making people feel unsafe.

The average Joe is pissed and votes whatever extremists, as long as they oppose the EU.

Trust me, there is confusion.

We have inequality in Romania, but we don't have flrefugees causing crime or making people feel unsafe.

The quality of life as steadily been improving.

There is lack of faith in the political class.

And Russia is happily adding fuel to that fire. It's a divide and conquer strategy for them.

So? Do you suggest that some people in Romania (and well.. applies to many other countries just as much) should lose the right to vote because they are too dumb and are easily tricked (I mean I certainly agree that they are)? Because what other options are there?

Propaganda channels need to be shut down and replaced with information sources. While originating with politicians, the advertising industry has turned propaganda into a science you can study at University and this is the result - populations, not just dumb individuals, without agency, and democracy just a game to be played by the manipulators. Political truth and spending laws also need to be become agile, because the US election showed you can dump billions into disinformation if you are fast enough to not be blocked until after the election. But it is toothless while someone outside of your legal framework gets to choose the next leader by hiring a marketing graduate and giving them an advertising budget.

The argument is doubled edged and typically what a totalitarian government could say to close competing media outlets.

It is quite ironical that the main newspaper in the Soviet Union was called la Pravda = "the truth".

They also had Novosti = the news. It led to a fun joke: "Why do we have two newspapers, Truth and News? Well that's because there's no truth in News, and no news in Truth."

Alot of these old Soviet jokes are becoming quite appropriate again. What times we live in.

This is true. But nonetheless, it is double edged. Not a fan of closing down sources, more a fan of education and inoculation of the population against misinformation. But that takes decades. And this is now. Not sure what is the best course of action.

People are the sole judge. If you have to nudge them to vote the right way it's not democracy.

Independent courts, not the government, need to determine truth, along with penalties for lying or abusing the system. Any government, not just totalitarian ones, will abuse it if they have opportunity. Just have to hope the courts remain independent or that people notice if the government attempts to nobble the system. There are a number of regions with laws like this that haven't descended into totalitarian states.

We had this for a long time in Europe. It forced everyone to recognize that God did exist and that the sun revolved around the earth. Worked really great!

Hence independent courts, independent from church and state. It also helps to have embraced rationalism and the scientific method.

I think most of suggest that large-scale targeted foreign interference, and benefiting from it, should be illegal qnd have consequences which may include overturning results. And that's the case here, as it is in most countries. I don't think we have to explain why.

How many likes from foreigners on tiktok should a candidate be allowed to receive? Are all foreign countries to be treated equally, or are some foreigners ok?

The're not losing the right to vote, they just get to do it all over again, hopefully without another state actor tainting the ballot. And without inept politicians combining the presidential and parliamentary elections over the course of two weeks, giving Russia the unique opportunity to manipulate both at the same time. The secret service was probably ignored, because they had the correct assessment ready.

So unless they disqualify that guy why would the outcome change that much?

Dunno, people are already brainwashed with Russian propaganda and convinced that the majority party somehow stole the elections, when in fact they're as surprised as everyone else. If they disqualify the guy his votes would likly go to another borderline fascist candidate who's also allegedly backed by Russia. His party took place #2 in the parliamentary elections. He has been formerly declared persona non grata in Moldova and Ukraine, due to unionist, anti Ukrainian actity and links to the GRU. They already disqualified another candidate due to anti EU and anti NATO affiliations, who's also openly pro Russian and a regular at events hosted at their embassy. I think it was a mistake because her votes went to this other crazy person who made it to round two. Russia backed not one but three trojan horse candidates in these elections. This is how important it is for them to derail that country from its Euroatlantic path. Romania now has three right wing parties with over 30% in its parliament and a cancelled presidential election.

How bad you or I think he is is irrelevant. If the people's decision is overturned when the elite do not like it then the country isn't any kind of democracy.

How about overturning the result when the elite accepts it, but then discovers that he (or whoever helped him) actually manipulated people via TikTok?

It's not really a true people's vote in that case any more, so it seems rather like defending democracy.

My point is that our personal views on his positions and character are irrelevant. You seem to be discussing a different point.

You seem to be discussing the Romanian election in a vacuum divorced from the reality that Putin is doing everything in his power to sow chaos in Europe because the calculus just works for him.

Democracy works because it leads to reasonable outcomes for the vas majority of the population. If the election itself leads to unreasonable ones, it ceases to be a good political system.

You know about the old dilemma used for justifying the electoral college "the tyranny of the" majority". Well, me and my countrymen mostly judge that we were about to vote for tyranny in our country. An EC like approach wouldn't have stopped it because of the vote repartition, but only because of electors refusal to vote for a particular candidate. Well, actually, it kind of DID stop it because we had the CCR step in and declare the election null.

This fetishizing of democracy need to take into account the safely valves baked into the law for situations like this and a safety valve just triggered.

every form of communication is manipulation

the only thing you can attack him for is the lack of reporting of election spending

What if it's so bad it would likely lead to lack of democracy? What then? How can democracy defend itself from democratically electing not to be a democracy anymore? Because make no mistake, this was what this election was about.

You elect this guy, you kill democracy. Essentially, this guy's platform was "let's try dictatorship for a change".

Then the choice you are offering is how you would like to kill democracy. Overturning a democratic election is a certain way to do it.

Ok, then the answer is simple for me. We kill it with something that is not fascism. And we try to kill it with something that does not end with the suffering of millions of people.

And we try to keep the best option that could lead to having a working democracy again in the shortest possible time.

Dude, you so much reveal what a brainwashing does to the people it is just unreal. We've seen that behavior few weeks ago after the US elections. How the evil has come now what we'll do etc. It is really a sad there're people who decide theirs truth is the only valid one.

I think you don't fully grasp my point. But maybe I don't grasp yours. Can you explain further?

Not much worth arguing about in this thread. Multiple sleeper accounts and coopted accounts with the same talking points about how someone who used illegal means to sway votes should just be allowed to take the reins of power with a fine. It's not logical and isn't real discussion just the same nefarious actors using social media to try to sway opinion. Get that good nights sleep and I'm glad your country didn't succumb to this new method of warfare like mine did.

You automatically jump to “anything but fascism” as a solution but that’s not a solution at all. That was Harris & Walz do-nothing strategy advertised as a “just don’t vote for Trump.” This type of anti-campaign is fundamentally rooted at brainwashing us to discount any and all fundamental problems to be solved. Instead, it relies on their constituents to rely on opinions, rather than facts. Relying on opinions and beliefs aren’t inherently bad, but when an entire campaign doesn’t present any other reason to vote for them other than “you’re an idiot if you advocate for a party that claims their election was hacked” or “Think about your daughters future,” that campaign is gaslighting the electorate to believe detractors to those views must be anti-democracy. Lo and behold, 2024 results come in and now the losing party cries “There’s no way the majority of Americans like this guy, early votes must’ve been thrown out.” Congrats, you’ve been brainwashed to only see flaws when your ideas and beliefs aren’t validated and reach for any explanation that preserves your worldview- even explanations that you’ve laughed at when presented by the other side)

> something that is not fascism

So let the will of the people stand and then it will just be a democracy with a leader you don't like. Overturning the election is the fascist thing to do.

What if the "will of the people" is for the country to turn fascist?

Does fascism stops being fascism when it has popular approval?

It doesn't, but if you're in a democracy and the majority well and truly does not want it to be a democracy, I don't think you can stop the transition. Attempting to "save" democracy by imposing a minority will on the majority merely guarantees the end of democracy.

It's rarely as blunt as this, though. Usually people who support such politics will insist that it is democratic, and they do have a point: what they really want is a democracy in which the majority (which includes themselves) gets to do whatever it wants to others.

I agree that you can't really legislate this kind of sentiment away, but I don't think attempts to do so are entirely useless, either - they slow down the process, which, at the very least, buys more time for potential targets to realize what is happening and get out of harm's way through emigration etc.

It was not a democratic election specifically because of massive foreign interference. Democracy doesn't work with an adversary propaganda channel in your society. This is why RT and Sputnik news were banned just about everywhere in the West. This is why the US has given Tiktok a year to sell their operations to a US company or gtfo. After this I hope the EU follows suit, kicks them out or at least massively fines them into compliance.

Although in the abstract, we are on the same page, I think it _was_ a democratic election. With interference, a lot of it, but the will of the voters was CG. It's just that CG would have most likely destroyed democracy and destroyed our country.

If the end result of democracy is fascism, one can simply not allow this transition to happen in good conscience. I fetishise democracy less than I value the truth and in turn that less than I value not having people suffer.

We might have dug our own grave here, and the situation is pretty serious. I for one am not a big fan of the CCR decision and am thankful I was not the one to make it. But I understand how they might come to this decision.

The correct course of action is to stop the interference before the people vote. Once they vote, the will of the people has been revealed, the ruling party is a sore loser, and you've lost your chance.

Yes, but they were sleeping at the wheel and making the wrong sort of plans that they always make without accounting for foreign interference.

Too bad. Sounds like they fucked up and are now sore losers.

They're technically still hold the #1 ballot but now they need other parties to form a coalition, just like in other European countries (Germany, The Nederlands). Which is not that bad, because this party was founded by those trained by Gorbachev's KGB to replace Romania's communist leadership and took the clothes of social democracy. How they came to turn against Russia is not entirely clear. Maybe they tried a balancing act between NATO/EU and Russia as Moldova did in the past, but some factions saw the writing on the wall.

> Democracy doesn't work with an adversary propaganda channel in your society.

So the insinuation is that people stop having free agency when they’re allowed to view certain kinds of “wrong” speech? Therefore they aren’t entitled to a vote in an election? That’s not democracy, that’s textbook tyranny.

He seems like a bad guy. If you thought he would manage to kill democracy you're wrong. Especially with the EU support for civil society and the possibility of sanctions if he did something really undemocratic, like demanding a rerun of an election he lost for example.

Orban has been doing his "illiberal democracy" (i.e. not a democracy) thing for 15+ years now. The EU is about as laughably powerless to stop him as I am to stop a punch by Floyd Mayweather. So it's kinda funny you say that.

He does some bad things but he would not get away with anything as extreme overturning an election based on a pretext like this, nor with widespread voter fraud. Eventually he will lose an election, just like Law and Justice in Poland. Judging by the polling trends that could be as soon as 2026: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_H...

The most fucked up part to me is (I’m guessing) the majority of the votes this guy receives were from people that lived under Ceaușescu‘s rule and thought “Yes, let’s bring that era back”. Similar to how domestic abuse victims protect the person abusing them.

What "elite" are you talking about? He broke multiple laws that would made him ineligible to run, and therefore he is ineligible to run. Can you explain what's wrong with this reasoning?

It frankly speaks to your democratic culture, that you can only conceive of a candidate being prevented to run by a shady cabal of elites blocking the candidate they don't like.

Yes how bad he is is irrelevant. I read GP's comment more about how utterly impossible it is for a single person to keep up, let alone fight, the torrent of hyper-optimised propaganda that a few tens of millions can buy on tiktok. Maybe this illustrates why mass social media manipulation skews democracy towards the highest bidder.

He broke multiple laws that would made him ineligible to run, and therefore he is ineligible to run.

Do you have a link to his trial, conviction, and appeals? Was he given an opportunity to respond to the charges, provide his own witnesses and offer his own evidence?

Does the constitution really say, “if foreigners on tik-tok give you too many likes, you may be disqualified”?

Under this framework, what if you simply bribed people to vote for your candidate of choice: e.g. Here's 20 euro, vote for this guy.

You could still say "The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves."

But this doesn't really pass a smell test for what we want democracy to look like.

Similarly, if you live in a country and you see billions of dollars poured into your election advertisements from USA, Russia, China, etc, you'd be like "wtf are we even sovereign?"

That's why there is voting secrecy. You can pay someone 20 euros but they vote someone else.

Paying for votes is illegal almost everywhere. In the US it's up to 5 years jail time.

That is done for good reason, you can't waive it away with 'voting secrecy'.

'voting secrecy' can be defeated pretty quickly by asking the voter to take a picture with phone and report it.

Where I live it's illegal to use a camera within 100 feet of a voting booth to protect the privacy of people's votes. If you tried to take a photo of your ballot, you'd likely get asked by a poll worker to put the camera away.

you need some imagination, this is something that has happened.

you have a phone and the voting booth is private, how is anyone going to catch you?

the other old school (90s) way was you were given an already stamped paper and you had to return an unstamped one to get the money.

or if you want to go communist old school, you had people looking at you through holes in ceiling.

The old-school Soviet approach is to run one candidate uncontested.

After all, if they are endorsed by the Party, why do you think you can do a better job, citizen?

While they did have agency, what if they were also lied to? These campaigns to say nice things about a candidate usually come with equally strong campaigns to lie about their rivals. It could all be lies, there could be nothing redeemable about the candidate. We saw similar in a recent election in another country that I'm not going to mention specifically. This is exactly how fascists gain power.

The problem is that lies are common, and sadly, accepted in politics. What was the last time you saw a candidate who didn't lie in their platform?

I know that people like Trump or Georgescu are in a different league in this respect, they lie more and in a more unhinged way, but it's hard to draw a line and say that their votes are don't legitimate becuase their voters were lied to, while probably voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.

> voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.

Okay, I'll get specific now. In the US this typically isn't because the Democrat candidate lied, it's because of obstruction from the right-wing. Sure, Biden promised to cancel student debt, but he was met with obstruction at every step from the right-wing. That isn't a lie from Biden, but the lack of results is what we get when voters believe the right-wing obstructionist liars telling them that student loan forgiveness is evil. So then people call out Biden for somehow "lying" about forgiving student loans, and then don't show up to vote for the Democrat in the next election, because "they are liars".

True, but in Spain we have had governments with absolute majority from both major parties, and they still lied, and I think most European countries can say the same.

'And those with the deepest pocket shall win, amen'

There are reasons why there are rules on how to influence voters (campaign), actually, despite voters having absolute 'agency'. There are problematic influences you know, considered problematic by the society.

You could say the same about people who voted for Brexit, who after the fact when they came to learn what it would actually mean said they would've never voted for it if they knew the implications. But alas, the United Kingdom was on the receiving end of a similar (dis)information campaign. Yes, the people technically knew which candidate they were giving their vote for, but no, they did not know what that candidate actually stood for.

You are saying a candidate that breaks the law pursuading others to vote for them should still be elected?

The inauguration is coming up.

How do you have agency when influenced.

You act based on information. If someone controls your information, then they control your choices. This is most obvious in cults.

Who controls the information available to the Romanian electorate? Is their internet censored? Their television? Radio?

Why would we needs censorship?

Leaving the topic of these specific elections, and discussing how these operations work-

Censorship isn’t the offensive tool.

You flood an information ecosystem with specific data, and you crowd other information out.

The primary sin in similar discussions is usually the assumption that the best ideas win in the market place of ideas.

This is definitely not the case, because that competition of ideas assumes a fair fight.

Current disinformation techniques target disinformation researchers, flood networks, increase mistrust and spread doubt on fact checkers.

—————-

Holmes, who is wrote the Abram’s dissent, which led to the analogy of the market place- didn’t assume that the best ideas would win.

He assumed majoritarian beliefs would often supplant other ideas.

His point was that it’s only through the process that humanity arrives at better ideas.

Today, there have been domestic and International workarounds found to capture and disrupt the fair trade in ideas.

I can appreciate the viewpoint that the election campaign laws don’t make sense or are in some way unfair as a basis for advocating against such laws.

But Romania has laws regulating election campaigns. Is your point of view that that Romanian courts should not enforce those existing laws?

The laws regulating campaigns have specific penalties outlined for those that disobey them. Election authorities have broad authority to enforce those laws unilaterally during the campaign, without even getting the courts involved, such as having ads taken down immediately, fining those that didn't follow labeling requirements, and so on. People can be charged and convicted for disobeying these laws, through the regular court system.

There is also a law for how the vote results are to be tallied, when they can be recounted, and in what conditions the recount can lead to a do-over of the election (specifically, the law says that only if widespread fraud of a nature that could have changed the order of candidates). The law also mentions when this do-over would take place (the second next Sunday after the decision is taken, which must be within two weeks of the suspect vote itself).

However, no law in Romania stipulates that an election is to be entirely canceled, from the beginning steps of candidate registration before their campaigns, if one candidate disobeyed campaign finance laws and/or electoral ad labeling laws and no one caught them in time.

This response, while correct technically and in sentiment, is why democracy is more vulnerable to influence from a dictatorship than vice-versa.

Ultimately, electoral laws exist and have a purpose. If the law was broken, then it must be investigated and the tainted election must be re-run. These laws are designed to prevent exactly what is alleged to be happening, so it is not a case of misusing power.

> If the law was broken, then it must be investigated

Yes, of course.

> and the tainted election must be re-run

No, not at all. First because there is no law that even mentions this possibility - courts should not get to invent rules and regulations.

Secondly because there is no time to take correct decisions of this nature during the short election cycle, and ensure that evidence is properly gathered, rights are respected, and so on. The standard of evidence used to take this decision is barely good enough to charge someone.

> The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves

They got brainwashed into the vote. The other parties had very weak candidates, some with a bunch of corruption issues that the press raved about just before the election. The others are just weak and unprepared, even the second runner up, a former journalist who's currently a mayor in a small town. This surprise candidate is no different, but he has an empty discourse that strikes a chord with many frustrated voters, without screaming or being hysterical, much like that Stoianaglo guy in Moldova. Of course, it's all mumbo jumbo, the guy is either deluded or a mythomaniac. People are fed up, most of them have given the current establishment a hate no-confidence vote, which Russia has speculated mainly with bots on Tiktok. It was quite easy for them to do so given that the inept Romanian politicians also set the dates of both presidential and parliamentary elections over the course of two weeks.

Have you not been following in the past few years about how susceptible the human mind is to disinformation and manipulation? You fake a positive belief field around a person and a huge number of us flip to align with that perceived crowd. You might disagree for yourself, or want it to be different, or hear people claiming otherwise, but we are very vulnerable to the effect of being surrounded by genuine sentiments (of very marginal perspectives) that have been boosted to appear majority.

Do you disagree with the above?

If these forces are so powerful, why don’t both sides use them and cancel each other out? It seems like people only invoke these explanations when their side loses, when they win it’s because the voters accepted true and good arguments.

It may seem that, but I invoke it bc it aligns with adversarial desires of hostile states (Iran, China, Russian). I assume some proportion of fake humans are part of any system sowing cultural discord, left or right.

The international consensus is that trump sows international discord with USA's allies. I agree. My analysis has nothing to do with right vs left or sides here

Is it possible the election itself was also "influenced" in a more direct manner? (Where the psywar aspect would serve merely to legitimize the result, rather than create it.)

I love the cognitive dissonance at play here

I think this comes down to a very simple question: Is one open to entertain the notion that well crafted messages targeted through algorithmic platforms can drive people to change behavior.

As an ex Facebook person let me offer this thought:

Either advertisement works or it doesn’t. Looking at my past paychecks and stock price of all tech advertisment giants, I have my opinion.

I think it’s preposterous to think that political choices / votes somehow are in a different category for people than all the other things advertisements are run for.

If medical ads work (why would we regulate them) to “manipulate” or convince people to act or spend against their own self best interest, then why would political ones not work.

And in many countries political ads are allowed and are regulated and have massive ad spend. We shouldn’t spend and regulate now if we didn’t think they’d work, would we.

And the debate is not new. I was at FB for Cambridge analytics and saw the damage mitigation first hand - along with the weird conclusions that no harm was done.

Which is the same we see every time a big tech company announces they banned foreign adversaries running influence campaigns and found no evidence they had any impact.

So we have Schroedingers ad product here - highly effective when the ads are official, as measurable via the ads manager, but totally hapless and ineffective when it’s not run by an allowed source.

Romania is a great one minute past midnight wake up call for western democracies to resolve this cognitive dissonance and get off their high horse of humans being selectively able to resist an industry that has mastered manipulation through scientific a/b testing for decades.

Resolving that doesn’t mean getting rid of the notion of free will … one merely need to remember that people’s ability to make decisions is constrained by the data available to them and their ability to make sense of that data.

And time spent on platform and activity - active or passive collection of data - is the constraining factor there. The channels of information are changing and passive absorption is vastly outpacing active informing at a pace most politicians do not comprehend.

The latest ofcom report in the UK shows a 25% increase (1h) of time spent on phones - the vast majority of which is either video social media platforms - in one year!

Maybe 2016 the effect wasn’t strong enough yet. But it’s 9 years of a/b testing down the road, a rise of aggressive engagement video platforms and political podcast influencers and a pandemic later and in the last year alone we’ve seen a massive change in engagement patterns and where people get their data to sensemake reality from.

Also ex-facebook here, who worked in high severity integrity.

The human mind is not well understood, and we've seen correlation between things like exposure to suicide and self injury content and increased suicidal ideation.

We KNOW that advertising works, we KNOW that opinions can be swayed with misinformation (it's easier to fool someone, than convince someone they've been fooled) - just look at QAnon for a great example.

You need some basic rules for what's acceptable in elections, or otherwise the winning tactics will be things like threatening or bribing voters. You won't capture the genuine will of the voters if that's going on.

He very clearly broke the law. We could debate the severity of the violation, but it's certainly enough to make you ineligible to run many places.

The law is about what he is spending. If I go and pay for ads on my own initiative, he doesn't need to declare it just like Basescu didn't declare all the stuff NGOs paid for him back in the days.

EDIT: I do find it impossible for him to spend 0 on it though. You have to travel from A to B (at the very least)

My question in these events is, so why not investigate it and block the running BEFORE the vote? People only care about illegal hiding of funds post elections? Why even let it go on if you can get evidence so quickly just after? In these 6 days what came out that wasn't out say, 10 or 20 days before voting day?

Because before the first round he was considered a nobody, and the second round was scheduled to happen two weeks after the first round. It's too short of a time.

2 weeks is more time than the 6 days since the election. They could've decided to stop things then. I get what you mean agree it's probably messy with the timings, but one gets the feeling that if you lose you can do all the election fraud you want, which is kind of suss to me because people can use decoy candidates for the fraud and if they lose nobody looks into it.

> The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves.

> Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign.

That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.

You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.

That's exactly why we have regulations like public campaign spending, radio/TV quotas, &c. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Most likely

State actors are always working day and night to make you go against your own interest. This happens in every election.

The question is: who gets to decide which are nullified and which are not?

> That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.

> You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.

It is possible for a brain to do, but it is not common because almost everyone thinks based on heuristics, like you are doing.

It is highly analogous to the rise of science's influence on beliefs and thinking styles in the physical realm, but a different realm. We remain in a sort of dark ages in this regard.

Modern mass social media is a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush. It's more than just "an influence".

Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.

I stress this: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views....

In other words, democracy is under serious attack and if we think it's worth savibg, we will need to find robust counter-measures against these methods.

It's not a new idea that this is a serious problem: demagogues were recognized in the Antique.

This is like saying that people deceived by false advertising should have to keep what they were tricked into buying.

Massive election interference should nullify the election. Obviously the evidence bar is high here, but you can't have someone flout election laws and have outside state interference and just shrug you shoulders.

The correct course of action is to take the case to the highest court and get them to make a ruling. They decided a do over because the election is too flawed to continue.

If this guy can run again and isn't wrapped up in a criminal case, maybe they will vote for him, but at least now they have far more information than they did before.

In a lot of countries there are rules, for instance limitations in terms of spending or similar time on air for all candidates. I don't know whether that's the case in Romania, but it is completely possible to rule an election out even if people voted "freely". I know that typically doesn't apply to the US, but there's a world outside of it

> they liked what they were being presented with, and made the final call themselves on who to vote for

This assumes they were presented with accurate information and a proper understanding no?

Otherwise it's just manipulation? So wouldn't you want to have safeguards in place to make sure as a voter, you are not deceived?

Wow, this is a worrisome comment because it reveals a huge misconception of the Free & Fair election process.

Elections aren't about defrauding people - you're framing the electoral process as "people have agency to make an X on a voting card, and it doesn't matter what happens until then".

There are laws for elections for some reason. If you're defrauding people, it doesn't represent agency, it represents that people are misinformed.

Thats like saying older member of family transferring all of his equity to Asian Pig farm also had agency and decided for himself. He liked what he saw being presented with, and made the final call himself on who to give his lifesavings to.

> this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media

Anyone can buy ads and flyers.

If your rejoinder is "It's against the law to buy ads for a candidate if you're not officially part of the campaign" - who cares? Nothing is stopping e.g. me from buying tiktok ads in elections (domestic or foreign).

> Nothing is stopping e.g. me from buying tiktok ads in elections (domestic or foreign).

Yes, and that's a big part of the problem, which is why tiktok is also under fire in this whole situation.

Tik tok is one of many news sources in Romania. If a local journal decides to support a candidate after that one of its big advertiser asks them to, do we cancel the election?

TikTok is a social network where anyone can post any video they want, using it as a news source is very dangerous. And no, the election wouldn't be cancelled if a local journalist supported a candidate, though it's not an apples-to-apples comparison with a social network potentially messing with the algo to support a candidate and not respecting electoral law with regards to sponsored ad content.

Depending on where you do that, yes, you are breaking local laws. Not every where like America sees money equating to speech.

You would be breaking Romanian law if you did that, which you may or may not care about of course.

Depends heavily on where you live. I live in a place where donations must be declared and are capped per person. This ensures we know where the money came from, and prevents disproportional influence from rich people.

An obvious hack to bypass this is to assemble "a group of citizens" who start spending money to campaign for a candidate without any direct connection to them, but in such case, there's a special commission run by retired campaign finance people that analyzes the spending and can take action like demand a candidate to pay back over-cap portion of the money spent to advertise them, even if someone else paid for it. In the worst case, this can be escalated to the Supreme Court, who has the authority to scrap and re-run entire elections if the impact of illegal practices is deemed large enough to sway elections.

So far, this system has produced a very transparent campaign financing environment. It was heavily tested in the first few years and withstood attacks remarkably well. A shadow figure of a political party used a retail network they owned to run a huge advertising campaign for a keychain that depicted the mascot of a major political party in their colors. The party was never directly mentioned, but you were blasted everywhere with their colors and the same animal as their mascot. After years of legal battles, it was deemed an illegal donation and the party had to pay for it all back with penalties. It was such a financial blow that the party underperformed for the next few electoral cycles due to constrained finances. No-one dares to try these tricks since then. Both financially and politically, it's cheaper to respect the rules.

The part that I don't buy is that this is the way that campaign finance violations would ordinarily be handled. Would an election that was won by one of the mainstream parties be completely overturned and rerun if it were found that they violated some campaign procedure laws? I doubt it.

This isn't a few forgotten expenditures, this is a candidate which reported no spending on their campaign and which allegedly had support from a foreign state. You can get away with some things, but we're not just talking about a technicality.

Why did they wait for the elections to do anything about that, though? Or do candidates only have to report their spending after the voting is done?

From what I know the law says that they have up to 15 days after the election to submit their finance report, which is what allowed this to slip by undetected.

>with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.

Harris +3 in IOWA was not an oopsie accident. Now you get to learn that your media runs your polls and they’ll say whatever they need to, too.

You mean Harris +3 in Iowa.

But yes, I agree that a 17-point miss by "the gold standard of Iowa polling" is almost inexplicable unless it was done as a last-minute act to persuade marginal voters to vote for Harris. (Selzer herself says that she thinks the poll's result motivated Trump voters, the preposterousness of which is all the more indication that she intentionally skewed the result.)

am I understanding correctly that you're suggesting that an Iowa poll was artificially made to favour Harris in order to get more people to vote for her?

Yes. People naturally like to vote for winners, and those who look like winners.

There was *massive* news coverage of the Selzer poll's surprising result, with accompanying breathless commentary discussing how this was proof that hordes of Republican women were indeed secretly[1] voting for Kamala. Cue the tens of thousands of Redditards' comments on how Harris would surely win not just Iowa but Texas, Florida, Ohio, etc.

Governor Pritzker of Illinois told an audience at Duke of the poll before its release. In other words, it was leaked to those who would be pleased by the findings. <https://www.semafor.com/article/11/10/2024/gannett-probes-po...>

[1] For example, the Julia Roberts-starring TV ad <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCPck2qDhk> showing how women could and should secretly vote for Harris and not tell their horrible husbands.

(Beware; the cringe level is so overwhelming that if your brain doesn't shut down in self-defense your computer might explode. There is a reason why the ad is not linked directly anywhere on Reddit except a handful of posts with a half dozen comments. If Redditors saw it as truly "stunning" and "brave", it would have been reposted 100 times, each time with 20K upvotes and 3.5K comments.)

do you have a source saying that voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who polls higher?

... and to keep donations coming in. It helped cultivate a sense of hope when they needed it.

We're not talking about an established candidate with pre-existing support, and this was just the first leg of the election with multiple presidential candidates, not the run-off, so don't compare this to Trump v Kamala.

I'm also not talking about a single poll, or ones run by just the left/right, he wasn't polling well anywhere.

I don't have knowledge about the polls but someone made a good point elesewhere. His share of the vote might have increased after the Constitutional Court banned another (far right) candidate because they didn't like her discourse (crazy, right?) https://tvpworld.com/82727489/romanian-pm-suggests-constitut... Rather ironic that the PM criticized that decision while praising the court for this latest intrusion.

This is different. He was basically unknown, last visible in politics in 1996 or so. He isn't a member of any big party and by that I don't mean just the mainstream ones, but like, the top 10 parties in the country.

He's a nobody.

Like that, your defense of bad polling is that only the people who control the polls should have a say in who is elected.

“He’s a nobody!” means “He isn’t supported by our media and elites and corporations”

Have you ever considered that is the reason he did well?

As far as I undertand there is no voting fraud involved. It tells a bit about the establishment candidates if you can become a president by buying TikTok likes with 1M EUR. Someone needs to take a look at a mirror.

> if you can become a president by buying TikTok

He didn't though and I doubt he could. He got 23% of the vote which is a lot but in no way does it guarantee that he could ever come close to 50% in the second round. He only won because the non pro-Russian (i.e. pro-fascist) parties aren't actually united.

> pro-Russian (i.e. pro-fascist)

It's a bit funny that pro-Russian ones are considered pro-fascist, even as Russian government is fighting allegedly "fascist" Ukranians, and their official goal of their war is to "denazi-fy" it. "-You're the fascists!" / "-Oh I don't think so, you are the real fascists" / "-No, way, you are!" etc.

But to be serious, and not being too familiar with the situation, if this guy is a fascist, how the heck did he get 23% of the votes? We're talking about a EU country not North Korea or something of that sort.

Eastern Europe is very different. Years of eastern-block, and the poverty afterwards does that to you.

Yep. I just read this, following the wiki link of OP, and it starts make sense :(

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ia%C8%99i_pogrom

> pro-Russian ones are considered pro-fascist

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck (even if that duck claims that it's an elephant and keeps saying that everyone else is a duck).

I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.

> I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.

Is Putin's ideology a form of "fascism"? Some scholars say "yes", others say "no".

Since you already seem to have a good awareness of the "yes" case, let me share with you some of the "no" case [0]:

> “Snyder is wrong,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

> Russia doesn’t meet the criteria of a fascist state – there is no ideological party, no hysterical cult of the leader, and no revolutionary new regime juxtaposed to the old one.

> Instead, in Russia, “there is an aggressive, imperialist, authoritarian state with a ruling junta”, Mitrokhin said.

I'm not a fan of Putin – I have always been cheering for Ukraine in the present war, and I think it is disappointing it has not gone better for the Ukrainians, but I suppose hope springs eternal – but I also think the word "fascism" is overused nowadays, and I prefer narrower definitions like that of Mitrokhin – the broader definitions miss significant aspects of what Mussolini was actually on about.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/26/how-fascist-are-pu...

It ticks all the boxes from the Wikipedia definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

Authoritarian+, and ultranationalist+, ... dictatorial leader+, centralized autocracy+, militarism+, forcible suppression of opposition+, belief in a natural social hierarchy (+ as far as regime goes), subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation+ or race, and strong regimentation of society+ and the economy+

The same article also says:

> Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."[28] Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascists—especially when they're in power—have historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.[30]

So, rather than purporting to define "fascism", the article acknowledges it has many definitions and it is contested which one is right. Read in the context of the whole section "Definitions", I don't think the opening sentence should be read as a definition, except in a very vague ballpark sense, which isn't meant to be used in decisively answering the question of whether any particular thing is an instance of it.

Furthermore, it mentions key elements of historical fascism – anti-communism, anti-conservatism, and anti-liberalism – whose presence in Putin's Russia is debatable. Putin has criticised communism, but he tends to go for nuanced and qualified criticism rather than the demonisation of it which was historically found in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany or Franco's Spain. He isn't anti-conservative either. Nor is he rhetorically opposed to parliamentary liberalism – he is accused of undermining the substance of it, but he pays it lip service, unlike Mussolini and Hitler who demonised it.

The first actual definition it gives in the "Definition" section is this:

> Historian Stanley G. Payne's definition is frequently cited as standard by notable scholars,[31] such as Roger Griffin,[32] Randall Schweller,[33] Bo Rothstein,[34] Federico Finchelstein,[35] and Stephen D. Shenfield,[36] [37] His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:

And the first of those three concepts is:

> "Fascist negations" – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.

I say Putin lacks all three – he isn't anti-liberal (you can say he is in a contemporary sense, but not in the historical sense that Mussolini was, which is I believe the sense Payne means), he isn't anti-communist (again, not in the sense Mussolini/etc were), and he isn't anti-conservative.

You are trying to align a governance type with a political spectrum.

It’s a category error.

Fascism has nothing to do with the policies, and everything to do with whatever is necessary to retain power, given the society fascists intends to rule.

He can’t be a monarchist, he doesn’t advocate for mercantilism!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

So, when Ian Kershaw, the esteemed historian of Nazi Germany, said that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall", you are telling me he was wrong? Because you seem to think it is much more of a clearcut question than he does.

Yes, Ian Kershaw is precisely right! It is very difficult to define because it is a means by which one, either a person, a party, an ethnicity, whatever, pursues and attempts to preserve power regardless of the will or interests of the people they intend to have power over.

The difference here is that anti-fascists have ethical and moral standards, create and support political systems that make it possible for them to loose, celebrate those losses.

It’s difficult to define a barbarian, but you definitely know it when they come to your town.

No, you are putting forward one particular definition as the "right" one, and arguing all contrary definitions should be ignored, even when proposed by esteemed scholars in relevant fields – which is the complete opposite of Kershaw's point.

Ahh, so we lack a definition, no one is fascist, and killing political dissidents is equivalent to fair and legal elections.

Good is equivalent to evil, because both are hard to define.

He can’t be a monarchist, he doesn’t believe in mercantilism, which random authority says is an essential part of monarchism. Plus, how do you define monarchism? You can’t.

Humanity is so fucked.

(Btw, this problem has been decisively solved by the paradox of tolerance, and was solved in the 40’s, when the apparently undefinable, thus never repeatable, original fascists did their thing.)

> Ahh, so we lack a definition, no one is fascist, and killing political dissidents is equivalent to fair and legal elections.

No. One can condemn a regime even if one doesn't agree with labelling it "fascist".

I'm sure we both agree that North Korea is a brutal and inhuman dictatorship, but I wouldn't call it "fascist" and I doubt you would either. Because "brutal and inhuman dictatorship" is what really counts here, not whether it is "fascist" or something else.

Putin's regime is closer to some Middle Eastern or Latin American military dictatorship than to 1930s/1940s fascism. 1930s/1940s fascism was highly ideological, Putin's regime is post-ideological (Putin doesn't care what your ideology is so long as he gets to stay in charge)

You are making a distinction without a difference.

That you do so with such voraciousness, makes it seem like you are keen to defend those labeled fascist/authoritarian/etc.

Split hairs all day, the gulag doesn’t care.

> You are making a distinction without a difference.

I think it is obvious that your objectives are very different from mine. What's "without a difference" given one set of objectives is a key difference given another.

> That you do so with such voraciousness, makes it seem like you are keen to defend those labeled fascist/authoritarian/etc.

No. I'm interested in having a historical argument about how to define "fascism" as part of "history for history's sake". You seem by contrast primarily interested in defining words to rhetorically assist you towards some political end.

> Split hairs all day, the gulag doesn’t care.

I've lived my whole life in Australia. I think it is very unlikely that the current or any foreseeable future Australian government is going to start putting people in anything resembling gulags. To suggest otherwise is rather alarmist.

That definition doesn't make sense - everyone of every political persuasion is trying to retain power.

Yes: but do they use collectively agreed upon rules?

Do they agree that it is possible, and even more importantly, good that they can loose?

Will they end the system that empowered them once in power?

Liberal, meaning non-fascist, political movements do not destroy the peaceful means of the transfer of power once they have achieved power.

Pretty simple, really.

Care to try to unseat Putin? Wonder how that will work for your health.

January 6th: anti-democratic, attempting to use force to reverse the peaceful transition of power, hence fascist.

> Will they end the system that empowered them once in power?

This is one of a couple of points where the lack of a precise definition causes the perspective to fall apart. Liberals would do exactly that by instituting democratic liberalism in a country after coming to power.

Changing a system isn't fascistic. Even replacing isn't characteristic of fascism (although what is beyond self-identification), the French are up to Republic #5 and republics generally aren't fascist. It is necessary to evaluate the change and impacts of the change in context to work out what the nature of a political thing is.

Well done avoiding the rest of my comment.

Fascists may participate in a peaceful transition of power in order to gain power, then do not allow for peaceful transitions of power in the future. Jan 6 was an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power. Just like the Beer Hall Putsch. Unsuccessful, but totally unambiguous.

Yes, obviously, changing a system isn’t fascism.

Doing so in a way that prevents any other future system change or peaceful transfer of political change is Fascism.

How is this even complicated?

We all come up with rules. Everyone follows the rules. We can all decide to change the rules, but again everybody decides what those rules are, and those rules allow for future changing of rules and actively support the peaceful transition of power. Sometimes there’s somebody who says rules don’t apply to me and I’m the only person who gets to make the rules forever and if you disagree with me I’ll kill you. One activity is not fascist, the other is.

The difficulty is fascists never say they are fascists. they don’t advertise it. They will swear up and down that they’re following the rules, and will abide by the rules right up until they’re powerful enough, that they can just kill everyone who opposes them.

> Doing so in a way that prevents any other future system change or peaceful transfer of political change is Fascism.

Instituting a monarchy isn't fascism, so that definition doesn't work either. Dictatorships aren't automatically fascism; communism for example was explicitly in opposition to fascism. The fascists in fact inflicted huge casualties on the communists despite both ideologies being authoritarian dictatorships. You're running in to the major problem in defining fascism - if a group of people don't say "we are fascists!" then there isn't anything unique that identifies the fascists.

> The difficulty is fascists never say they are fascists. they don’t advertise it.

I swear I drafted my comment before I got to this part. That is literally the only way of identifying fascism. It is a self-identification. It is like being part of a club - the only way of knowing who is in the club is talking to the people/club management. Or if they otherwise identify themselves with a funny hat or something. They didn't actually stand for any particularly clear cut ideologies.

Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context. I also don't care in this specific scenario for musings of individual researches or small groups. Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute, especially considering it basically matches https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism and https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism , today's Russia still hitting all checkboxes.

Wiki, Merriam-Webster, and Britannica already made compilations for us, came to the same conclusion, and I don't see any reason not to just use what they ended up with. I doubt the two of us, or even the entirety of remotely interested HN could reasonably claim we can do much better.

I also disagree with claims about Putin's regime that you made, but feel that it is not worth arguing.

> Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context

Which specific quotes are you claiming I have "taken out of context"? How have I done so?

> Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute

This site is supposed to be about "intellectual curiosity". [0] Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.

Is it? I personally consider research in classification to be of relatively low intellectual value, especially in the already poor sciences of psychology and sociology. So the expectation of value from it, intellectual or not, is extremely low.

I mean, just take "cited as standard by _notable scholars_", "focuses on", and "anti-communism". Then ask yourself: what if the communism did not exist as an idea yet until after 1945, e.g. USSR being just another western democracy, and the holocaust and WWII still went the way they did, would Germany no longer be "fascist"? Somehow I asked myself that question right away, but none of the _notable scholars_ did.

This is why in this thread the fact that masses can be manipulated by wordplay seems more interesting than classification of societies. I'm more intellectually curious about what to do with that problem.

You seem to be using the term "fascist" to mean the same thing as "authoritarian"/"totalitarian"/"tyrannical"/"dictatorial"/"oppressive"/etc.

If you use the word in that way, then the Soviet Union was a fascist state.

But, to someone in the period between the World Wars, that would have seemed nonsensical – the Stalinists and fascists were at war with each other, on the streets of Italy and Germany, in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. Both may well have been evil but only one was fascist.

Because there's another sense of "fascism", in which it refers to a specific type of authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny/etc devised by Mussolini and his associates, as opposed to just authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny in general. And in that sense, whether anything non-Italian counts as "fascism" is going to depend on which elements it has in common with the Italian archetype, and how significant you think each of those elements are.

> the streets of Italy and German

Stalinists/bolsheviks hated the Socialdemocrats just as much if not more than the nazis for quite a while. Does that mean that both groups couldn’t be socialist at the same time?

After Stalin decided to (literally) bankroll the the German invasion of France the French communist party openly and directly supported Hitler and Nazi Germany. Until they suddenly become the greatest enemies again purely due to “ideological” reasons after Barbarosa..

When it comes to totalitarianism the actual ideological differences become sort of meaningless. If Stalin tells you that the Fasicsts are the good guys now or that liberals/socialists/anarchists/etc. are just as bad, well.. it means that they are. Any diversion from the (very flexible) party line is just as bad as supporting the opposite side (or occasionally even much worse).

I’m not saying that there is no difference between Fascism, Naziism or [Stalinist/Bolsvhevik] Communism, far from it. However trying to define these as some sort of coherent ideologies based on fixed beliefs and principles is somewhat pointless due to their extremely shapeshifting nature.

I don't know where you got your first statement from (and without it the rest of your comment is meaningless). I gave you the list of criteria from Wikipedia and you pretended that it only had one item for some reason.

It doesn't tick the most important one, though. Fascism isn't merely conservative totalitarianism; it positions itself as new and revolutionary, the "third way".

But Putin's Russia isn't "third way" at all, neither ideologically nor in practice. It's a classic traditional authoritarian conservative dictatorship.

But revolutionary fascism is but one variant within a broader palette, is it not?

If we substitute "The West and its degenerate values" for the usual enemies, then Stanley's definition seems to describe Putin's regime quite succinctly:

  In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly:

   [A] cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.

I would agree that Putin is not an archetypal fascist in all categories - but he does seem be on the spectrum.

This is the point where there's a lot of disagreement. The OG Italian fascism is explicitly revolutionary, as were its contemporary offshoots like NSDAP, Iron Guard, Arrow Cross, Ustashe etc.

My personal take is that if you remove this requirement, there's no clear distinction between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism, with the two getting conflated.

That's a valid point.

We need to better language to describe the new breed of postmodern terror-driven autocrats like Putin, and post-truth / antidemocratic Western leaders like Trump.

But at the end of the day, it's academic. The real question is, what to do about them.

that's pretty funny!

maybe a political-science researcher, not from Germany would give a less tone-based definition.

> if this guy is a fascist, how the heck did he get 23% of the votes?

Many of us are asking similar questions of the country that just reelected a man who regularly and openly expresses fascist sentiments, incited an insurrection and attempted to commit a coup. Comparing Romania to North Korea instead of to that country is an… interesting choice.

> any of us are asking similar questions of the country that just reelected a man who regularly and openly expresses fascist sentiments

Madness. Fascism is everywhere these days, it seems!

> are considered pro-fascist

If you were to look into Devil's dictionary for the year 2024, you'd see:

   Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/)  

     - people I disagree with.

How about people that say that actual fascists were good people and have anti-smemitical discourse and use word for word fascist speeches and denie the existence of victims in these hideous systems? How do you call those?

Since I would disagree with them, they are also fascist. Also extreme right.

I'm sorry but calling everyone Fascist/Nazist has semantically watered down the meaning.

The gulag doesn’t care.

Italy, Germany, Spain…

Mussolini, Hitler, Franco…

Fascists don’t come out and say: Vote for me, and I’ll commit genocide, and have thought police and assassination squads!

No: fascists want power, will use that power to take aways yours, and have absolutely no compunction about lying, cheating, and stealing to get that power.

Fascists will say till they are blue in the face that you are violating their rights in order to get power, and will claim to support those rights right up until they get power. And then? Freedom of What now? To the gulag with you!

>Someone needs to take a look at a mirror.

irony

something one finger something something something three fingers

https://vocabulary1.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-phr...

goldfinger

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)

"got" you, you joker! :)

You’ve made the classic error: assuming that anyone who tries to become president is acting in good faith.

A well funded bad faith candidate will ALWAYS beat any good faith candidate.

Why? You can tell everyone you’ll do exactly what they want you to do.

Muslims: I’ll stop the violence in Gaza instantly, I support a ceasefire. The other guy wants to kill all Palestinians.

Jews: I will support Israel unconditionally. The other guy wants Israel wiped off the map.

And people make the mistake you are: well, he’s running for president. He CANNOT possibly be that corrupt.

And they will vote, in droves, for the demagogue.

That’s why that word exists.

Was there voter fraud? If not the election was legitimate and you should not complain. Trust me when I say that as someone who is from a dysfunctional democracy, where rioters recently overthrew the government that had won the last election in a landslide.

Once you start saying that the election results are invalid because “the people were misled” or because of ancillary legal violations, or similar excuses, there is no logical stopping point to how far that goes. This is what happened in Bangladesh, where I’m from. People always complain that there was this or that reason why their party didn’t win, they have protests over who won, they boycott elections and then complain the results are invalid because their party didn’t participate. You cannot run a democracy that way. It’s impossible to have a democracy when you try to second guess voters’ reasons for voting the way they did.

> There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the election".

For the record, I'm personally not thrilled by the idea that people have voted for an extremist. However, the situation you're disclaiming certainly seems to be the actual case.

The rest of your comment essentially boils down to "I think that the people who voted for him, should not have voted for him for reasons X,Y,Z"...which doesn't change the fact that people did in fact vote for him.

The question remains: why did they vote for him? What was the motivation?

The ads, or matching of the fundamental values represented by him. Protest? Or something else?

Of course this is futile play with thoughs while democracy is in danger from the benefitiaries themselves (demos), apparently not knowing what and how to do with it, paid influencers and social platforms shepherding them to wherever those want. It happened before.

> The question remains: why did they vote for him? What was the motivation?

Is it typical in most democratic systems that one has to justify their vote for it to be counted? Or does that only happen when the incumbent is unhappy with the outcome?

It is good to know because of understanding. To know if there is undue influence or the problems depicted are only illusions and no reason to intervene.

A state of confusion in the victim is one of the main symptoms of information warfare, and what makes it so effective. The source and extent of the attack can never be clearly determined, and it's easy to dismiss it altogether with allegations of fear mongering, xenophobia, sore loser syndrome, etc.

We've seen this in many countries over the past several decades. The Cambridge Analytica leaks should've been enough for lawmakers around the world to realize that there's an entire industry behind these operations and to take action in the interest of national security. Yet major regulations haven't been passed, and even the proposal of a TikTok ban is highly controversial.

We're living in strange times, and I fear it's going to get much worse before it can get better.

No, the rest of the comment is mainly a list of crimes that are alleged to have been committed in financing the political campaign, which is the grounds for the anullment

You're reducing elections to voting, while it is only the final stage of a proper democratic process.

First comes the preparation of the public opinion — it is campaigning, political advertisement, debates, etc. This shapes the voting outcome.

At this stage it can be heavily influenced by foreign actors (adversaries), this is why in most countries there are laws regarding the transparency of political campaigns (funding, ads, and so on). You can't let China elect presidents in your country...

> doesn't change the fact that people did in fact vote for him

It also doesn't change the fact that if Russia didn't pour a lot of money into his campaign, he wouldn't have gotten any votes.

Voting is the only thing in the democratic process. If the people are easily convinced by tictok, that's on the voters.

> Voting is the only thing in the democratic process

Voting is not the only thing. If it was, Russia or Belarus could have been considered democracies — people get to vote there (in case you didn't know). You can research why those countries are commonly considered autocracies / dictatorships, despite holding elections.

> If the people are easily convinced by tictok, that's on the voters

If people are easily addicted to heroin, is that on them by that logic? Ok maybe. Now imagine if China were smuggling heroin into the U.S. specifically to destabilize American society — would you still blame the people? Or might you consider it reasonable to fight against that?

>Russia or Belarus could have been considered democracies

People voting a way you don't like is different from fraudulent votes. Comparing the two is disingenuous.

>is that on them by that logic?

Yes.

> different from fraudulent votes

No, Putin would have won in elections even if you removed fraudulent votes (there is a fraction, but it is not at all decisive). He wins not because of it.

In those kind of countries elections are won way before the voting takes place. So the voting is just an act of the regime's legitimation and is irrelevant regarding the outcome.

As far as I can tell, there is no actual evidence of foreign interference, unless you count "using a foreign app" as foreign interference. The tik-tok accounts that they speak of could have been created by anyone.

Actual evidence points to people mobilising themselves, including printing propaganda and putting it up on walls, see Arad county as an example https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

So we all agree that it's actual people and not bot that voted for this guy right ?

Does it mean that whoever control the most popular social media in Romania also controls the result of political election ? That's more terrifying to me than just a candidate funded by Putin and who lied, it's a whole generation of 'tiktok zombies' voting for whoever their influencer tell them to !

Is their no education or political education in Romania ? Legal age to vote got to be above 18, so it's not just kids anymore.

You seem surprised. This has been happening all around the world for several decades now. The Cambridge Analytica leaks made it evident that there's an entire industry pulling the strings of democracy behind the scenes.

Given enough time, dedication and not much resources anyone can get a group of individuals and entire societies to think and do whatever they want. This is straight from the advertising playbook, delivered via the greatest propaganda machine ever invented: the internet, adtech and social media.

Cambridge analytica was laser focused on voters from a few American 'swinger' state, it used lot of data to show personalized posts that would play on one fear or wish to get them to vote republican.

This is tiktok influencers...

Yes, as a libertarian, I'm astonished. Everyone over 18 should be able to think for themselves and at least be mature enough that promoted and sponsored politicians from tiktok influencers don't have your best interest in mind.

I'm not above everyone else, people can fall for propaganda, especially when it's well made. I studied Nazi propaganda movie, they are extremely clever in the way they make you think what they want you to, and admittedly in the right condition I would fall for some of the less extreme idea, but here it's a new low, it's an insult to intellect.

If that's what people fall for, they are no more than apes with smartphones.

This is not much different from what CA did in many countries, not just the US. TikTok is the most popular platform today, so it makes sense that these tactics would migrate to it. Besides, CA was just one company of an entire industry doing these operations, which includes state-level actors. This industry is very much alive and prospering today.

> If that's what people fall for, they are no more than apes with smartphones.

You claim not to be above everyone else, but then say this. We're all susceptible to psychological manipulation, and we know that propaganda is very effective. Just because you haven't been manipulated in this specific way, doesn't mean you aren't in other ways, whether you realize it or not.

People voted, the question is how big of an impact do these bots have when it comes to promoting content on social media, because it seems like a lot. There's also a huge issue with TikTok being owned by China, which is not an ally nation to Romania, and with China's support of Russia in their ongoing war against one of our neighbors our intelligence agencies are suspecting foul play.

I don't think this is specific to just Romania, a lot of people are glued to their devices on a daily basis in search of something to satiate their dopamine hunger and they'll take whatever they get fed by the algorithm.

Critical thinking is not something our educational system does well, we're more focused on getting you to learn things like a robot and reproduce them for an exam. The lack of real educational reforms is something we'll keep seeing the effects of for decades to come.

But this just comes down to “we need to overrule the plebs when they think wrong!”

That’s antithetical to democracy.

Is not really breaking news that people can be influenced through media, is it ? I'm not surprised that the people in power had the brilliant idea to use this pretext to cancel the free vote and put back PSD on track to win (after they lost the race). But I'm amazed that so many educated people manage to rationalze it and are going along with it - while claiming to value democracy !

I wonder if there may be parallels to other countries. Perhaps that makes social networks worth billions?

> Does it mean that whoever control the most popular social media in Romania also controls the result of political election ? That's more terrifying to me than just a candidate funded by Putin and who lied, it's a whole generation of 'tiktok zombies' voting for whoever their influencer tell them to !

Now you get it.

> The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law.

its very possible that HE didn't spend anything. that's how US political campaigns work. the vast majority of spending is by third parties.

If you're not in control and responsible for your own campaign, how can they be in control of the country once they run it?

If they inspired people to support them during their campaign, they'll have more support to delegate and spread their cause

In some countries (NZ for example) this does not exempt you from reporting requirements unless your total spend falls under NZD$15,700.

but not at the penalty of annulling the election results

the government would just levy sanctions against the third party that failed to report

Here's a private message archive from one of 40 Romanian counties, volunteers organized themselves and printed the propaganda out of pocket, without having been asked by the candidate to do so. I reckon the same happened everywhere: https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

The reality on the ground, so far, supports the theory "voting will continue until you elect the one we want you to elect", I've seen no actual proof otherwise, only opinions by old people in positions of power.

This could just a psy op, or totally fake.

Where are these records from? Telegram?

> ...with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.

Obviously I'm no expert in Romainian voting procedures, but how does that make any sense without there being vote tampering? The polling must have been able to see him coming. It is hard to see even a state actor successfully pulling off that sort of insane last minute blitz without resorting to a mind control ray.

Legit or not, something insane just happened.

A couple of other possible explanations: 1) People voted who don't normally vote, the main reason Trump has often overperformed polls. 2) Pollsters wanted to avoid a preference cascade.

I think 1 is the most likely reason. It's important to remember Romania is much poorer and more corrupt than the typical Western European country which means the established political parties are both less popular and more vulnerable to disruption by (in this case somewhat unhinged) outsiders.

Don't forget: people tend to lie in polls if their real vote preference is deemed unsavoury by the current mainstream media.

This wasn't the case here, CG wasn't a well-known candidate with a large party behind him.

Yes, that's also a very plausible explanation

It happened incredibly fast

Polling did see it coming. But the growth was so unprecedented, the pollsters questioned their sanity (read: methodology, or at least sampling bias)

The campaign propelling him happened during the two weeks preceding the election. Enough to create a wave of enthusiasm, just short enough to fly below the radar (of him properly getting scrutinised)

Romania's NSA report suggests the campaign was a copycat of campaigns in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Romania either had an X factor that made this one succeed, or the state actor managed to nail the way it calibrated the campaign this time

He would not be my choice for candidate, but if the entire claim is that he won because of TikTok (and not because of voter suppression or ballot stuffing) then overturning the election was a complete fuckup. If polling showed that much less support then the poling did not take into account how modern voters act.

I should stress that I disagree with everything he stands for, but if democracy is to mean something we have to accept that what people freely choose to vote for is who wins.

This "experts say" type explaination might have worked back when publications pushing such a literary style explainations had credibility.

An FT opinion piece thinks that the interference angle misses the point:

https://www.ft.com/content/37347819-22ba-4b6d-a815-ec6115a8f...

For many years, political and economic conditions in Romania have been ripe for this sort of breakthrough. Blaming it on Russian interference and the support that Georgescu generated through the social media platform TikTok — factors cited by the court on the basis of declassified intelligence reports — is to miss the larger point.

The FT is the opposite of a pro-Russian outlet. This is the first time that I see a European mainstream paper acknowledge broader issues, which gives some hope. The article also makes the valid point that nationalistic movements are not unambiguously positive for Russia. This is a self evident point, which has also been suppressed for the past 10 years.

I’m American, and we could tell you some stories about criminal irregularities in our elections!

But the time to do this sort of thing is before the election, and preferably before reliable polls.

After an election takes place, everyone, judges included, are influenced by its result. That’s inappropriate.

Why not exclude the candidate before people went to the polls?

Is there more round(s) where this guy could have been eliminated rather than cancelling the election result? That's the bit that confused me. Seems dangerous to strike down results when they appear to come from people voting like idiots rather than election voting machines being hijacked.

I agree with 95% of what you said, but TikTok is about to be resurrected by the Trump administration. There’s no way they will let it go under, it has helped them tremendously, and they will reward corporations for loyalty

All I could read was: I don’t like the guy and will buy any excuses given

It looks like they cancelled the elections because the wrong candidate won and now they are scrambling for anything that will justify, after the fact, what they did. Meanwhile, they hope that "he is evil and supported by the Russians" is enough to make people mind their festive holidays rather than what the government is doing.

So Romania does not have politicians living in homes, or driving around in cars owned/financed by their political supporters?

And what about assets owned - not by particular individual, but by their friends or family.

BTW - sorry if that's a bit Too Balkan ;)

We can certainly see that a powerful entity is working very hard to show that Georgescu is the devil. Meanwhile: 1. We didn't see any proof or any official claims that he did anything wrong, only speculations. There is certainly no justification for cancelling the free elections. 2. The spotlights are only on him, there is no analysis on how the establishment candidates used social media or the source of their campaign funds. Claims that PSD and PNL used public funds for their campaigns were quickly forgotten and not investigated. 3. Ask any Romanian and they will tell you how corrupt the government is. They control the justice system and the Constitutional Court. Any claim that they are on the right side of the law is laughable.

Not forgetting the elephant in the room: free people went to express their choice via a free vote and that freedom was taken from them. In an EU country !

Romanian here. Discussions of cancelling the election happened way before the cyberattack. AFAIK for the first time in a very long time the largest two parties did not win and they started panicking and scrambling to re-do the vote count.

Do you think the protest candidate will do better or worse in the rerun?

He’s going to be arrested his TikTok’s were too good

It's unclear if he will be allowed to participate again, due to his sympathy for the Iron Guard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard) which is outlawed, and some pending criminal cases for money laundering, as he reported 0 expenses in the election campaign, which is impossible.

Did tiktok convince 20% of the voters to vote for a racist, or did they trick 20% into unwittingly voting for a racist? Hopefully now that everyone is talking about him and his affection for religious fascism a lot of those voters will realize what they voted for and change their vote in the future.

They voted for him because he speaks pretty well for a politician. Also some of his messages really land - consider that Ukraine is losing (very very slowly, and can still win), so it makes sense to talk to both sides since it's unclear who will be calling shots in the region. Moldova is definitely next, right after Ukraine, and it cannot defend itself even from one mechanized brigade.

>Ukraine is losing (very very slowly, and can still win),

This is not remotely true, Ukraine can't retake what it's lost they have no men left. If it were true Zelensky wouldn't be contemplating ceding territory to Russia. It sucks but Ukraine lost in 2014 when the world let Crimea get annexed with no response.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/zelensky-says-for-first-...

Just depends on how you define “winning”. Right now both Russia and Ukraine are losing a lot compared to before 2022.

By their own goals, Russia already lost this war 2 years ago. They may end it with a little extra territory and people, but that's not a victory, again, by their own claims.

Ukraine can't retake what it's lost they have no men left.

You're extremifying.

You could have said "they don't have enough people". But instead you had to dial it up to "they have no men left".

No matter what is actually happening on the ground -- you definitely won't be able to make heads or tails of it, if you keep confounding yourself with rhetoric like this.

> You could have said "they don't have enough people". But instead you had to dial it up to "they have no men left".

The realities of war are not LGBTQ-friendly.

My male cousin has not been allowed to leave the country for almost 3 years. His wife is in Germany.

I'm sorry you got triggered, but that was absolutely in no way what I was getting at.

That line had nothing whatsoever to do with this "people"/"men" nonsense. I was referring simply to the quantifier.

Thanks for the explanation.

What’s the difference between those two?

Subtracting the "people" vs "men" noise, I was trying to draw the distinction between the phrasings "they don't have enough people" and "they have no people left" (in both cases to meaning available to fight).

The former suggests a situation which is quite dire, and that is certainly accurate in regard to Ukraine's current situation. The latter (if taken at face value) is essentially totalistic, and objectively misleading. That doesn't mean that that was their intent, of course. But to my ears it comes across as an overly emotionalized and in any case muddled characterization of the situation.

Kind of like when, say, a startup is going through rough times and someone says "everyone's leaving" when really it was just their friend and a couple other people who have left.

There's a word for this expressive style, btw: "histrionics".

Thank you for this in-depth clarification. Much appreciated.

I'd argue the situation is quite dire and the, arguably fatalistic, phrasing is not incorrect here.

Men are not allowed to exit the country, and I know personally quite a few cases where males, who were in no real fighting age or condition, were literally picked up on the street and sent to the front. With handcuffs and aggressive force. In my former hometown.

So, staying in your analogy, "everyone's leaving" is rather correct, with the modifier "...who has enough money or sheer luck". "But they're still there" feels like nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking.

Well, we disagree about the language issue then. Which in any case means essentially nothing compared with what these people are going through.

In that sense I appreciate your clarification as well.

Cheers! What a nice & civil disagreement :)

You’re missing the forest for the trees. You claim “they have no men left”. This is false, and reduces trust in everything else you say. You might be right about your main point, but the argument you provide is not convincing.

As one datapoint I’d love to hear a convincing argument, and really don’t have a strong opinion on who will win. If you make a more trustworthy argument for why Ukraine will lose, I promise I’ll read it

Edit: truthfully, this is the most convincing argument I’ve seen so far https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-ukraine-win-t...

Are you sure you've replied to the right person?

Oh lol I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right, this isn’t the comment I was trying to reply to

Edit: wow, somehow I wasn’t even close, I’m like three generations off

What? Why are you shoehorning LGBTQ into this... the intent of “…no men left” is well understood, and the vast majority of soldiers in Ukraine are male. The colloquialism is the same as your username rrr_oh_man. Man, and men is used are used in the same vain.

And what does this have to do with your male cousin?

Please re-read the thread, you might have misunderstood.

GP's comment was:

> You could have said "they don't have enough people". But instead you had to dial it up to "they have no men left"

which I, mistakenly, as GP pointed out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349533, assumed to be a play on "there are also women on the front". Which there are, but in vastly fewer numbers.

No, I understood clearly.

"War does not determine who is right—only who is left."

You're right that there are men still living in Ukraine, Zelensky is still alive after all. However, the manpower situation has been pretty bleak for a while. [1] I'm in regular contact with people in theater and I'm not far off in saying 'there are no men left'. Russia is still advancing albeit slowly. We'll likely have new borders in a few months. Almost time to update your globe.

[1] https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2024-03-16/ukraine-v...

We're broadly on the same page it seems. I just found that the original choice of wording tiltied more into the territory of spin than a sober assessment of the state of things. That is all. Unfortunately, this kind of blurring has permeated the general discourse.

Best to luck to whomever in your in contact with.

I won't be changing my globe for anyone, however.

People do put a lot of spin on this topic. Your initial reaction is completely understandable.

Thanks, hopefully they'll be home soon. I've been mowing his grass for nearly 3 years, hardly a commensurate sacrifice I must admit.

We each do our part. Every bit helps.

> Russia is still advancing albeit slowly

Isn't their rate of advancement a lot faster than a year ago?

Yes, but it also seems to have plateaued, and has held steady for the past 9 months or so.

In the sense that advancing by two fields a week is much faster than advancing by one field a week, yes. By any absolute metric it is not a "fast" advance.

The first week of the war was a "fast" advance. Even this "accelerated" rate is basically on par with WWI.

His messaging regarding Ukraine was not something that positively affected his campaign, on the contrary it ignited political opponents over his anti-NATO views.

His campaign landed better because of his palatable way of speaking and saying a lot without saying anything, as most people that voted for him were not really aware of his positions on any serious subject.

Yes, I said multiple times he was Schrodinger's candidate, he could hold multiple mutually contradictory positions at the same time. Pretty ridiculous.

Romania is a member of NATO, they don’t need to give two shits about Russia being a regional power because they will not be invaded by Russia as long as the US is part of NATO.

His campaign messages weren't outright extremist, just your casual populism, impossible promises and a dash of dogwhistles. Once he won the first round of elections, people really started to look into his past and it's pretty insane.

I think he is legitimately insane. He fits schizotypal personality disorder to a T. Multiple psychologists told me he fits.

Our Democracy(tm) is when elected candidates are judicially removed due to accusations of having unfavorable "sympathies"

This has not happened yet, it's merely a speculation at this time, but the accusations have a solid foundation in videos of him talking about the subject and even plagiarizing speeches by famous Iron Guard members.

Romania does not have free speech like the US, we have protected speech and there are some sympathies which are simply illegal, whether you agree with it or not.

I know nothing about this situation, but I bet it's like when they say Trump = Hitler, because he had a rally at MSG.

Nobody's calling him Hitler, there's a lot of very weird things the guy says though, as he's pretty heavy into religious mysticism and a bit of a nutjob, some of his hits:

- Pepsi contains nanochips that enter your body

- water isn't actually H2O

- capitalism is communism, there is no difference

- everybody accepted that Covid exists, there's no such thing, there never was

No, it's way beyond that.

He got booted out of one of the other far right wing parties when he publicly praised Romania's 1930s-1940s fascist/nazi dictators as "heroes, who maybe did some bad things, but a lot of good". He has refused to diaavow them every time he has been asked about them.

One of his major campaign leads wears Romanian nazi symbolism (think the Romanian equivalent of a swastika). The other one often posts about those same dictators, especially in commemoration of their deaths.

He has started one of his speeches with an exact quote from one of said dictators.

This is beyond all of the insane conspiracies and religious mystic declarations, from seeing aliens to "C-sections interrupt the divine cord", "water is not just H2O, it is information, that is why they bottle it to keep this information contained", and so many more.

One of his major campaign leads wears Romanian nazi symbolism (think the Romanian equivalent of a swastika).

One of these, perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romanian_fascist_symbols....

If you could provide these symbols (in Romain) that would be very helpful. And if it's not too much trouble, a few keywords (in Romanian) of that speech so I can look it up.

Not doubting you in the slightest, but these don't seem to be easily searchable (and I'd appreciate your take).

Sure, here are some links:

- The leader with the legionary / Iron Guard pin (what I called "Romananian nazi movement" pin) [0] (the man on the left is wearing the top Iron Guard symbol as a golden pin, the man in the center is Călin Georgescu)

- Wikipedia entry on this movement [1]

- The copied speech fragment from marshal Ion Antonescu, the Romanian military dictator that allied with Hitler [2]

- Wikipedia entry on Ion Antonescu [3]

- if you want some keywords on the people here, you can search for Eugen Sechila [the person with that pin], neo-legionari, Antonescu, Corneliu Zelea-Codreanu (the leader of the legionary movement in the 1930s and 40s, whom Călin Georgescu was praising)

[0] https://www.bursa.ro/calin-georgescu-apropiat-de-neolegionar...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eoE9zQ16b0A&pp=ygUiY8SDbGluIGd...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu

Extremely helpful - mulţumesc

when they say Trump = Hitler, because he had a rally at MSG.

No, not "because he had a rally at MSG".

But because of the things he said at that rally.

Do you understand the distinction?

It's also definitely not true that most of the people saying he's a fascist are saying he's "a Nazi"; that's an overdrawn distortion. And a lot of these people with concerns about his rhetoric don't even necessarily think he's a fascist per se; though they do find a matter of concern that he seems to at least be channeling fascist rhetoric.

Whether you agree with them or not is beside the point. What seems much more significant is that you seem to have a weirdly muddled (and hyperemotionalized) view of what people actually think about Trump, and why.

Uhm, you have "sympathies which are simply illegal"? Wow. You trust the government to tell you where you can lay your personal sympathies? I sometimes run into casual statements like this that make me SO GRATEFUL I live in the United States.

I don't trust the government, but I do trust history on this. If you're curious about the movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard

I'm very grateful to live in Romania and have a lot of things about the US that I disagree with, but I understand it's a different country with a different history & culture.

At least they have more than 2 candidates (and less than 14).

That sounds pretty anti-democratic, that the election can be cancelled because the incumbents disapprove of where the people who voted against them got their information from.

The court members are politically appointed by exactly these people. This is a corrupt system, has nothing to do with democracy. The Constitution was rigged from the day it was created by former Communist regime people.

No, there are clear laws that candidates have to mark their campaign ads as such and that they have to declare their campaign finances. One candidate did not do this.

Who is considered the establishment in Romania?

As far as I can see, modern Romania appears to be ruled mostly by the Social Democrats whose candidate came 3rd and was disqualified from the second round. They also appeared to have roots in the Communist era, is that right?

Can we say that this move was to save the Social Democrats? Who were supposed run agains't the liberals and win I guess, but this pro-Russia candidate came from nowhere and the 2nd round turned into pro-Russia vs pro-West, right?

PNL & PSD are establishment parties in Romania. We are a young democracy, since the end of 1989 when we ended communism with people rising up to fight in the streets for a better tomorrow, so the aforementioned parties do have roots in communism, but they are by no means communist parties.

The Social Democrats haven't won the presidency in decades and their current candidate sunk them in this election process even though he was sure to win, but some missteps he took associating himself with people connected to a huge real estate scam sunk his campaign.

Whether this move helps Social Democrats (PSD) is unlikely, as their current candidate is still just as unpopular and would most likely not win.

You are correct that because of this Russophile candidate the runoff turned into a pro-EU vs pro-Russia fight.

Why the Romanian diaspora is so much pro-Russian? I have some idea from the Bulgarian diaspora but I don't know how much it aligns with the Romanian.

Not as much pro-Russian as they are anti-establishment and also surprisingly anti-EU, even though they live in EU outside of Romania. Many of them are working minimum paid jobs in tough working conditions, plus they have trouble integrating there, so they dislike their current situation and find the blame in EU & the country they're living in.

There's also tremendous amounts of anti-EU propaganda on social media which they're subjected to and most people in today's age don't bother fact checking anything so they just trust whatever's showing up on their screen.

I think it is more about urban vs rural voters. Latter group is more likely to vote with CG, even after emigrating. It takes more time for them to pick up western values simply because they are economically disadvantaged at home and to a lesser degree abroad as well.

Georgescu's voters don't see themselves as pro-Russian. They think of themselves as "patriots", anti-LGBT, and anti-establishment. They also think that we are helping Ukraine too much, at the expense of domestic issues.

These are the messages that were used on TikTok, an open pro-Russia message would have been buried quickly.

Romanian culture is pretty conservative by modern Western standards. All the gay stuff is completely foreign and anathema to someone who grew up in it (most Romanians are orthodox Christians) and the political correctness/liberal propaganda is a return to the communist system but as applied to culture rather than economics. Russia is seen as the last bastion in Europe willing to stand up for traditional values.

What is his stance on Moldova? Doesn't pan-Romanian nationalism have a strong undercurrent in Romanian politics? And how does that play in with Romanian-Russian relations?

Every politician in Romania has a "pro Moldova" attitude and even a pro-union attitude (there's no legal mechanism to make this happen, so it's very shallow).

In Moldova, where lots of people have Romanian citizenship as well, Lasconi received 56.5% of the vote, while Georgescu received 3.11% of the vote.

Makes sense. I'm very curious as to why Romania was caught so off guard in comparison to Moldova despite a very similar disinfo campaign barely a few weeks ago against Sandu (heck, I'd assume this disinfo campaign used the exact same personnel).

On which note, was there any reuse found in comparison to the campaign in Moldova?

I'm predicating this on Georgescu's anti-NATO stance (that said, I don't really follow EE politics that closely).

We don't have all the answers yet and there's a bunch of speculation that the intelligence services were a bit incompetent or even supported him in hopes of taking votes away from other candidates, but things may have gotten a bit out of control and they underestimated his popularity.

Georgescu's stance wasn't super well known to most of his supporters and it's not what was being pushed, he's mostly flag-waiving, talking about sovereignty and God, not really saying much of substance, but he's palatable if you don't know his views and he was something fresh compared to the other candidates that were more known, thus giving him a boost among anti-establishment types.

He's not completely new to the scene as he was touted as potential PM by a minority political party at some point, but they also distanced themselves from him to clean up their own anti-EU image.

To be honest, I think this guy just had more charisma. He really feels like a very natural salesman, with a smooth voice, gray hair, catchy turns of phrases, etc. While I think what he said was ultimately shallow, I see why many felt hypnotized by him. You can check out his video swimming in an icy lake, talking about your immune system just being an extension of your freedom as an individual, etc. He is definitely talented as a cult leader.

Romanian here too, anyone with a bit of a brain and not biassed would tell you that this unknown guy growing in 2 weeks was not normal.

Any person in any country with a bit of inteligence could also tell you that this guy did not used ZERO funds in his campaign as he declared , so if you are his fan go pray he will not go to jail for fraud or treason, but probably politicians already have their jail cells upgraded for their fat asses, he will write some book and get out a bit faster.

Growing relative to what ? The polls that the government media fed the people non stop, claiming that no-one else stands a chance ? Also, just because he didn't register inside your bubble, doesn't make him "unknown": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C4%83lin_Georgescu

> AFAIK for the first time in a very long time the largest two parties did not win and they started panicking and scrambling to re-do the vote count.

This is what it sounds like. Everyone's talking about "democracy vs Russian interference" but I think it's realpolitik.

The top two candidates who were to compete in the final election were Georgescu (a lunatic) and Lasconi (SRU, a moderate outsider). Lasconi was second only by a small margin to Ciolacu (SPD, current president).

Immediately after the first election, the court (mostly consisting of SPD) ordered (EDIT: one) controversial recount they blocked almost everyone from seeing. Some suspect the plan was to declare a miscount and get Ciolacu into second place. Then the first election would not be rerun and the final election would be Georgescu vs Ciolacu.

Except if it came down to them there's a good chance Georgescu would've won, since people would know SPD corrupted the results. And Georgescu really is a lunatic, so perhaps SPD decided they'd rather have Lasconi then him.

Except now it seems SPD hasn't fully decided this. This election seemingly gives them one more (albeit small) chance, while still ensuring Georgescu won't win (unless he out-votes even someone like Lasconi, but I can only hope not. Georgescu makes Trump look like Abraham Lincoln).

> Immediately after the first election, the court (mostly consisting of SPD) ordered a recount.

The recount was ordered after two complaints were lodged, one which was rejected and the one that was accepted was from another contender in the first round of elections. Only one recount was performed. Only 4 of the 9 members of the court were proposed by PSD (SPD), 4 were proposed by PNL and another by UDMR.

> Except now it seems SPD hasn't fully decided this. This election seemingly gives them one more chance

While they do have another chance, the fact that they were at the wheel while this happened, and the fact that their candidate was in 3rd place even after the recount will not help them in a new election.

> Only 4 of the 9 members of the court were proposed by PSD (SPD), 4 were proposed by PNL and another by UDMR.

You forget to mention that PSD/SPD and PNL are running the government together now, and UDMR (minority hungarian party) will ally with anyone who gives them a few government positions. Usually with SPD.

You know if this ever happened in another European country where the main parties were asleep at the wheel and a newcomer takes the stage - this sounds like a trial balloon to see how Europe likes cancelling democracy when it doesn't suit the ruling players.

France is another case where the main ruling parties (PS, LR and even ENS) have lost legitimacy but they paint the newcomers in ascendancy (RN, LFI) as both "useful idiots of the Russians" and "antisemitic". Then the President decides to break norms and not follow the will of the people in his choice of PM (typically should go to the party with most votes in assembly) - and faces no reprimand from the institutions.

Both of these are tests what needs to happens so Europe remains tied to NATO and the US. But these are both symptoms of a decaying order.

Meh, IMHO the actually important rule is that parliament has to consent to the PM. He appointed someone else that had a majority tolerating him, and then parliament changed its mind and now Macron has to pick someone else. The left only has a plurality not a majority. Why should that guarantee they get to pick a PM?

If the results were 30% centrists, 30% leftists, 40% RN would you be calling for a RN PM?

Macron chose someone from the lowest-vote party (LR) to spit in the faces of the voters. The largest bloc was leftists, so they should have gotten an opportunity to form a government. But even if he decided his future was with the extreme right, choosing an RN PM would have made sense.

But no, he chose a personal ally who nobody liked.

So no evidence to show, except a "declassified document" allegedly proving that TikTok gave preferential treatment to Georgescu.

I'd be curious to know what preferential treatment means, how preferential, and how it balances out if we include treatment of all candidates across all media, but alas, that is not for us to know. Even Georgescu's opponent, Elena Lasconi, condemned the court's ruling as "illegal" and "immoral".

This just looks like a soft coup to me.

The documents explain clearly that thousands of sleeper accounts were activated days before the election and shared and promoted campaign material that was not marked as such in a highly coordinated way that suggests a state actor.

So what is the problem here, that a state actor tried to influence the elections? Then why aren't we talking about the influence of NATO&co as well? Because that can be found everywhere, starting from google search results. Search "elena lasconi campaign donors" on google, you'll get exclusively results about "far right kremlin backed election interference". Repeat the search on yandex.ru and you'll get actual results about Elena Lasconi.

The problem isn't really a state actor here; it's that people didn't vote the right way™.

As to the effect a last minute campaign on TikTok can have on the elections, I wonder can you really sway 9 milions of votes in a few days on a platform that basically nobody over 30 years old uses? That must have been some incredibly good propaganda!

It was only ~2 million votes, as it was a first round with 10+ candidates.

I disagree it was about voting the right way, it was about campaign law violation.

> Then why aren't we talking about the influence of NATO&co as well? Because that can be found everywhere, starting from google search results. Search "elena lasconi campaign donors" on google, you'll get exclusively results about "far right kremlin backed election interference". Repeat the search on yandex.ru and you'll get actual results about Elena Lasconi.

NATO is a defensive military alliance. Has there been any proof that they're manipulating search results or social media sites?

Also, regarding your Google search: the reason why you're getting poor results is because you're searching in English for a subject predominantly connected to romanian language sites.

> NATO is a defensive military alliance. Has there been any proof that they're manipulating search results or social media sites?

Plenty, if you accept the possibility[0]. The US army is openly recruiting for PSYOPs[1]

- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63731751

- https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-careers/sp...

> the reason why you're getting poor results is because you're searching in English for a subject predominantly connected to romanian language sites.

Easily disproven by repeating the search in Romanian. Again, on google I get mostly results about Kremlin foreign election interference, while on yandex I only get relevant results. I tried several combinations of keywords.

Does getting other results on Yandex make you trust them more?

Is "different" for you "more true"?

Depends if it's different from a lie I guess

how about filing your expenses according to the law?

This happens all the time on major social media sites including reddit (in fact, it's quite easy for anybody to buy a reddit account with high karma). In the Depp vs Heard case that swept the internet it was found that both sides heavily used online bots to influence online dialog (tho Depp was better funded and obviously more successful)

When your astroturfing is targeted at an election, and you get caught, the election can be annulled to ensure its integrity. What's the problem here, exactly?

The problem is simple, either that astroturfing is so effective because it's rooted in truth and resonates with the issues the electors are concerned with, or electors are so easily influenceable that we can't have democracy without giving up free speech. Pick one.

There are electoral laws that state how political advertising can be done, and how it can be funded for an election campaign.

Social media companies have to adhere to these laws - for example to say when something is an "Ad" paid by someone for the benefit of the candidate.

In this case, apparently although TikTok was notified that a bot network controlled and paid for by nobody-knows-who was spamming election ads (untagged as such), and they ignored everything.

This is all illegal.

Nothing this dude said is rooted in truth. It's just we're so stupid we'd turn out country into a dictatorship for nothing.

There are real grievances, no doubt, but this guy was so full of hot air there is no reasonable explanation for buying into him except us being irreparably dumb.

Just read the room, the far-right is winning across all of Europe, not just in Romania. It'd be more extraordinary if the left won the elections.

> we can't have democracy without giving up free speech

Social media does NOT equal free speech.

It’s clear by now that giving everyone “equal standing” in the ability to reach millions is a recipe for disaster, manipulation, hysteria, amplification of extremism, mental health decline, and so on… traditional media had social constraints and we need those back.

> traditional media had social constraints and we need those back

Sure, let's go back to only governments and bilionaires having access to media, that was so much better.

But the people that now supposedly defend free speech all ARE billionaires.

Musk is a free speech absolutist (his words), yet biases his own companies algo to shove more of his stuff down my digital throat. I guess everyone is free to say stuff, but not everyone is free to see what people that are non-Musk writing?

So much for free speech and billionaires.

"Social media" is dominated by billionaires far more than "traditional" media ever was.

Zuckerberg is worth 10 times what Rupert Murdoch is. Musk 30 x. And Murdoch is a huge outlier. Most traditional media is barely holding on by a shoestring.

And yet, my comments and posts can reach thousands of viewers with very little effort. There's no way I could do that with traditional media.

And that is a good thing. That’s the whole point. You should go through a few layers of validation (journalist who has professional ethics, a publishing company with legal responsibility, etc).

Especially if yours is a reasonable and polite voice. The guy who screams murder daily, spreads blood-boiling fake news and constantly causes controversy is gonna beat you by miles.

> journalist who has professional ethics

More like journalist who has to follow the editorial guidelines imposed by a billionaire owner more interested in protecting his interests than letting the public know the truth

> Especially if yours is a reasonable and polite voice. The guy who screams murder daily, spreads blood-boiling fake news and constantly causes controversy is gonna beat you by miles.

That is just a result of the economic incentives of social media. Monetization is based on the amount of views/followers, which are driven by rage bait content. The solution to this issue is rooted in economics.

There are impartiality rules to stop owners from directly influencing the content in media companies. While they can still exert influence via editorial direction, investments, and personal power, it's unquestionably against the rules and you have an entire structure of editors, writers and reporters who have sworn an oath and have clear incentives to keep their credibility intact.

Another important aspect is that you, the reader, actually have a choice of which vehicles will earn your money and eyeballs.

Even when those interventions happened, they are a lot more subtle than turning an election completely around in a couple months. It's still game-able but a far cry from such billionaires directly controlling algorithms which dictate exactly the kind of content you're seeing, where and when.

> The solution to this issue is rooted in economics.

How so? In what plausible scenario does intellectually-stimulating, rational content would win over engagement-driven content?

your comments don't "reach" anyone, they just become part of a vast cacophony which is on the whole algorithmically manipulated to suit the ends of other people who are far more powerful than yourself.

The free speech is a US thing. Most EU countries do have freedom of expression, but not 'free', speech. It comes from "European Convention on Human Rights" which has some limitations.

I take it you voted for Meloni?

Do you take it that Elena Lasconi voted for Meloni as well? Because she's stated that the court ruling is "illegal" and "immoral".

People were hysterical about Meloni before the elections and then nothing actually happened.

This could be yet another case of the EUSA establishment crying wolf.

>Even Georgescu's opponent, Elena Lasconi, condemned the court's ruling as "illegal" and "immoral".

This seems like pretty important information as an observer with little knowledge of Romania's inner workings.

Elena Lasconi would be highly favored to win in a 1v1. Also keep in mind that both of these candidates are rightwing. Also keep in mind that the leading candidate only got 22.94% of the vote while Lasconi only got 19.18%

If they do a redo and a center, liberal, or leftwing candidate makes it to the second round, Lasconi would have a much more challenging battle

>Elena Lasconi would be highly favored to win in a 1v1.

Not according to polling[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_R...

> both of these candidates are rightwing

Just curious by what metrics do you consider Lasconi to be a right winger?

The USR party is liberal right wing. They get accused of being "sexomarxisti" but that's mostly brainless chants.

They're pro free trade, freedoms, equality, all your runoff the mill liberal stuff.

Yeah, I would call that a centrist party. To me the "right" includes trampling on individual and social freedoms. But maybe I've been brainwashed by American politics.

Well, they are for privatizing health care I think? That's pretty right wing? But, yes your right wind is waaaaay more to the right than the norm.

Wouldn't that qualify a lot of the democratats as right wing since they are pro-censorship?

It is and they are. The slider of politics in the US is to the right and that was op's point.

She would definitely consider herself a right wing candidate, and has even tried before the election to convince multiple right-wing parties to form an electoral alliance and run a single candidate (presumably either herself or the president of the National Liberal Party, the largest right wing party in Romania, Nicolae Ciucă).

This should not be confused to the far-right parties that backed her opponent for the second round, Călin Georgescu.

Basically Romania's political scene has one nominally left wing party, the Social Democratic Party (though their economic policies are often centrist, and their social policies are often right wing, with opposition to civil partnerships and even some resistance to abortion rights)*. They are quite hated as representatives of the pre-Revolution communist Romania, and as very corrupt. Their traditional electorate are those living in rural areas, those living in poverty, those working in the state apparatus, and generally with a lower education.

Then there is one traditional right-wing party, the National Liberal Party (liberal here in the "classical liberalism" sense, basically free market), that is slowly dying off, mostly due to the extremely unpopular current president who was elected on their lists; and due to governing in alliance with the SDP. They also have often been accused of corruption. They are relatively right wing both on economic and social issues.

Then, there is a much newer centre-right party, the Save Romania Union, which has similar economic policies to the NLP and is more socially liberal. They coasted to some success on a powerful anti-corruption, Change message, but have since become embroiled in internal infighting. There are also several small parties that split off from them that have very similar policies. For both these and the NLP, their traditional electorate is people living in larger cities, wealthier, especially white collar workers, with higher education.

All of the above parties are pro-EU, pro-NATO collaboration, agree on providing funds to Ukraine and so on.

Then there's the newest force, the hard right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR, which also means "gold" in Romanian). They ran on populist somewhat left-wing promises (cheap houses for everyone!), hard right social conservatism (anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, very religious minded). There's also a splinter party with virtually the same promises, the SOS Romania Party, and a newer force, The Young People's party. All of these three are various degrees of euroskpetic, NATO skeptics and against providing resources to Ukraine.

Typically when someone in Romania says "the left", they mean the SDP; when they say "the right" they mean "the NLP and SRU", and when they want to refer to the other group, they'll either say "far right", "ultra nationalists", or their own preferred term "sovereignists" (from "national sovereignty").

* There is one small European-style left-wing party that ran in this election for the first time, but they only won 2,3% of the vote

> If they do a redo and a center, liberal, or leftwing candidate makes it to the second round, Lasconi would have a much more challenging battle

Right, so the players want to change the rules of the game because they lost, when the left wing problem is the classic: they’re splitters.

Had the left not been split so many different ways then they wouldn’t be in this position. And they cannot say they didn’t understand the process in advance.

It's less important than seems at first. It was a tight race with 10+ candidates, these two went into the second round. If the entire procedure is annulled and repeated, the other person in the second round is also disadvantaged as her chances to get to the second round again are smaller. Her frustration is understandable, she seems like collateral casualty here.

There is no doubt in my mind that while the decision today is backed by the law it still erodes democratic principles in my country.

The main issue is he declared his election campaign cost 0.

Literally, that is what he declared he spent on his election campaign.

The million euros for the TikTok & social media storm that got him elected has to have been paid by someone though, and according to law this money has to be clean and have clear sources.

He does not have clear sources. Probably also does not have clean money. The source of this dirty money is what is suspected to be Russian-adjacent actors that wanted him to win.

>Literally, that is what he declared he spent on his election campaign.

>The million euros for the TikTok & social media storm that got him elected has to have been paid by someone though, and according to law this money has to be clean and have clear sources.

What if he did indeed spend 0€ ?

If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2 main parties, and don't report it, do they also get disqualified?

> If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2 main parties, and don't report it, do they also get disqualified?

If you pay money to run electoral ads, for someone's campaign, this money has to be declared, and the ads should be marked as such.

In this case, neither has happened.

TikTok also did not ban these bot networks as they should have according to the electoral laws, so there will be a separate investigation that I think the EU commission has started to find out why they are not complying with electoral laws in the countries they operate in.

I see you didn't answer the question i asked (probably because it would make it obvious how untenable your argument is), so I will ask again.

If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2 main parties, and don't report it, do they also get disqualified?

I have no idea, but if you illegally want to get someone elected as president in a foreign country, I suggest talking to a very smart lawyer, not to a rando on hacker news :)

He's not talking about getting someone elected, the inverse actually.

An analogy would be buying github stars or reddit upvotes for an adversary to get them banned.

It all depends on whether the candidate asked for the help.

Okay, so where is the proof he asked for the help?

https://snoop.ro/cazul-bunelu-firma-sustinatorilor-lui-georg...

Explains the money trail, and there's even a nice picture with one of the sovereign candidates and the Tracia Unita group who paid for the campaign.

That's not proof, it's the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist trying to put loose connections together.

They even threw in a tirade about Trump to top it off.

But yeah, let's throw away an entire country's election because of the ramblings of Victor Ilie.

Thank God he put it all together and saved Romania. No investigation needed, he figured it out.

Probably depends on how much money you spend. But spend enough and at a minimum it’ll be considered election interference (the exact rules depend on the country). If there’s evidence the candidate that benefited collaborated with you in any way, then it’s likely they’ll face sanctions as well.

Europe is like the U.S. We don’t have Political Action Committees here, or anything similar. Political campaigns, particularly in the lead up to an election, are tightly controlled and limited to ensure candidates have to compete on an even playing field. They can’t just try and outspend their competitors.

Heck in the UK, it’s illegal for political campaigning to occur outside the few weeks before an election. Obviously politicians will do everything they can to demonstrate their value to the people all the time. But they can’t engage in explicit campaigning, with calls to actions about how to vote, outside of the time limited campaign period. It’s all done to keep as much money as possible out of our political system, and prevent our politics becoming ruled entirely by money, like we see in the U.S. Hell there recently been huge controversy in the UK because out PM accepted some clothes (literally a few suits) from a party donor, and that was considered as being potentially illegal campaign support.

In the US, the past 2 of 3 Presidential elections were won by the candidate + PACs who spent less money.

U.S. presidential elections regularly result in campaign spending measured in billions of dollars per side. In the UK spending is capped at just £53,000 per constituency, which means a total of £34m of spending for a party with candidates in every constituency.

Campaign spending in the U.S. is literally two orders of magnitude greater, the fact that someone wins while only spending $2billion rather than $3billion really doesn’t say that much. Musks contributions to Trump alone are an order of magnitude greater than the total spend allowed for an entire party in the UK.

> If you pay money to run electoral ads, for someone's campaign, this money has to be declared, and the ads should be marked as such.

Do you really think this makes sense as a justification for a court to depose a candidate, or are you just being disingenuous for rhetorical purposes?

If we actually apply your logic as stated, then anyone could unilaterally "disqualify" any candidate by buying political ads on their behalf and not reporting the ads.

How can you advertise yourself if you spent 0€ ? What genius trick is at play ? Come on, it's much more plausible there's something fishy.

Elon companies spend $0 on traditional advertisements and only advertise through word of mouth, viral/social campaigns, etc.

Many celebrities do the same as well via their social media presence.

I don't think anyone is getting disqualified. The elections will be rerun with the same candidates, because the authorities were unable to do it properly the first time.

If you pay a small amount of money for some political ads, nobody is going to care, because it obviously didn't affect the results substantially. If the amount is large enough, the situation may be different. And then both you and Google may face consequences for illegal election interference.

So next time Russia should buy ads for the candidate they want to lose.

1. Buy ads for opposition.

2. Opposition reports invalid figures not accounting for russian ads

3. People accuse opposition of being helped by russia and misreporting funds.

4. Opposition wins, recount stays the same, courts annul it because russia.

Am I missing something here?

You are missing two things.

First, the elections will be rerun. If people think the annulment was unfair, the opposition candidate may get even more votes due to organic publicity.

Second, you can't just buy ads. You must also find someone with wide enough circulation willing to show the ads. And that someone may be liable for the consequences.

No those two things are clear to me.

First, yes they will be re-ran, and it's doubtful the winning candidate will even get to run. Also, where does it end, do we keep re-running it until we get the right candidate? What if it was the candidate you voted for, how would you feel?

Second, yes apparently you can, it happened. If the whole country was able to be swayed by TikTok ads but apparently no politicians noticed then they aren't very good at politicking or governing. If they noticed an issue they should have dealt with TikTok earlier.

So far TikTok hasn't been held liable, only the voters who choose to vote for this candidate.

Right now, TikTok is under EU level investigation, which will take much longer than a few days. If found guilty, it can face a fine up to 6% of worldwide revenues.

Yes, as I said, as of right now they have not been held liable, only the voters have been punished by having their votes revoked.

The voters were apparently too stupid and got tricked by scary russian ads, so we must re-do the elections until they come to their senses and pick the correct candidate.

It's TikTok's fault for letting Russian ads in, so we'll take some of their money and we'll also stay in power. Win-win for the establishment.

It couldn't possibly be that the voters knew exactly what they were voting for... They're too gullible, that's it.

The point is that in the future, TikTok / Google / whatever will have to be more careful with political ads, because they can be bad for business.

Whatever your opinion on the candidates is, it's a fact that many people didn't consider the election results legitimate. In a situation like that, it's impossible to make them legitimate by any administrative action. Courts can make the results legal, but legitimacy is something people decide on their own. If legitimacy is considered important, the only way to regain it is to run new elections. It may take a long time and many attempts, and it may not work at all. But you can't have legitimate elections if the losers don't accept that the elections were fair and they lost.

> it's a fact that many people didn't consider the election results legitimate

it's a fact that more people considered it legitimate, otherwise the candidate in question wouldn't have won the election.

let me ask you this about your "fact" how "many people" didn't consider it legitimate? should be easy to answer since it's a fact.

Legitimacy is not determined by majority vote. It's determined by the people who don't like the results for whatever reason. If the vast majority of them accept that the elections were legitimate, they were legitimate. If a substantial minority of them don't accept the results, the legitimacy is questionable at best, and the country is in a lot of trouble.

> Legitimacy is not determined by majority vote.

> If the vast majority of them accept that the elections were legitimate, they were legitimate.

???

> determined by the people who don't like the results

So I guess I have to ask, which people and how are you determining majority legitimacy if not by vote?

Legitimacy is fundamentally about trust. Trust that the elections were fair, even if you don't like the outcome.

If your candidate won, your opinion on the legitimacy doesn't matter much. If your candidate lost, your opinion matters more. If you think that the elections were legitimate, your opinion doesn't matter much. If you think they were not legitimate, your opinion matters more.

It doesn't really matter if the elections were fair. If the losers don't trust the system, the elections were not legitimate.

A society can handle a small number of people who question its legitimacy. Maybe 5%, maybe 10%, maybe even 20%, depending on the overall level of trust. If too many people don't trust the system, the society doesn't really work anymore. Laws, constitutions, and other institutions are only as strong as people's faith in them.

That is the thing I do not get: the basis for disqualifiying the first round is there for the second round. Second round would be as valid (or invalid) as the first round. Which makes this looks like a soft coup.

It should be noted that Romanian Constitutional Court has a long tradition for yielding to political influence. Read and weep [0]

[0] page 93 onwards Corruption https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1317...

> The elections will be rerun with the same candidates, because the authorities were unable to do it properly the first time.

No, the whole electoral process will be restarted, as if it had never happened, starting from potential candidates gathering signatures to validate their registration. Anyone who wishes to run has to start anew.

And it's almost impossible to believe that the candidate whose campaign was found to be so illegally run that the entire process has been corrupted and has to be restarted could be allowed to run again. This would be pantomime of the highest level. And I'm saying this as someone who thinks this decision was a soft coup.

Annulling the results of an election on an accounting issue is not democracy. They could prosecute him for fraud if he committed it, that's not the same as revoking the vote of the population.

If a foreign state actor gets someone illegally elected in a separate country with dirty money, this is not an "accounting issue".

So the next step for russia is to invest some tiktok money for the the person that would be elected anyways but they hate the most, and this way discredit that person?

Well hopefully they cannot do that in the future, since TikTok is also being investigated in the scandal. They are the ones who pocketed the money for the ads after all, and are required to comply with the electoral laws of the country, which they did not.

(later edit: Actually probably they did not pocket the ad money, since I think the accusation is most of it was not legitimate ads, but puppet-account posts from some service. Of course, TikTok could still be be held responsible to better police these, but perhaps is not the direct destination of the money.)

He only got 23% of the votes and wasn't elected yet, though.

Also what can they do besides disqualifying him or delaying the elections for months(years?) until he's convicted of fraud (hopefully by that point all of his voters would have forgotten all those ads)?

If my university proves I cheated on my entry exams, I fully expect them to throw me out, before or after the first day of school.

What if they think you might have cheated, so they cancel the entire entrance exam for everyone because your potential, unproven, cheating would have given you an unfair advantage over the other students?

Because this is what our court did.

If large scale fraud is suspected, results of exams will be annulled.

If a person is found cheating (and no other interference), that person's exam results will be annulled.

Why do you think this is not the case?

In this case, one person suspected of cheating (only suspected, he is not convicted or even charged with anything at all!) has led to the annulment of the entire exam. Only one of the candidates was found to have cheated, during their campaign. The voting process was found to be perfectly secure and to accurately reflect the intention of the people who voted. And yet, the entire election, starting not just from the vote, but from the moment that all candidates registered and started their campaign, has been annulled and started from scratch.

Any party who wishes to participate in the elections will have to start from step 0, from collecting 200k signatures of people who support their candidacy.

Key part: large-scale fraud.

This is not fraud. Voting fraud is when you manipulate ballots. It's amazing how well intentioned people here tend to believe that voters are influenced toddlers who can't be trusted. Why even have elections?

> This is not fraud. Voting fraud

That's the problem with analogies: they are always inadequate.

> tend to believe that voters are influenced toddlers who can't be trusted.

No, people tend to believe that things like canoeing financing, income sources, political ads etc. have to be disclosed and monitored.

Bad analogy, a student is not being evaluated for a position where he controls the lives of millions.

10 people were competing for president, a position with significant power. Whoever you elect will have powers immediately so you cannot afford to kick cheaters out after the fact, only before.

This election game is played in two rounds. If you find a cheater before the first round, what happens if you remove him? There's 9 left. What about in the second round where it's 1v1? You just gave away the presidency to last candidate.

Romania acted too late in kicking the cheater out. Maybe there were reasons for that, but this means re-running the elections without the cheater might be the lesser evil.

> The million euros for the TikTok & social media storm that got him elected

I just read that it was approximately 360000 Euros paid to TikTok influencers, not millions. Doesn’t change the fact that somebody paid them, yes, but apparently not Millions. Or my source was wrong, am I missing something?

EDIT Thanks for downvoting - I did not want to defend anything, I just read in an article about the court ruling that it was this number that appeared quite low to me, that’s all, I was wondering.

If you can buy presidency with 360k euros or even 1M euros on TinTok likes it reflects how bad the other candidates must be.

or perhaps that sum is incorrect, or perhaps it was state actors with power to force algorithm changes on TikTok or to tiktok via other means without payment.

external state actors interfering with elections is a perfect reason to invalidate.

That’s why I was asking. I’ve got this number from a German article on the court ruling. I do not know if this is in fact the number specified in the ruling, or whether this was a “leak”, or “misinformation”. So I was hoping somebody could elaborate a bit more as I don’t speak Romanian and haven’t really followed the whole thing, and the OP I replied to mentioned “millions”

Edit: https://archive.fo/tAcG1 (nzz.ch paywalled) is the original source, I would argue NZZ is very trustworthy. They quote the intelligence report. You would need to translate to English. Maybe you have a different source that puts this all in question, which I would appreciate

Edit2: Here’s ABC as I just ran across it, mentioning the same number https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/romanias-top-...

here's a first part of some good investigative journalism on this: https://snoop.ro/strategia-cu-bani-rusesti-cum-au-ajuns-recl...

I think this is the wrong way to think about it.

I have no idea how much it costs to run a Russian or Chinese disinformation group, but let's suppose its 360k Euros. That's like the annual salary of 20 higher-income Romanians. If this was just a one-month campaign, that's like 240 TikTok users making more than double the median income in Romania. If they just worked full-time to push stuff out, maybe using a bunch of different accounts, yeah, that's conceivably enough to swamp Romanian TikTok. Keep in mind, there's only about 19 million people living in Romania. How many committed TikTokers are necessary to sway a Senate election in California?

or a single Romanian expat who “made it” in Silicon Valley (I think this would be also illegal though)

you're an expat only if you are an English native speaker, else you are an immigrant. Hence, no such thing as Romanian expat.

Is this a jab at (supposed) American racism/xenophobia? Because by definition I'm pretty sure being a native speaker is not a requirement for being an expat

>An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person who resides outside their country of citizenship

"Expat" is mostly an English (British) thing, much less US. I'd have called it by name, e.g. US exceptionalism/centrism, if that was the case. ("Expat" use rose during the British empire)

In the hypothetical case of a Romanian working in the US, "immigrant" would be a correct term (unless they obtain the green card and become a citizen)

Expat and immigrant are effectively the same thing under most jurisdictions... yet expat carries less stigma and people would prefer to call themselves that way.

Here is some analysis of the court documents:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348942

"They document a social media campaign supporting Călin Georgescu that involved around 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers, and coordinated messaging. "

the issue with downvoiting is a rather blatant attempt of playing a victim: "i just read... xxx moeny". It can be any number, mostly undisclosed.

People gathered and did all the leaflets themselves, read the private chat for Arad here: https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

So he won with a campaign run at zero cost by volunteers? Now I understand why they won't allow him to win.

It would set a dangerous precedent that you can run and win a campaign without multi-millionaire sponsorships from lobbies.

So far, I couldn't find any evidence that he received donations directly. All the bank statements and transactions that have been made public show that other people grouped together and did those things to his benefit.

Old people in positions of power, the so called "Supreme Defence Council of Romania", don't really understand how web platforms work. They released an opinion, which weighs a lot tbh, as did others. But I could find actual proof that the candidate spent any money, neither did the authorities, so far. If there's anyone guilty of breaking RO electoral law, it's the volunteers in the link I posted.

>It would set a dangerous precedent that you can run and win a campaign without multi-millionaire sponsorships from lobbies

This is (in most cases) not a thing in Europe, generally political parties finance themselves and lobbying is illegal.

Why the scare quotes on declassified document? It's a declassified report from the national intelligence agency, which was made public.

Because it's too easy like this. Who's checking the national intelligence agency? Otherwise, whenever something they don't like comes up, they can pull out another document to declassify. It's basically a cheap tool for secret services to subvert elections or democratically elected powers.

I'm not sure about this particular case, and absolutely no question that the specific interest in this case probably has very little to do with concern about democracy and a lot with power struggles in that new cold war we're in.

(Gonna agree with it being a soft coup if they limit the new election to only pro-western parties. So far, it's "only" the repeat of an election)

But, having said that, there really is a lot of pro-russian propaganda on TikTok and the way the algorithm selects it can't always be explained with user preferences.

An Austrian newspaper recently posted results of an experiment they did themselves: They added a bunch of brand new accounts, pretending to be teenagers. The given interests were diverse, but all of them unpolitical and typical kids stuff.

Nevertheless, after a short habituation period of benign posts, the feeds of all but one of the accounts quickly shifted from typical teenager stuff to "political" content, mostly hard right-wing, islamist and pro-russian clips. All of that without any of the users ever having given any indication that they were interested in political posts, let alone pro-russian ones.

The report is here (in German) : https://dietagespresse.com/selbstversuch-so-radikalisiert-ti...

The newspaper usually posts satire, but this article was about a real self-experiment.

Medium hot take: this is why closed-source social media post promotion algorithms should be banned. We should not let a foreign private company with government links influence society in a hidden way like that.

It pretty much is a soft coup, yes. The general population is apologetic for it, since the concept of rule-of-law is not that important to Romanian culture.

I do not think it was a soft coup. I look around me and all I can feel around except the most diehard CG or Lasconi fans is, honestly, relief.

You can't really get the atmosphere in the country when that fascist was about to be voted in. I listened to a couple of journalists in the last couple of days, they were tearing their hairs out in frustration. Radio broadcasters and political commentators were saying the closing of their shows like it was a funeral and the end of free speech.

Me and many people around me could not sleep for 2 weeks straight because we knew what this meant. CG victory would have meant we needed to flee the country, sooner or later.

I am fully convinced we narrowly avoided something terrible. I'm also not convinced that we're out of the woods yet.

> I'd be curious to know what preferential treatment means, how preferential, and how it balances out if we include treatment of all candidates across all media

Iirc all candidates were supposed to mark their promotional material as electoral material. CG was the only one who didn't. This was considered illegal in Romania and TikTok was supposed to not promote the material. Yet they did

The second thing I vaguely remember is that the secret service report surmised that TikTok has swarming detection algorithms, that CG's posts were clearly swarmed, yet TikTok allowed the material as if it hasn't been swarmed, despite its own policies

If ever there was a country that should be using ranked choice voting or something similar it is Romania.

They had 14 candidates, with a lot of overlap in where they were on the left/right spectrum, and they use a "top 2 advance to the next round" system if nobody gets a majority in the first round.

That's a situation that makes it fairly easy for candidates that are liked by a majority to get eliminated due to vote splitting, leaving a second round where a majority are not happy with either candidate.

"The election will be re-run, likely with closer oversight over systems and social media" Except the opinions have already been formed based on whatever false information they have been fed. So without providing "true" facts, the new votes won't change much.

This assumes that the earlier votes were legitimate, and it's the people whose opinions were affected.

If the voting systems themselves reported different vote counts than the population actually cast, then the new election would be radically different.

They weren't, the vote systems (which are manual, and were counted by ~150,000 people, representatives of the political parties, independent observers, and others) were verified and a successful recount was already carried out. If anything is clear, it is that the people's votes were correctly counted.

People are always going to be influenced, that's the whole point of political campaigns, to influence you to vote for them. If they claim Russia tried to influence the Romanian people, and that they did it successfully enough to have their chosen candidate win, I think that shows more a failure of the other candidates than anything. You can't just tell every country in the world: please don't interfere with our opinions!!! We want our people to only be influenced by ourselves!!! I would love to see exactly what they claim Russia did to influence so many people to affect the result of the elections. Last time they claimed this in the USA, it has been shown that the influence was actually widely blown out of proportion. The 2024 results seem to show that people would've voted the way they did anyway, and maybe even in larger numbers. There's very little evidence to the contrary.

> You can't just tell every country in the world: please don't interfere with our opinions!!! We want our people to only be influenced by ourselves!!!

You can indeed, and countries do indeed have laws governing this, as does Romania[1]. The sources of spending for electoral ads have to be very transparent, and adhere to various regulations, such as that foreign governments, institutions and companies cannot finance local elections.

[1]: https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/73672

The people in power passed laws to keep themselves in power? Tell me more.

International law always sanctioned a state's intervention in another state's affairs. In addition to this very well known fact by jurists, there is also recent works in the field contradicting your position.

"International law prohibits states from intervening in the internal and external affairs of other states [...] as coercion-as-control, an action materially depriving the victim state of its ability to control its sovereign choices. This may be done even through acts like cyber operations that the victim state is entirely unaware of." [1]

[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

> If anything is clear, it is that the people's votes were correctly counted.

No, that's not clear at all. There were numerous other cyberattacks on Romanian voting infrastructure, per other articles about this event [0][1]

From Reuters:

> The intelligence service also said login data for official Romanian election websites was published on Russian cybercrime platforms. It added that it had identified more than 85,000 cyberattacks that aimed to exploit system vulnerabilities.

It sounds like this is about a lot more than tiktok preferentially showing one candidate. There were also denial-of-service attacks that would have suppressed certain votes, unauthorized access to the voting systems, and more.

Perhaps the votes reported were all cast, i.e. not literal fabricated numbers, but that doesn't mean that they were cast by the person they were supposed to be cast by, or that votes for other candidates were all counted.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/thousands-attend-pro-eu...

[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/lasconi-georgescu-runoff-romania/332...

First of all, the main way Romanian elections work are based on manual counting of ballots, in the presence of representatives from all political parties and outside observers, filled in on paper forms signed by all who observed the count. Then all those paper forms are centralized at the district (județ) level, and then to the central electoral bureau. This is all done on hand, with paper forms, with numerous observers all along the process. There is a digital process based on scanning these paper forms, but that is only done to report partial results faster to the public (and the count only happens after the vote has ended everywhere in the country, so false information in the partial results can't influence other voters).

So, even if the digital systems had been entirely compromised and under Russian control, that wouldn't have mattered one iota for the final results. And even after all this, a full hand recount was carried out last week which found the same results, with very little difference and no doubt whatsoever that CG won more votes than any other candidate).

And even the news stories you shared, which are anyway irrelevant to the final paper results, have misunderstood what our authorities are saying. The part of the our secret services which handles the cybernetic parts of the election (named the STS, Special Tellecomunications Service) has been very explicit, both in public declarations and in the classified briefing they gave to the President, that there were no risks to the core infrastructure, and that checks have been made before, during, and after the elections to confirm this.

Interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to lay this out; as all I have to go off of is global news articles, if those misunderstand Romanian authorities, then I'm not getting good information.

So the annulation is indeed based purely on the social media algorithmic skew, then?

Edit: the motivation was just published [0], here is a translation of the most relevant part:

> In the present case, the Court notes that, according to the aforementioned "Information Notes", the main aspects imputed to the electoral process regarding the election of the President of Romania in 2024 are those regarding the manipulation of the vote of voters and the distortion of equal opportunities for electoral competitors, through the non-transparent use and in violation of electoral legislation of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in the conduct of the electoral campaign, as well as through the financing of the electoral campaign from undeclared sources, including online.

The court has not yet published the motivation of its decision (its expected to be published tonight), so we're not sure yet.

Still, given that the same court unanimously decided on Dec 2nd, after receiving the results of a full recount, that the vote was fair and that the first round was valid, it seems extremely unlikely that they would cast any doubt on the vote count today.

Also, all of the discussions in the local press are about Russian influence on the campaign process. This includes allegations of algorithmic skew by Tik Tok, allegations that Tik Tok ignored Romanian campaign laws that require electoral clips to proeminently show some registration numbers, of illegal contributions to CG's campaign (including foreign, probably Russian, financing), of foreign nationals (again, probably Russians) coordinating to spread his campaign on Tik Tok and other social media, etc. The Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT) papers that were declassified that triggered this late decision by the court were mostly about this.

To my mind, all of these might well have been disqualifying before the election, but give that the people have voted for him fairly, even if manipulated through social media, it's absurd to cancel the entire process and restart it. Especially considering that this will move the elections to at least February or March, months past the regular end of the current President's term. Consider also the huge costs for redoing this whole election, which we as taxpayers will cover.

I will note that the campaign financing fraud allegation is almost self-evidently true itself - CG has filed in official papers that his campaign was run for 0 RON. The fact that the authorities who received these filings months ago were unable or unwilling to do anything about it is absurd. I still don't believe that canceling the entire process when it was two days away from finishing is an acceptable moment to right this.

[0] https://hotnews.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HCC-32-2024.PD... - PDF by a news source, couldn't find it yet on the official site

There is nobody that is alleging the vote counts were illegitimate. Not the voters, not the courts, not the politicians. That allegation isn't even relevant to this discussion

As I mentioned in a different comment, there are other news articles about this event that imply illegitimate vote counts. Those are what I based my comment on. Another commenter pointed out that those are misleading.

Without reading news in Romanian it's difficult to get accurate information.

The facts were emerging faster than people could follow. Now at least people have a few weeks to cool down and think about it.

How would you vote if there was a chance your country was to become a Ukraine situation? Would having children influence that vote. Would that sort of thinking invalidate the votes. I dunno personally.

Facts don't sway opinions.

Persuasion does.

And once one has been duped, good luck convincing them they were...

But they have been provided with true facts: that the candidate is actually backed by Russia, and that the supposedly "true" facts that they were provided were in fact not true facts.

The election has still been influenced for sure, but it's a false statement to say that voters have no new information.

Do you have a reliable source for those facts? Because there’s a lot of newspaper articles and allegedly some report from the Romanian spooks and I wouldn’t call any of those facts.

If they have a trial and if they prove corruption then that’s fair and square. Right now we’re in the “journalists and rival politicians accuse” phase.

I see many comments signaling the facts are not known and the situation confusing. Here is a summary:

In the election, a previously unknown candidate had a massive TikTok campaign and got the first place, qualifying for a second round. The campaign funds were not declared, it looks to be funded by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems quite credible.

A recount was decided and performed, no change in results. So the Constitutional Court, highly politically biased (appointed by the parties that lost), decided to annul the result and do it again.

That guy was democratically elected. This is showing how fragile the entire idea of democracy is, people elected a really bad guy, but they voted for him by the millions. Practically democracy was trolled big time. The guy has no chance to win the finals, every other candidate's voters will vote against him, it's just trolling.

> The campaign funds were not declared, it looks to be funded by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems quite credible.

Because of what you wrote in this sentence, he was not democratically elected according to the laws of the country. He was elected through a tiktok campaign funded by foreign (dirty) undeclared money.

Democratically elected? Yes. Lawfully? No. There is a distinction.

There has to be more to it than that. I seriously doubt that the entire country of Romania is sitting on TikTok, and was so easily swayed.

Also, when I hear "looks to be funded by Russians and Chinese, no proof so far but it seems quite credible". Sure, anything is possible. But how can it be credible, if no proof so far, as you say.

I am no expert on anything Romanian, but my skeptical bells are going off when I hear this.

A lot of "influencers" did campaign for this guy, some of them not even knowing who are they doing it for. They signed contract with "talent company" to promote stuff without mentioning any name, but that stuff was his main point of the campaign, so they amplified the craziness. Not all of Romania is sitting on TikTok, but a large enough portion or around 2 million people voted him while most of the rest of the people never heard about him. The list of candidates was so long (>10) and some were not known, most people ignored them.

I personally don't know anyone that voted for him. It was a big surprise for most people. Now that videos of his speeches appeared in public space he has no chance to get any significant amount of votes as he sounds like a lunatic. This is why I said the entire thing is trolling.

> There has to be more to it than that. I seriously doubt that the entire country of Romania is sitting on TikTok, and was so easily swayed.

Romania isn't a de facto two party system like the US. There were 14 candidates on the ballot, 10 from various parties and 4 independents.

If nobody gets a majority the top 2 advance to a second round vote.

If I've matched up candidates and parties correctly, of the 10 party candidates at least 6 were from right wing parties, and collectively got 47% of the vote. But the way it was split among them the highest any one of them got was 19.18%. The second highest of them got 13.86% and the third 8.79%.

The highest non-right party or independent got 19.15% of the vote.

So no, Georgescu didn't need the entire country to be on TikTok. He only needed to get more than 19.15% to get to the second round. He got 22.94%.

If Romania had used a ranked choice or instant runoff type of voting system, which probably should be used when you have as many candidates they do from as many different parties as they have, Georgescu probably wouldn't have a chance.

For most of the 47% who voted right wing but not for him he probably would have been pretty far down in their ranking and been eliminated after a handful of rounds.

He'd have had a chance if not for the "$0 campaign" publicity stunt, and the hidden trail of money coming from very suspicious places. Who is supposed to believe that he invested nothing, and got top position in the first round, while having absolutely nothing to do with the "benefactors". That and it seems tik tok favoured him, beyond the advantage of comment spam. And none of the content was labeled with the campaign id according to the law. If he spent at least a decent amount of money for the campaign, $100.000 or whatever, he'd have a better chance at plausibly denying the connection with the tik tok amplifier people, who in truth, could very well be just "fans", like Elon Musk was for Trump. And there's also the Iron Guard connections all over the place, that pretty much make you incompatible with the function, same reason the other candidate got removed from the list. So the decision isn't really undemocratic, although the moment it was given in was probably not quite legal/right, should have been done after the second round, but that would have caused more uproar and give him more legitimacy if he had won, and the odds are that he would have, so that's why they decided to cut it early, to minimise damage.

He had no chance in the second round. The moment he become a celebrity and his speeches were public, people figured out he is a lunatic. Therefore no chance.

What's suspicious about this trail of money? Check out the bank transfers https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

Here's your funds, simple people https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

Boy, that was a stupid place for TikTok to blow their wad. I suspect that this will result in some fairly serious pummeling of their operations in many places.

The court didn't provide any evidence that this was somehow coordinate by TikTok themselves. Rather a state actor that made hundreds of TikTok accounts just before the election. This kind of stuff happened on Twitter all the time. It'll probably happen on Bluesky as well if they succeed

> hundreds of TikTok accounts

I read a much, much higher number. One that suggests that TT knew exactly what was going on.

The Georgescu trend was no.9 world wide and exploded 2 weeks before the election

What I learned from this is that people are much more easy to influence than previously thought. Especially if you come up with something that is a blank slate. Me included.

I was literally crying for my country these last 2 weeks.

How many state actors can you see in here? https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

Are they going to cancel the parlamentary elections, which were held one week after the Presidential election?

Doesn't look like it at the moment.

They'll have to see who is winning first?

The parliamentary elections have been over for a week and we know the establishment parties took most of the vote, though considerably less than they did 4 years ago.

That's a bold precedent to create, if nothing else. Let's see how it works for them in the future, when political winds start blowing in some other direction. These things _always_ backfire.

This seems to be exactly the outcome Russia desired: undermining the democratic process.

It also sets a dangerous precedent, suggesting that anyone with sufficient resources can invalidate election results.

Yes, any motivated bad actor with money, resources and willing or unwitting patsys can get an election invalidated. What is the alternative, turn a blind eye to it and disregard regulations for how elections should run? Why even have regulations at all if an election can never be invalidated?

I don't know what the big fuss is about. There are clearly rules in places that force you to declare your voting budgets and where the money comes from. Seems pretty clear. So saying you spent 0€ and then have ads everywhere and _win_, is clearly illegal. In smaller scale, this could have been omitted but this is just blatant fraud.

For people who say this undermines democracy, I think this is perfectly the opposite. We have rules in democracy that need to be followed. If he now declares he got the money from Russia and China or wherever and people still vote for him, so be it. He'll probably end up in 2nd round either way but it's good Romania shows that they are vigilant even though their people aren't necessarily that smart.

> There are clearly rules in places that force you to declare your voting budgets and where the money comes from. Seems pretty clear. So saying you spent 0€ and then have ads everywhere and _win_, is clearly illegal.

Is it though? It’s entirely possible that people who wanted him to win purchased ads to support him, possibly without his consent. This happens in most countries, including the US. That doesn’t mean he actually spent the money himself or had anything to do with the ads.

Without his consent seems implausible. Clearly somebody has been coordinating it and he should have noticed this and done something. Pretending that it was all just coincidence is just bad faith.

"And happens in most countries" is just a blanket statement. Major proportion is still declared and you dont just skate into presidential election 2nd round with 0€ spent.

Why would he do something about it if it’s helping him win?

> "And happens in most countries" is just a blanket statement. Major proportion is still declared and you dont just skate into presidential election 2nd round with 0€ spent.

Are you kidding? In the 2024 election, super PACs spent $4.5 billion on helping one candidate or the other win, and the source of more than 50% of those funds is unknown. I don’t think you can name a single democratic country where this doesn’t happen.

It’s kind of funny how people are willing to shut down all critical thinking when they want to believe a particular thing.

If a foreign, hostile country is helping you to win the election I think you ought to report it. I get if you are of the school that all that matters is winning and not how you do it, ethics aside, but setting a precedent that all is allowed is just dangerous. That's why I think it's great that there's new vote. I believe he might as well win again, but this time it's much more transparent what's behind it.

> Are you kidding? In the 2024 election, super PACs spent $4.5 billion on helping one candidate or the other win, and the source of more than 50% of those funds is unknown. I don’t think you can name a single democratic country where this doesn’t happen.

Yes, US the shining beacon of democratic process. But even in that system, there's a money trace—clear evidence who has spent and what amount. But since you are enthusiastic about it, can you analyze the Nordic systems as well?

> It’s kind of funny how people are willing to shut down all critical thinking when they want to believe a particular thing.

To me the funny part is that you can't argue without trying to dismiss my point of view. I think you should evaluate your own critical thinking before critizing others.

Look, I merely wanted to point out that it's good the interference was caught and put on display, probably the people will elect him to 2nd round nonetheless. I think he should be allowed to run of course, if that's why you are getting so worked up about this. It's clear the other parties probably try to out-maneuver him this time, but this might just as well help him.

> If he now declares he got the money ...

He didn't pay for the ads. Others did or home printed them.

If there is a candidate that the globalist do not approve. Simply cancel the election. Easy.

Why are we suddenly screwing around with democracy? We know how to do it - we've known for generations. Nothing else compares morally, or in terms of results - freedom, prosperity, or security - or in terms of competency of government (yes - it's very flawed, but no other form of government compares).

Everything else is 'influence campaigns' and BS, designed to distract people and keep them inert - and it's doing an effective job!

Yes it’s a properly scary time. I think people are just waking up to it and are becoming more vigilant, it might be too late for the USA though.

> Why are we suddenly screwing around with democracy?

Suddenly? We've been doing this for 60 years, most particularly, in South America. It's now just made it's way fully into Europe.

> We know how to do it - we've known for generations.

We know how to do mob rule. We're not particularly good at Democracy. Sometimes the two would produce the same outcome and people do not struggle to notice the difference.

The judicial branch needs to get involved when the election process is being tampered with. In the past there were times when "democracy" won, but society lost: 1789 France, 1933 Germany, 1949 Romania, etc. If only the will of the people rules you sometimes get abuse and dictators. The concept of a "republic" means the rule of the people under a set of laws and a constitution which protects all people from abuses of the majority. The decision to call for another presidential election was taken by the Constitutional Court - similar to the Supreme Court of US, which is the one that needs to validate the results of elections before they can produce results.

> The concept of a "republic" means the rule of the people under a set of laws and a constitution which protects all people from abuses of the majority.

I agree, but I think that's called 'constitutional democracy'. Democracy can't be mob rule, is another way of looking at it; it can't be 'two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner'.

> In the past there were times when "democracy" won, but society lost: 1789 France, 1933 Germany, 1949 Romania, etc.

Yes, the cardinal sin is someone who uses their power to prevent future democracy (or to oppress the minority).

It seems like democracy is not as good as it used to be because of online bubbles and personalized/targeted media. Propaganda has levelled up.

Despite this, "democracy is still the worst system of government we know of... except for all the other ones" is still true.

We need to get better at it though because it's not trending in a good direction at the moment. Because it is and will likely always be the best option, we should really be making sure that it works as well as possible and produces the best quality results.

Places like Reddit or HN are so funny considering the "red scare" attitude of "everyone who doesn't fall in line is a russian or influenced by Russia".

We saw for year of Russiagate and now we see, every time, the same pro-NATO/pro-war propaganda and we're supposed to be fully xenophobic towards russians.

"Fuck democracy when it doesn't suit me". The CIA would be proud.

I don't think anyone is advocating xenophobia towards _Russians_. However, skepticism towards stances known to be propagated by the _Russian government psyops groups_ meant to destabilize... well, just about anything they can... sure.

>every time, the same pro-NATO/pro-war propaganda and we're supposed to be fully xenophobic towards russians

They've done a fair bit of bad stuff beyond pro-NATO/pro-war propaganda.

The article presents no evidence that the election was fraudulent.

You can go read the CCR decision yourself: https://www.ccr.ro/comunicat-de-presa-6-decembrie-2024/

Please do some research before the knee-jerk reactionary take, it's more conducive to any discussion than inviting the mouth-frothers to fester about something you and they have no idea about.

I cannot read Romanian. Given the language barrier one would expect the BBC to at least do a bit of translation for its English speaking audience.

There should be links to other artciles on BBC, like TicTok admitting the bots farms used, a big one from Ruzzia.

We here in Romania are following this for weeks so we know all this details, hard to find now english links, but imagine some candiate having the guts to declare zero spending in campaign, like how is this possible?

I will try to find the tTic Tok admitting the issue, maybe then the skeptics can accept it or maybe they will claim Romanian gov controls Tc Tok

Edit

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-removed-3-influence-c...

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-probes-tiktok-after-surprise-win-in...

I am sure there is more but Tic Tok found this "by mistake", they also did nothing about electoral content not being labeled correctly.

I mean, even if his campaign finances are declared wrong, it's still shocking that this leads to an election being overturned.

Using my own experience in America, misdeclaring finances (which has been done by Clinton, Trump, Biden, Harris, etc) leads to fines from the FEC, not an election being overturned.

The point with the fraud is to make it clear the guy character, what character or personality trait someone has if the declares ZERO money spent but in fact he spent a lot ? Would such a person accept help from his friends in Kremlin? Would he screw Romanians over ?

Keeping in mind this and the fact Ruzzian troll networks were involved this makes it so our country president would be decided in Kremlin, this is not democratic.

I know in USA you elected a criminal but I would prefer we do not have a criminal and Ruzzian puppet

In a democracy, the people are allowed to elect a criminal into office.

Not allowing that simply allows one administration to weaponize justice to keep their opponents out of office.

This adherence to 'norms' that many democratic states insist on today is the reason why so many of them end up falling to dictatorships and America just keeps chugging along.

> The point with the fraud is to make it clear the guy character, what character or personality trait someone has if the declares ZERO money spent but in fact he spent a lot ? Would such a person accept help from his friends in Kremlin? Would he screw Romanians over ?

Once again, I'll reiterate my point that you seem to be confused as to what democracy is. You're allowed to be a shitty person and to be elected if that's what your country's people want. The time to make these arguments was before the election. And the people to make them to was your fellow countrymen, not random foreigners online. If there was some confusion regarding that, maybe you'll have better luck next time.

>Once again, I'll reiterate my point that you seem to be confused as to what democracy is. You're allowed to be a shitty person and to be elected if that's what your country's people want. The time to make these arguments was before the election. And the people to make them to was your fellow countrymen, not random foreigners online. If there was some confusion regarding that, maybe you'll have better luck next time.

There is no confussion, it is legal to ask the courts to declare an election void because illegal stuff happened like fraud, or the candidate did not followed the electoral laws. It is a shame that the fraud or Ruzzian influence evidence did not appeared before the campaign started but they were clever about this, the guy was less then 1% in oppinions polls and nobody know who he is.

Theadministration does not order the Constitutional Court around and the vote was in unanimity. I suggest you keep an eye on this and what new evidence will appear, sorry that our system does not allow a criminal to be president if he managed to trick some people.

Also probably you are not aware, the presidential elections were in two tours, so the fascist guy gained 25% votes , he did not win 51% votes and the elections were cancelled , the final tour was cancelled because of the interference.

To be fair, your link lacks this info also.

Firefox's translation (also, apparently FF can now translate from Romanian, nice!):

  > The arguments retained in the reasoning of the solution given by the Plenum of the Constitutional Court will be presented in the decision, which will be published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I.

Basically "we'll tell you later"

Simpler translation would be that the entire decision, including all of the arguments that led to it, will be published in said gazette.

Still "we'll tell you later", but a little easier to parse than the ML.

Did you read it? It's a complete joke.

PRESS RELEASE, December 6, 2024 In the meeting of December 6, 2024, the Constitutional Court, in order to ensure the correctness and legality of the electoral process, exercised its attribution provided by art. 146 letter f) of the Constitution and, with unanimity of votes, decided the following: 1. Pursuant to art. 146 letter f) of the Constitution, annuls the entire electoral process regarding the election of the President of Romania, carried out on the basis of Government Decision no. 756/2024 regarding the establishment of the date of the elections for the President of Romania in 2024 and Government Decision no. .1061/2024 regarding the approval of the Calendar Program for carrying out the necessary actions for the election of the President of Romania in the year 2024. 2. The electoral process for the election of the President of Romania will be resumed in its entirety, with the Government going to set a new date for the election of the President of Romania, as well as a new calendar program for carrying out the necessary actions. 3. This decision is final and generally binding, it is published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, and is brought to public knowledge. • The arguments retained in justifying the solution pronounced by the Plenary of the Constitutional Court will be presented in the content of the decision, which will be published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I. The Department of External Relations, Press Relations and Protocol of the Constitutional Court

Mind pointing out where is the evidence at the link you provided? Maybe you should take your own suggestion.

Why was the election allowed to proceed if one candidate declared $0 in campaign funding and that's apparently impossible and obviously a lie?

Annulling an election is never a good look, rarely ever instills confidence in the citizenry or those abroad, so it needs to be done in absolutely necessary circumstances.

I don't want pro-Russian candidates to win anywhere after their invasion of a sovereign nation, bombing of hospitals and schools, and other brazen acts of destruction as well as the warrant from the ICC for the arrest of their head of state. At the same time, I don't want democracies to backslide to avoid election of candidates I don't like, and I'm seeing a lot of democratic backsliding these days in various countries.

Wait so one party filled out a form wrong? I thought this was about russian TikTok accounts?

The candidate ran a large campaign just days before the election without declaring a campaign budget. It took the services and the constitutional court a few days to figure out what happened and take this decision. Give them some credit, this is not an easy problem to navigate.

$0 isn't impossible if other people do things for you, see https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

There are two interesting POVs in this comments section:

1. Elections are the voters’ will. The voters’ will is being undermined.

2. Elections are votes + campaigning and there are laws around both. The campaigning laws may have been violated.

I find myself more in the second camp but I’ll acknowledge two challenges it has:

1. The mere act of questioning the result destroys faith in government.

2.The new government gets influence over the investigation as to whether it broke laws while campaigning

It's very hard to have honest and logical discussions about this. Both sides are biased here, and both sides think the other is undermining their will and interests. And sane adults that see some of this "meta detail" and call it out (like what you did), are not listened to.

Even if they wanted to listen to sane and logical points like that, it would be a detriment to both sides to listen to it - so they don't because they know the other side probably won't.

Isn't there still the possibility of beating the guy in the second round? Would that be more fair?

(disclaimer: I'm a random Canadian on the internet who's out of the loop on this)

Seeing this election unfold from the inside the country has turned me simultaneously more anti-establishment and anti-democratic.

The candidate that could have potentially won is an imbecile that dresses well, has good diction and spouts jingoism about God and country. He also says stuff like maybe we didn't land on the moon and soda's have microchips. The voters are poor and uneducated and just like Trump seems like the poor's man idea of a rich person, so was he the uneducated person's idea of an intellectual. TikTok did not sway them much, it just presented the candidate.

The political establishment has been gorging itself on public funds and the urban intellectuals (who had the other hopeful candidate) are simply copying US left-leaning ideology in a country that has vastly different problems. For instance, abortions are perfectly legal in Romania, yet they keep bringing reproductive rights onto their agenda, instead of focusing on massive corruption and on improving the economy.

Each political faction seems to filter for candidates that are either unrealistic ideologues or the most corrupt individuals in the European Union.

Let this maybe be a warning for the future: an uneducated democracy is not easier or harder to manipulate, it's simply random and unpredictable.

This is why Romans used to actually appoint dictators for some periods of time, some how they were often good people who’d come into power , fix a bunch of stuff, then go back to their tomato growing.

Interesting that a winning candidate was allegedly not marking his promotion videos. Does it mean that people generally distrust everything officially marked and skip the video instantly (like I skip ads on Youtube)? And so, marking the video makes your campaign inefficient? Or it wasn't an important factor?

Seeing "sponsored campaign ad" is an instant skip for most people.

People gathered and did the propaganda stuff themselves, here's an export of one of many private chats where they coordinated https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

Isn't that normal political activity? Making propaganda for candidate you support? (if I understand correctly that people simply gathered and tried to promote their candidate).

That is illegal in Romania, all campaign contributions must be declared, even if you're not a willing beneficiary.

To be honest, I couldn't find any proof that the candidate got funded by anyone, and all news articles express opinions of old people in positions of power who don't understand how web platforms work.

If I suddenly decided to print campaign posters myself and gather a group of people to donate to me for doing so, in favour of some random candidate, shouldn't the constitutional court cancel the elections again?... Bad precedent.

Shouldn't election be organized such that it cannot be disrupted by Internet attacks from abroad? At least not so easily.

Also, I tried opening the PDF [1] with so called "declassified report" and while I cannot read Romanian, the first header contains "TikTok" and I am left wondering how can one hack an election system using Tiktok? Did they count the votes using TikTok videos? And what about Telegram (mentioned nearby)? It doesn't even have a newsfeed. Oh those powerful hackers!

Judging by "distribuite numeroase imagini" and "blockarea accessului visual" (which almost sounds English), TikTok hacked their elections by simply refusing to block a video (or by blocking it?).

> Access credentials for election websites were stolen by threat actors and leaked on a Russian hacker forum

What a sad state of European cybersecurity. But this threat seems to be real, unlike the TikTok attack.

[1] https://www.presidency.ro/files/userfiles/Documente%20CSAT/D...

if you can't read Romanian then your insights into a Romanian report aren't very useful.

There are two separate issues: (1) TikTok favoring one candidate even after the campaign was over, and (2) an IT systems breach.

>TikTok favoring one candidate even after the campaign was over

This shouldn't be an issue because, the mainstream candidates where heavily favoured by the conventional media. If TikTok isn't allowed to publish media supportive of one candidate then the mainstream media shouldn't be either.

That's not how the law works in Romania. As a political candidate, your paid ads have to marked accordingly with a number that can be traced back and all donations and spending must be reported to a government authority.

One of the issues with this TikTok business was that many ads for Georgescu were not marked correctly, and thus in violation of electoral law.

And while I cannot read Romanian,

If you can use a mouse, and you know how to cut-and-paste -- you can read Romanian.

If you can't be bothered to do that, then I doubt anyone will be interested in your complaints about content of report, or your inferences as to its broader implications.

There is no hacking. There was a massive campaign on TikTok for a candidate, that campaign was surprisingly effective, putting someone that most people never heard of, in the first place. That is now hacking, that is trolling grandmaster level.

A proper explanation of what is going on with all the propaganda outlets painting elections in the light they decide they want to paint it with. https://youtu.be/XTZ-V1z8C9o

Attempts to ban AfD (which is projected to take the second place), "firewalled" LePen's party which has won with 33% of votes and has zero political power, and now this. And people wonder why trust in the "democratic" system gradually falls and anti-establishment sentiment is on the rise.

I would contend that the anti-establishment movements are the reason why parties like AfD and LePen's sprouted in the first place.

That is not entirely true. Le Pen just brought down the french government yesterday. She has some power as a King maker in the current configuration.

But she does not govern nor does she want to. However, the left wing coalition won the most seats in the national assembly but Macron refused to appoint a prime mister which was from this coalition as it is normally customary.

In July, he called on the left wing coalition to safeguard democracy by instructing his party to drop out of the races in which they had no chance to win so that the left could win these races against the National Rally.

Now he saying that the left wing coalition is extremist and that the National Rally is extremist just as well and that he won't have a government with either of them. Basically he just told half of the population to get stuffed.

Then people wonder how democracy dies, that is how it dies.

We can disagree with the right and with the left but if the will of the people is not respected, then the consequences will be dramatic.

I’m not saying those parties are fascists but they lean that way. Once fascists gain power, they undermine the entire democratic system and stay in power. So how does one deal with this situation? Do you just hand over a democracy over because a certain percentage of the population voted for them or do you play dirty back?

I dislike the anti-immigration far-right in Denmark but for the past 25 years they have been electorally and influentially more successful with one simple trick: Don't support the geopolitical adversaries of the West. Maybe the AfD and LePen should have listened instead of publicly fellating Putin.

> Maybe the AfD and LePen should have listened instead of publicly fellating Putin.

They're winning, though. Why would they do anything differently? The reason why people vote for them is because they hate you.

>They're winning, though. Why would they do anything differently?

They are not really winning. At best they are just sewing chaos. Their voters only vote for them for anti-immigration and anti-trans reasons which they have failed to politically materialize. In Denmark their ideological brethren made mainstream parties fold on immigration and on some trans issues by simply not being complete idiots on foreign policy.

The interesting things about these claims of manipulation via social media platforms is we are no longer on the side of the coin saying “my side is censored” but very much “the other side is visible and should not be”.

Interfering by censorship is bad because you deny people information on which to base their decision. Interfering by allowing all candidates to be heard is not negative interference at all. This decision by the court is yet another blow for the credibility of democracy in the west.

The UK with Brexit was an interesting case: highly contentious, counted promptly, the establishment acknowledged they didn’t like it and reluctantly eventually followed through. That was when democracy went too far, and now the plebs must pick only between pre approved options.

> “the other side is visible and should not be”

The other side is visible in millions of ads, despite officially declaring that 0 money was spent on visibility.

Aka “when people look at us it is entirely organic but the only reason they would look at that guy is he is paying for it”.

The other parties reported spending as per the law, and this guy didn't. You can't run a campaign with no money, and he had no real grass-roots support (he was polling below 5% in all polls).

> You can't run a campaign with no money, and he had no real grass-roots support

The fact he won the first round contradicts you on both points.

You seem to think your statements are axiomatic, but they have no basis.

They do have a basis, as the candidate had flyers printed out, paid ads on social media as well as paid ads that were not marked as political ads, which is against the law, and so is not reporting campaign spending.

Political polls from across the spectrum showing him polling poorly as well as not being an established candidate is what led to this whole investigation starting up to figure out exactly how he garnered so much support so fast.

> They do have a basis, as the candidate had flyers printed out, paid ads on social media as well as paid ads that were not marked as political ads, which is against the law, and so is not reporting campaign spending.

Did he pay for them? And we all know polls miss things they don’t know about or want to find. As long as the ballots were counted accurately the problem was not the campaign he was running, but the ineptitude of the pollsters.

As discussed at length elsewhere in this thread this whole thing opens up so many new ways to abuse the system Romania simply will not be able to have an election anyone believes in again for a generation.

Yeah the whole thing very much sounds like "this guy's platform is actually really popular with voters, but he should have remained an unknown because he shouldn't have been able to spread his message that effectively."

Isn’t it about time that the EU banned TikTok?

I don't think banning outright is the solution, but I do think that social media has a tremendous amount of power and can impact things like elections if you have control over the recommendation algorithm on one of these sites.

I think more transparency into how these recommendation algorithms work is required especially when it comes to elections, as well as mechanisms to verify that they aren't being tampered with.

You mean that only media and information approved by some EU bureoucrats be allowed here? Well, there was no need to tear down the wall 35 years ago for that.

Tiktok is clearly a civilizational weapon wielded by the enemies of the west, freedom, and democracy. 5th generational warfare.

And Facebook etc. are a weapon being wielded by the US. That's just as bad. If you allow one side but not the other, you are living in an authoritarian state.

Sure, if they also ban Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Otherwise, they are choosing sides. That's not a democratic system, but deciding what people can read and do (and think) as they do the exact same thing but for the “other side”.

I don't know a lot about this specific situation, but this seems to set a dangerous precedent where governments can just claim "election interference" or "misinformation" any time their candidate loses to get a do-over.

Its not the government doing it. Its the constitutional court on the basis of some kind of evidence. That's how its supposed to work. It would be way more dangerous to let other states meddle in your elections. If the results was true the first time around it'll be the same next time. So in many ways there is no good reason to not have a redo if there is anykind of evidence of foul play.

The court is the government.

> If the results was true the first time around it'll be the same next time.

Not necessarily. Given that the opposition party now knows what the people seem to want, they can do all sorts of things, especially given the knowledge that the court will strike it down should the election not go in their favor.

>Not necessarily. Given that the opposition party now knows what the people seem to want, they can do all sorts of things, especially given the knowledge that the court will strike it down should the election not go in their favor.

Like what? they will make the opponents praise Putin and make China and Ruzzia send them funds to cancel the election again?

A country is actually allowed to vote for a pro-Putin politician.

You may not like it, but that's not what this is about.

Also, it's actually okay to be against democracy. You should just say it instead of dancing around it though.

People are simply lacking in empathy. Imagine you living so close to a proxy war. Imagine you have children. Which way would you vote?

I think it's the "some kind of evidence" that's the important part.

The right wing party literally made TikTok’s that the governing part(ies?) didn’t like, but which apparently resonated with the people they labelled them as misinformation. Have you heard that one before?

What do you mean by "the" right wing party? Romania has several right wing parties, none of which supported Georgescu. He ran as an independent.

Looking like that was the correct choice.

Under your theory, could the Supreme Court have canceled the 2016 election result because of Russian interference?

What does the US constitution say about the court's role in elections? What does the Romanian constitution say?

(Though to be honest they could still make whatever ruling they want in the US. It's probably cause chaos as people try to figure out if they're bound by it.)

You can read about it, the decision just came out and it's public. Georgescu declared spending zero euros in funding while investigations found about 50m€ spent.

The Constitutional Court has determined election interference based on what they got, it's better to do a do-over rather than allow Russia interference in the democratic process.

You can claim the slippery slope fallacy but given the potential catastrophe of allowing Russian interference I'll side with the CCR on this case.

But we are wary of giving up fundamental democratic protections of our votes for the boogeyman of Russia. There will always be a Boogeyman. There won't always be free and fair elections.

Campaign finance violations are serious. Why is the vote allowed to continue if they happen? Why is this not probed well before the election?

In fairness he can't declare funds that haven't passed directly through his campaign accounts. It's a transparent loop hole, but it needs to be patched, not used as post-factum evidence supporting wrong doing.

That would have been a good argument sometime while the campaign was still in progress. Once the votes were cast, any court would recognize this is a fait accompli. It's crazy to annull elections (a procedure which no law whatsoever, nor the Constitution, even mentions, it was invented wholesale by the CCR during their meeting today) based on campaign finance violations, even ones involving outside interference.

What would have happened if the interference were discovered only next year? Would you have been ok with annuling the elections after the new president was already in office? This is no different whatsoever, after the first round was finished.

I hated and feared CG as much as anyone, but this court decision is obviously crazy and undemocratic (as pointed out by the other candidate in the second round as well).

The supposed campaign on tiktok ran days before the election. It is remarkable for state organs to be able to act within a week or so. Annulling the election in this situation seems the right thing to do. A similar cancellation of results happened in Austria in 2016. A year later it indeed would have been too late.

No, the supposed campaign started one month before the elections. It ramped up maybe in the last few days before the election. But you don't convince 2 million people to vote for a crazed maniac like CG in two days of manipulation.

Agreed. You do your best to counter and mitigate this type of foreign influence, but once people have voted, they have voted. Once you start to rationalize "but they only voted this way because X", it will be tempting to expand X in a way that disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.

>Agreed. You do your best to counter and mitigate this type of foreign influence, but once people have voted, they have voted. Once you start to rationalize "but they only voted this way because X", it will be tempting to expand X in a way that disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.

And you ignore the laws? You discover that the candidate do illegal stuff?

Is there a law that calls for election annulment if a candidate does illegal stuff? I doubt. In fact, usually there are specifically no such laws to avoid initiatives for political prosecution.

Over in Japan, the newly re-elected Hyogo Prefecture Governor is being sued for violating electoral laws concerning his use of social media, with the penalties including voiding of the election and the stripping of his electoral rights.

Incidentally, the Governor was re-elected in an upset victory after being ousted by the Hyogo Prefecture Legislature over alleged power harrassment scandals. Yes, the Japanese establishment hates him and are doing anything possible to get rid of him.

> and are doing anything possible to get rid of him.

As long as it's legal, there is nothing very wrong with it. If he committed crimes that influenced the election, then the election is void and he should be banned from politics.

No, I'm taking a step back and saying that if the law provides for nullifying the election, it's a bad law. It's an even worse law if no due process is involved (i.e. "nothing has been proven against this candidate in court as of yet, but we're going to go ahead and nullify the election because he benefited from foreign interference, as far as we can tell based on what our intelligence services are telling us").

For what it's worth, it sounds like the runner-up candidate agrees:

> Lasconi condemned the court's ruling as "illegal" and "immoral", saying "today is the moment when the Romanian state has trampled on democracy".

>No, I'm taking a step back and saying that if the law provides for nullifying the election, it's a bad law. It's an even worse law if no due process is involved (i.e. "nothing has been proven against this candidate in court as of yet, but we're going to go ahead and nullify the election because he benefited from foreign interference, as far as we can tell based on what our intelligence services are telling us").

Sorry, this is the constitution, it does not allow for years of appeals and dragging your feat. Are you really believing that the guy used zero funds and you need a court and 3 appeals to prove to you that he used more then ZERO funds ?

I'm not familiar with the Romanian constitution, but due process is fundamental to the US constitution:

> No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

The US constitution does not just "allow" for years of appeals, it guarantees your right to defend yourself through that process.

>The US constitution does not just "allow" for years of appeals, it guarantees your right to defend yourself through that process.

Don't worry, the pro Ruzzian traitor will have his appeals and lawyers to defend him from fraud and the other accusations, the elections were cancelled and will be repeated so we do not let Ruzzia influence them.

What does the US constitution say if it is discovered that there is credible evidence for :

1 a foreign power was involved in election and it affected the results (illegal in Romania)

2 the candidate that commuted fraud by not declaring the money he used (this is illegal in Romania)

3 the guy was unknown for the media and public before election so nobody checked him, now that Tic Tok made him popular it was also discovered a lot of bullshit he done, one of them is glorifying Iron Guard a fascist party in Romania's past (it is illegal to do that here)

In USA you let Ruzzia to chose your president because you are only 99% sure? Then won't the president pardon himself? Create some civil war?

As I said the constitutional Court decided to repeat the election, they did not decided to jail the guy, or execute him, or even block him to run in Ruzzia.

No, you prosecute and send for trial the people that committed the illegal acts. If that means deposing the acting president, the you do that - but you do it when you have the proof and a legitimate trial. Not the Constitutional Court inventing a power for itself that it doesn't have, based on vague wording in the Constitution (specifically, they based this decision on an article of the Romanian Constitution that says that "[the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed, and confirms the results of the vote", with no further stipulations - article 146, paragraph f).

> Not the Constitutional Court inventing a power for itself that it doesn't have, based on vague wording in the Constitution (specifically, they based this decision on an article of the Romanian Constitution that says that "[the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed, and confirms the results of the vote", with no further stipulations - article 146, paragraph f).

What powers do you believe this grants, that would make logical sense in a situation like this?

None essentially. It just enables other specific laws that organize the functioning of the court in this area, and perhaps it enables the court to settle questions on whether electoral processes have been followed.

For example, there is a specific law that specifies how the CCR can verify the results of the election (that certain institutions send the vote counts to it, in some specific format, within X days etc). The same law also specified what happens if the CCR finds that the vote counts are suspect - who can raise such concerns, within what dates, and most importantly, what happens next, when the elections are re-done and by whose decisions. This is how the court is supposed to function.

In contrast, the court has trampled on its own jurisprudence, where it only yesterday night (local time) declared that it can't hear any new claims about the elections until the end of the next round.

> None essentially. It just enables other specific laws that organize the functioning of the court in this area

> [the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed

I have no context on this beyond what you're writing, so I'm taking everything you're saying at face value. But even when I do that... don't you feel "the legislature shall have the power to organize the functioning of the court regarding elections" is a manifestly different sentence from "the court ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed, and confirms the results of the vote"?

Our constitution [0] uses this verbiage a lot. For example, here is what it says about the President:

> (2) The President of Romania shall guard the observance of the Constitution and the proper functioning of the public authorities. To this effect, he shall act as a mediator between the Powers in the State, as well as between the State and society.

The official English wording of the role of the court is:

> f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and to confirm the ballot returns;

Note the similarity of the verbiage. I don't think the first one can be read to mean that the president can interfere with any authority they think might not properly be respecting the Constitution. I don't believe this is the intended reading, and definitely no one recognizes such a power for the President of Romania. So, I don't think the equivalent verbiage in the article on the power of the CCR should be read to give them the power to decide anything they want on the electoral process.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer, just a citizen of this country. But to me it doesn't seem proper that a Court can devise procedures that are not specified in any law.

[0] https://www.presidency.ro/en/the-constitution-of-romania

So who has the power to decide that the elections were influenced by Ruzzia?

My belief is that no one has the right, or the legal and constitutional power, to annul the elections based on campaign influence. The law only specifies a right to annul one election (a specific day, not the whole process as was done here), and then only if the voting process itself is corrupted (miscounting votes, stopping people from voting, physically coercing people to vote, etc).

The regular court system can pursue individuals who conspired with Russia (including, likely, Călin Georgescu himself!), prosecute and try them for treason.

Intelligence services and electoral authorities have the power to stop the interference while it is in progress, by forcing people and sites to take it down, banning entire domains if they don't comply, arresting people who are coordinating with foreign nationals, etc.

And you do not see any weakness in this?

The election will be done again, and people can vote their favorite person again, this time with the full knowledge of who is behind them.

It sucks that authorities did nothing before the elections, but I suspect that disqualifying the fascist guy because of fraud and interference would have produced the exact same complains from his fans and the Ruzzian trolls.

Right? You would claim that he should be allowed to continue until the courts will decide it was fraud, and until the appeals are done and until the complains to the EU court are also complete.

I have long since come to the conclusion that democracy as a power system is merely an excuse for the Powers That Be to obtain and maintain power, it just has better plausible deniability than other means like monarchies, dictatorships, etc. at the cost of not having fine-grained control.

Occasionally there are aberrations like Trump, which subsequently lead to the Powers That Be doing everything they can to make sure the vote is made "right".

How this theory would explain the changeability of Powers That Be, the fact that they regularly also lose the power?

They're all just different heads of the same hydra. "Uniparty" might be a term you're familiar with. All the political catfighting is just kabuki theatre to give the notion power is changing hands.

I'm pretty sure that the Powers That Be didn't want the Fair Labor Act, or the Clean Air Act, or the Pure Food and Drug Act, or a number of other things. They may not care who is president, but on issues that they do care about, they still take some losses.

Large companies always fight against laws regulating them that didn't exist before; but once they exist they always fight for extending them so that new competitors can't arise.

"Democracy doesn't effect much" is not the same as "it does nothing at all".

> They're all just different heads of the same hydra.

s/hydra/nation/

> they regularly also lose the power?

TPTB aren't limited to one political party.

Trump was not outside the Powers that Be, he was just a different faction that won.

He took aid from Russia which is against Romanian law.

There's quite a large difference between us all knowing something and it being proven to a degree to make a national level decision on it.

They had to make a quick call, in my book they acted boldly, the risks of the alternative were greater. Everyone has time to cool down and think about it, and the candidate can win if he is good. In the last few days all new information has pointed in the opposite direction.

> quick call

They sat on this info for almost three weeks. Doing it now discards so much money and effort invested by people working the election stations, the people in other countries that already voted, etc. Not to mention that it communicates to the everyone that their vote doesn't count if it's not for the right candidate. A vote made under wrong assumptions is still a vote cast democratically. In my opinion this late decision makes a mocking of a real democratic process.

It's also very likely to have the side-effect of destroying Mrs. Lasconi's chances at the presidency. Who do you think that the Georgescu voters will vote for now? Not her for sure. I bet there will be a Simion vs. Ciolacu battle next time, and there we'll go again with choosing the "lesser of the two evils".

On the second point I completely agree with you. She appears to be collateral damage at this point. Perhaps that will raise sympathy and she can get into the second round again.

Theres been a lot of kurfuffle about it and apparently even the other politicians think this court decision was too much.

Im not sure why and how this works, just saying that having Russia create 10 million fake accounts (that we know of) in a country of 19 million is clearly foreign interference.

Funny enough, the EU is currently calling the election results in Georgia illegitimate because they passed a similar sort of law (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-georgias-foreign-agent-law...). This is not doing a good job of dispelling the accusation that the media now uses "democracy" as code for outcomes that are desirable for US globalists and their allies.

Russians did the same in Georgia. :-/

From what I heard, just from (statistical?) analysis from the OSINT folks on Twitter, the conclusion was that the Georgian election was stolen.

This is a whole different animal.

The Russian foreign agent law is used to attack the public personalities and NGOs, and have nothing in common with the Romanian Electoral Laws. Georgians are absolutely right to be scared.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law

US has its Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), multiple countries have this kind of law, I have no issues with it.

Why Georgians should be scared?

Have you seen the proof, or are you repeating what was written by someone else? There is a big difference. I bet this is the usual "credible information from anonymous government sources".

Im repeating the information that was shared. I dont have the expertise to discern whether that's really what happened. Those are the accusations.

No proof he did that, but here's proof he didn't: https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

>He took aid from Russia which is against Romanian law.

Funny that you know this, but the actual court decision that should show proof of this has yet to be released. Either you are spewing hearsay, are in the intelligence community and are sharing secret information or... you are lying.

Please, do link the so-far unreleased information that the court based its decision on. I'll wait.

Im not lying unless the court is lying. Im just saying what the court has said so far.

You should really calm down with your finger pointing and conspiracy theories.

First it's not the government its the supreme court

second a democracy needs to follow laws. If the candidate broke a law, then that can, if the law stipulates, invalidate an election result.

I am gravely disappointed with all attempts of democratic government.

"People" don't end up deciding, some small elite does instead, usually financial, but sometimes sociopolitical. (media/education/parties) The way Romania handles it is just as bad as more western countries, they just let their dictatorship moves slip up as more obvious. I would give examples about how more western countries are corrupt, but I don't think that's allowed on this site, pretty much making my point for me.

From a European to many Americans here who feel the need to chime in with their ideas of what exactly democracy should be (when clearly, America itself doesn’t have a clear clue what democracy actually is):

Europe is a continent at war. We are being attacked both physically on our eastern front, and online in all countries. Russia is exploiting weaknesses in our systems and employing state sponsored propaganda to install pro-Russian sentiment through means that our own laws have trouble catching.

It’s not about whether it’s 1 million euros vs. 360k vs 100 million. It’s about where this money is coming from. Who is using it, and exactly WHY they are doing so. The other candidates may or may not be shit, it’s irrelevant, if a country that is attacking one of ours is putting its defence spending to use in OUR ELECTIONS.

Kindly, ask yourself whether you are REALLY qualified to comment on who we should accept as the next people running countries that aren’t yours, and deciding fates an ocean away from you.

I notice similar sentiment from the US around election time. “What does Europe have to say about who we elect?” — well, quite a bit considering your president decides a lot of our fates. But EU leaders have far less individual influence over yours.

So, take a step back, and don’t tell our people at war not to fight back.

This is the new reality y’all ain’t woken up to yet. It’s not just Ukraine anymore. In fact it never was. I say this, having lost people there myself.

I think they only pushed away the issue.

In the end according to polls he was leading them in second turn. You can't come back as a society from this. :|

If this was Norway or any country where people have some trust in govt, it'd be one thing. But Romanian society has (mostly rightly) reasons to not trust PSD and other major parties. And what does this tell them? That they were right. :(

No, they had to take a decision quickly and they took it. They knew that one side will cry foul, but the alternative would have been worse. Before you start mocking those ignorant low-trust eastern europeans, notice that a similar thing happened in Austria in 2016 where an election outcome was cancelled on illegal campaign financing grounds.

i am myself Eastern European too, I'm Polish :<

Yes, one of the common pastimes of eastern europeans is being very critical of themselves and their countries, sometimes missing that others have largely the same problems, but with better press.

thank you romania for saving democracy!

Russia and China rigged Romanian Elections using 10M fake TikTok accounts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334325

did the bots vote???

"influence operation"... we must keep influence operations out of politics LOL

Did they just do the barman that kicks out the first fascist in a pub? Wish Hungary, Poland and USA had guts to do this ...

These countries are more familiar with these tactics and are not wiling to accept it, South Korea too.

I am getting 1989 flashbacks, but this time this is a coupe that subverts institution to its purpose.

Building military is much much more expensive than paying influencers.

Russian propaganda machine is incredibly strong, because it was perfected on their own citizens for basically century now. They spend billions on pure propaganda:

  - discrediting news agencies without actual reasons
  - cultivating "free thinkers" festering on real problems
  - offering variety of narratives and providing state sponsored falsehoods to justify them
  - overloading people with information to point where they don't care
  - generating so much outrageous (false and true) news that people spend all their attention on bogus
  - supporting 'nobody cares' atmosphere where people feel no agency

While with military - they relied on propaganda as well. They projected power while not picking conflicts with anyone who can punch back.

Ukraine appeared too big to swallow this time and everyone can see, that king is naked. Russian military is a sham compared to US. Like, incomparable to be honest. But problem is that propaganda is much stronger than military. So west made a mistake dismissing russia because of their weak corrupt military while being invaded by propaganda.

West has nothing against russian propaganda machine and this is what truly terrifying to be honest.

Something that makes the Russian propaganda machine so effective is that they have the multiple departments at Russian universities at their disposal to produce both international and domestic propaganda. The West is up against Russian propaganda refined by psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists etc.

In the West the academias are contrarian. We are not used to adversaries that can put every single intelligent educated person in their country to work to undermine our countries.

>In the West the academias are contrarian

Yet they have participated in tons of human experimentation in the US.

I am reminded of the commotion over this way back in 2016:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

They said Trump won with Russia's help.

I wonder, are voters so easily manipulated that some other (hostile) country can make them vote like sheep?

And should people in the state administration (who are appointed, not elected) have the power to cancel valid election results because of suspected foreign interference?

What if they make a mistake? Will they ever be held responsible for it?

'easily' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. As an American who maintains multiple friendships all over the political map due to significant nonpolitical shared interests, I've got more perspective on that commotion.

While it's true Trump won with Russia's help both times, it took an extraordinary effort with extraordinary results, patterned after internal Russian political manipulation (so it's not like it was just made up haphazardly). It required attentive siloing of Americans into camps isolated from each others' worldviews and the concealment of what the other camp was seeing. This is not remotely 'easy manipulation', it's lengthy hard work requiring great effort and attention, toward a goal of confusing both sides against each other, and eventually removing the very concept of reality.

Sounds impossible, but it works… at least to the extent of getting results, and tearing apart a country. That's why 'civil war' is constantly invoked by these forces: you can't do anything constructive this way but the goal is to spur internal conflict.

That's why it's relevant that it's foreign interference: the interferer isn't hobbled by a need to survive in the resulting damaged country. They can do whatever they want, because they're doing it to an enemy.

Also part of the reason the interference is so succesful is that America ISN'T some magical wonderland and people in the US know that, so they are inherently sympathetic to any message that says something bad about the current administration. It's a lot easier to have a strong effect in a very muddled situation than say, if it was 1944 and Americans were strongly united.

America is having pains. It's easier to stoke that fire than light one anew.

I understand that concern. Ideally, internal politics should remain internal, without outside interference.

But when it gets to a point where a country's administration (the long term one, not the 4 year one) doesn't trust its citizens to make the correct and informed choice and be loyal to their own country and interests and actively tries to meddle with the results, then the name is all that's left of that democracy.

Might as well start putting "People's" or "Democratic" before that country's name. Like in DPRK or PRC. At least they're being honest about it.

Trump did win and Russia did help, at least as far as hacking the Democratic party emails.

I guess overturning things depends on the laws of the countries. Obviously it didn't happen in that case.

I've gone through this entire comment thread, and I keep reading that voters were influenced by "false information," but nobody seems to mention what that false information is.

"Tiktok", "right-wing", "Putin", "anti-NATO sentiment", "Iron Guard" and "Russia" isn't false information. Why are people repeating this over and over again? Has any Romanian in this thread asked someone who voted for the winner why they voted that way? Was there any lie involved, or do you just hate that they're allowed to vote?

Trump won twice in the US by spending half the amount of his opponents. The internet now means that constant media saturation is infinitely less valuable, so elections aren't linear functions of the amount of donor cash. People can just choose the person they agree with. If he's the only anti-NATO candidate, and if for 25% of the population this is their main issue, why wouldn't he win?

Feels to me like the goal is to restrict the amount of information people can get about candidates that will not be allowed to win, in favor of an array of candidates with identical opinions on the important issues, but that come in a range of different colors and flavors.

Hello pessimizer! Please get yourself a few romanian tik-tok accounts, browse as a young man, and you will see what relentless propaganda has been produced. I am sorry this information, ie. the videos, are not widely available on the internet. (like most of the good useful information, if I may add)

The frontrunner was an independent candidate who claimed to have spent nothing on his campaign, asserting that it was entirely run by “volunteers.”

Romanian secret services, under the directive of the current president, released reports concluding that both state and non-state actors had been involved in manipulating public opinion.

The candidate holds extreme right-wing views aligned with Romanian neo-Nazi groups. He has repeatedly referred to Romanian Nazi leaders as heroes and has expressed admiration for Putin, calling him a hero as well. His speeches often included mystical elements and rejected modern medical science, denying the existence of viruses and questioning the effectiveness of chemotherapy for cancer. While he has made other controversial statements, I will leave it at that.

The candidate seems to be more of a communist than anything[1], he wants 51% state control of all large corporations operating in Romania. Labelling him as right-wing is asinine. Actual communist parties are supporting him.

Perhaps if people wouldn't demonise any anti-globalist public figure as "far right" we wouldn't have ended with this clown of a candidate. People haven't voted for him as a person, he was totally unknown as of a couple of weeks ago, they've voted against the status quo, and more importantly they voted against the establishment that regulates what constitutes acceptable opinion.

[1] https://calingeorgescu.ro/program

In the page that you linked, it states that he wants to implement a measure that enforces minimum 51% participation by the state in all natural resource exploitation activities on Romanian territory.

While this can be viewed as a left-wing policy, it can also be a form of economic nationalism.

As far as I understand, he gets classified as far right [1], because of his ultranationalist and ultraconservative views.

The parties that declared support for him [2][3][4], after the first election round, have similar views.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUR_Alliance

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_of_Young_People

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.O.S._Romania

His "spent nothing" claim is plausible, people did these things themselves https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

It feels like Europe is asleep at the wheel. We are in a cold war with Russia, right now. Why is there barely any resistance to blatant attempts to undermine democracy?

A Cold War? I don’t think it feels very cold to the Ukrainians

I mean, the US cold war had several "real" wars as a result of it. Korea and Vietnam were actual wars with humans shooting at each other, but they're considered part of the "Cold War" because both of them were sort of indirect, since the real enemy was the USSR.

But Ukrainians aren't part of any "We", from my perspective. We prudently formed no alliances with them.

Just a proxy conflict. Just need to figure out if Russia is the main power or the Chinese (or NK) proxy.

If so, then Russia is the proxy of China, while Ukraine is proxy of Canada, Germany, Poland, Australia, etc.

Money and nukes. The worst thing Europe did was get addicted to cheap Russian gas. It was a trojan horse that encouraged governments to look the other way.

Just 5 years ago Europeans were laughing in derision when this was pointed out.

Which is sadly how it goes -- you have to be willing to take a stand against people without capital-V Vision sometimes. They'll only ever perceive what's right in front of their eyes, and only ever believe that what's possible is what's already recently happened (and nothing more).

Totally unrelated but now I wanna jab my elbow at Ariane 6 (rocket)...

Not all of Europe. The immediate neighbors were always wary of Russia's game, but attempts to bring that up only got them labeled as rusophobic.

The immediate neighbors collected transit fees for Russian gas and oil. Ukraine itself collected transit fees for gas deliveries to Austria until very recently.

The Drushba pipeline through Poland was open at the same time that Sikorski congratulated the U.S. for blowing up Nord Stream. It remained open long after that. Both France and the U.S. were buying uranium from Russia until 2024. No complaints from Sikorski about that.

Nordstream was owned by Russia, Germany, France, and The Netherlands. There was a pipeline from the German terminal to Britain.

There are many hypocrites of the first order in the oil/gas game. In the context of this submission, it is appropriate to note that so called "far right" or "far left" parties are the only ones who point out facts like the above in public.

Voters notice this and blaming Russian interference is a very weak game that endangers the democracies in the EU.

> The immediate neighbors collected transit fees for Russian gas and oil. Ukraine itself collected transit fees for gas deliveries to Austria until very recently.

What else were they supposed to do? Block transit altogether and alienate their partners?

Yeah, it was so frustrating.

Some guy from Eastern Europe: "You don't know Russians. Let me tell you about my experience with them..."

Some guy from Western Europe: "LOL, I see you believe American propaganda completely uncritically."

The guy from EE: "What? No, I was telling you what happened to my family..."

The guy from WE: "Let's talk about how America sucks instead."

Seems to me that for many people Russia wasn't even a real country, just some boogeyman that American propaganda made up. Then they suddenly woke up, and now they are like "oh no, we must not escalate!". Guys, you don't even know that making concessions to Russia is the fastest way to escalate. (You didn't expect North Korean soldiers attacking a European country, did you? That's what you get for your non-escalation. There will be more.)

None of us were laughing in derision. If we were laughing its because we knew we were fucked.

Imma be honest, I was pretty convinced by the "if we have strong trade relations where it's almost codependent, they will not try stuff". That was probably wrong, but we were also way more dependent on them than the other way around...

> The worst thing Europe did was get addicted to cheap Russian gas.

True, it was really bad for us to be able build a decent industry and export all over the world. Much better to be addicted to expensive USA gas and let our industry and economies crumble.

Actually much better to leave perfectly functional nuclear power plants online so you don't have to pick one vs the other.

And who's Europe largest and closest supplier of Uranium?

You can't change geography, Europe doesn't have raw resources, Russia has tons of them. We're destined to have a close commercial relationship.

> closest supplier of Uranium

Dp you understand how energy-dense Uranium is? You can power a 1GW nuclear reactor for a week with a carry-on suitcase full of pellets. The proximity is utterly irrelevant.

It's also not even necessary! Uranium was discovered on the Czechia / Germany border and there are still many reserves there! Europe only stopped mining it in 2016!

And yet, even the USA imported 27% of its uranium from Russia until last year.

The entire world is based on cooperation even with nations one may not like. China, for instance, is the manufacturing backbone of the world - to say nothing of being the primary source of many critical elements, such as those used in electric batteries, solar, and so on.

And war between the US and China will also happen as soon as China moves to reintegrate Taiwan, and the EU will again be expected to work as a tool of the US, to its own detriment.

Will you then say that the EU should have done away with cheap Chinese manufacturing and resources earlier? And claim it was some sort of a Trojan Horse? Or will at some point the EU consider putting EU interests first?

I think Merkel thought that if pay Putin fairly, he will learn it is better to cooperate, everybody wins. EU addicted to gas, but make Putin addicted to money. It seems that Putin was not this kind of rational.

This news shows exactly that the constitutional court was not asleep. They took a bold decision.

But as comments have said, even acknowledging interference after the fact and rejecting the result is a failure in democracy, because it's ripe for abuse. Thus, the Russian interference has still succeeded.

This is a bit like a football referee looking at the videos after a goal and deciding that it was a handball, thus invalidating the goal. It is not an easy decision to make but better to do it quickly.

We'll have to see the replacement election to decide that. Will the population change their vote in response or not.

At least everyone has some time to cool down and think and absorb all the information that came out in the last few days.

Wait, you voted the wrong way! Here, take a few days to think about it, and then let's try again, ok?

Unlikely. The leading candidate is already being investigated by the police.

Chances are he’ll be jailed or otherwise prevented from running.

I did not mean to imply that the population should vote again for the same candidate to demonstrate their independence. New evidence was presented to and by a high court and it's fair to expect it to be considered (for example for how convincing it is, and for what all the candidates have to say about it, and even for who presented it and for what reason).

If the evidence was serious it also would not make sense to let the election continue.

Finally I don't know about Romania, but in a few other countries in Europe, no matter what happens to that sullied candidate, these votes are not too likely to shift to the incumbent party. See for example the circumstances that enabled Macron to be elected the first time in France.

acknowledging interference after the fact and rejecting the result is a failure in democracy

Citation very much needed. It seems you're desperately arguing towards a pre-determined conclusion. Especially if you're then equating this with a foreign government successfully installing a puppet regime.

Okay, so the interference has succeeded. So what?

If the success is limited to repeating the first round of voting, that's a lot of Ukrainians who will still be alive next year.

It damages confidence in democracy itself.

What damages it more? The court playing "calvinball" or a Putin puppet wrecking Romania?

Far from some bold decision in defense of democracy, this is almost a coup by our constitutional court.

First, there is no process or even mention in any Romanian law about annuling an election. The Constitutional Court of Romania has two specified roles in an election: it validates candidates (or rejects them, as it did with another far right candidate in this very election), and it validates the election results (or invalidates them if there is a significant suspicion of fraud in the vote counts, after a recount). They issued a recount order for this same election as well, and then decided based on the results that the first round was valid. If they had decided it wasn't valid, there are laws for when it would have been repeated. However, they later came back to this decision, and quoting a vague article in the Constitution that says that they assure the electoral procedures are followed, they invented this concept of annuling the entire electoral process, from the very beginning (so even the candidate registrations have to be re-done).

Secondly, they did this based on evidence that was public knowledge for two weeks, including the last few times they met and validated the counts.

Thirdly, the evidence in question is vague accusations of Russian interference with no specifics. There are no names, no identified groups, no sums of money except for one lump payment by a businessman. The only clear accusation is campaign finance violations (which the authorities had already blatantly ignored, as the candidate in question had registered his campaign costing 0 RON, which was known to the relevant authorities since last month and to the public for two weeks).

The two ruling parties that are governing in a coalition right now aren't known for either competence or honesty either.

Incidentally, their presidential candidates did not make it to the second round of elections.

So one can legitimately ask if this is because of the russian interference, or because they want another chance at the presidency?

OK, but what could they have done instead?

There is a very surprising, out-of-nowhere win by an independent, that declared he spent 0eur on his campaign, as a result of what looks to be a large scale (presumably expensive to run) campaign on TikTok, that nobody knows who financed, which will await trial, commissions and investigations to figure out.

What could the court have said when they were prompted? Ignore this? I'm not really a 'Constitutional Court' apologist :). I am genuinely curious... what would have been the alternative here?

The court had already validated the first round of elections. This was a fait accompli. They could have let it stand, noting that people had voted and their votes were correctly counted, and that matters more than any other manipulation.

Consider we don't have any decision by any court (before this one) that confirms that any illegal action of any kind has taken place. It's only isinuations and beliefs, but nothing proven to the extent required by law.

The elections should have been allowed to continue. If needed, some special prosecutor whose independence from the next president, even if CG won, could be guaranteed could be appointed to continue investigating the facts of this campaign. Then, CG could be tried based on the findings, could be suspended by Parliament while this was going on, and he could be deposed if he indeed was found guilty, and new elections held at that time (in Romania, if the president's mandate ends suddenly for any reason, there is a temporary presidency, but only until snap elections are called).

Let's not forget that he might not even have won - the race was tight, but not unwinnable. So in that case, he could easily be investigated as a private citizen.

But if you believe it is highly likely this would happen (which presumably the CCR do believe, along with various state-defense relevant institutions), how is this whole process you described better than just cancelling them now?

Because it's legal. And what they did now is not legal.

They don't even have may proof that anything that happened in the first round campaign was illegal. The CCR is not even qualified to rule on the facts, on the legality of anything that happened.

So if nothing illegal is proven by any court to have happened, if there isn't even enough evidence to get a tmeporary arrest warrant in his name in a regular court of law, how can we annul the whole electoral process? The costs alone should require a much higher level of justification.

The court has not even ruled that he is not allowed to participate in the re-made elections.

I was mortified that he might win, don't get me wrong. My entire family was going to vote for Lasconi, even those that didn't really like her, just to make sure this idiot madman didn't win. But that doesn't make this decision be any closer to the rule of law.

> Because it's legal. And what they did now is not legal.

I am not an expert on this, so I'm not saying you are wrong, but why would they not have the prerogative to do this? Do you have any sources for that?

I know at least that there is precedent in the EU - Austria cancelled a round of elections in 2016, also for some electoral law incongruities / technicalities (that at least superficially by my knowledge were less serious than this scandal), done also by their constitutional court.

Romanian law also has provisions for ca celling the results of an election. The CCR followed the process, heard challenges to the validity of these results for the first round of elections, ordered a recount, and found based on the recount that all was well, and it certified the results.

What they found afterwards, on their own without any case brought before them, is that the campaign that preceded the first round of elections (which lasted for one month before the first round two weeks ago now) may have been influenced by outside forces, that a candidate may have flaunted campaign finance laws, and similar matters, and that because of this, the entire electoral process is invalid and annulled. The government has to restart this process from scratch, with anyone who wants to participate registering their candidacy again from scratch.

There is no procedure or standard in any law or in the Construction to specify such a process. The Court invented it from whole cloth, based only on a vague/broad power to oversee the election.

I still do not understand how it can be illegal for them to do this, if they do have the prerogative to cancel an election result. (In the sense that you can disagree with a judge's decision, he might even make an objectively wrong decision, but it does not make him taking that decision illegal, just perhaps wrong.)

I am curious to read more about this in the coming days. I do remember previous scandals related to the CCR and their (often said too close) relationship to the parties in power. But I guess in this case I just don't see why their decision would be illegal, and when compared to the alternatives I don't see why it would be wrong.

To also clarify, despite thinking this might be the correct decision, I actually think politically there is a higher probability now of yielding a worse president, since Ciolacu & Simion will probably end up in the secondary, the latter having chances, instead of Lasconi. Not that I think she's the greatest candidate either, but again... compared to the alternatives...

> I still do not understand how it can be illegal for them to do this, if they do have the prerogative to cancel an election result.

It is precisely because of how that power works that what they did yesterday is illegal, in my opinion.

The Court is not basing its decision on whether to validate or invalidate an election result on the Constitution directly, in regular elections. The constitution is too broad and vague for this kind of power. Instead, based on the constition, specific laws that govern how elections are run and at what parts of the process the Court is involved in them were elaborated, and those laws were validated by the Court itself. Specifically, this law is 370/2004 [0].

If the Court can just convene itself by fiat, analyze any evidence it wants, and decide what effect that can have on the election, then why did we need a specific law with specific articles on how election results are validated in the first place?

[0] https://www.roaep.ro/legislatie/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/L...

How is annulling an election any different from their power to invalidate results?

The power cited to ensure election procedure doesn't seem vague. It appears to be quite broad:

> The Constitutional Court shall have the following powers: ... (f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and to confirm the ballot returns;

For the ballot returns, there is a whole law that details how that process works, what documents are to be sent to the court, who and how and when can contest the results, what happens if the results are annulled and so on. The court can't make up its own rules, there is a whole legislative cadre that specifies their powers, responsibilities, and their interaction with other institutions.

They trampled over all of these with this new decision: they didn't observe any time limits (they gave this decision out of the blue, while the voting for the second round had already started; could they have decided this same annulment two months from now? Nothing in this decision or motivation says they couldn't). They met to decide on this matter with no request from everyone, they brought this matter before themselves by their own power, which no court has the power to. They had no legal framework to demand this from any other institution.

Worse of all, they have specified no limits to this broad power they have found they have, nor any legal standards for what type of allegations are grave enough to objectively determine this annulment. What if next time a candidate that won 1% of the vote had a suspicious campaign, will that lead to annulment? What is the standard of evidence to be evaluated for this decision? The documents they based this decision on wouldn't even have constituted admissible evidence in a court of law, they are hearsay by institutions which aren't even making them under pain of perjury.

And related to that article of the Constitution, there is no reason to interpret it as a broad, decisional power. It is clearly meant to guide law makers to create specific laws for determining the CCR's specific role in the electoral process. There are many similar articles in the constitution about other institutions that don't grant them any direct powers in this way. For example, article 80, title 2 says:

If the President took the same approach as the court, it stands to reason that he could go into any public authority in Romania and block their decisions based on finding that they are not properly observing the Constitution, right?

> If the President took the same approach as the court, it stands to reason that he could go into any public authority in Romania and block their decisions based on finding that they are not properly observing the Constitution, right?

No. Article 80 you're quoting does not grant the President power. Instead it describes the role of President.

This is rather unlike Article 146 that explicitly grants the Constitutional Court power or the other articles that explicitly grant the President power.

> First, there is no process or even mention in any Romanian law about annuling an election.

This is false. Law 370 20/09/2004:

Article 52

(1) The Constitutional Court shall annul an election if the voting and the determination of the results have taken place by fraud of such a nature as to alter the allocation of the mandate or, as the case may be, the order of the candidates eligible to participate in the second round of voting. In such a case, the Court shall order that the second ballot be held on the second Sunday after the date on which the elections are annulled.

(2) An application to annul the elections may be filed by political parties, political alliances, electoral alliances, organizations of citizens belonging to national minorities represented in the Council of National Minorities and candidates who participated in the elections, within 3 days after the close of the voting at the latest; the application must be substantiated and accompanied by the evidence on which it is based.

(3) The Constitutional Court shall decide on the application by the date stipulated by law for the public announcement of the election results.

Article 53

(1) The Constitutional Court shall validate the result of each ballot, ensure the publication of the election result in the mass media and in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, for each ballot and validate the election result for the elected President.

(2) The Validation Act shall be drawn up in three copies, one of which shall remain with the Constitutional Court, one of which shall be submitted to Parliament for the taking of the oath provided for in Article 82 para. (2) of the Constitution of Romania, republished, and the third shall be submitted to the elected candidate.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

The articles from 370/2004 that you quoted contradict your thesis. They give the CCR specific power to decide to annul the specific election, and only if they find evidence of vote fraud " if the voting and the determination of the results have taken place by fraud of such a nature as to alter the allocation of the mandate or, as the case may be, the order of the candidates eligible to participate in the second round of voting". The court has already ruled in Tuesday based on this law, and they have explicitly found that no such fraud has taken place, and they have validated the results. And again, this only refers specifically to annuling one election, re-doing it the following Sunday, and only if vote fraud is identified.

The court yesterday decided to annull the entire electoral process, and not because of voter fraud, but strictly because of campaign finance violations. There is no such provision in that law or any other. The court did not "order that the second ballot be held on the second Sunday after the date on which the elections are annulled." - they ordered that the Government shall choose a new date, that candidates shall register a new etc. The next election will be, at the earliest, held in late February.

Also, article 2 was not followed in any way *. The current decision from the court was not based on any application to annul by any party whatsoever, the court convened of its own volition, based only on the declassified documents that appeared in the public sphere.

None of the other articles you quote give any such power. In fact, you'll see that the word "campaign" is not present anywhere in those articles. And yet the Court's decision is entirely based on problems they find related to said campaign.

* there was an application by two candidates to annull the first round of elections, those were investigated on Thursday and then Monday last week, and they were rejected. This new decision by the court is unrelated to that.

I'm not looking to get into a legal debate about this, as I'm not a legal scholar. You stated something factually wrong and I pointed you to the paragraph of the law.

The court is the single highest authority on constitutional matters and can pretty much decide what they want to on these matters, as well as how they interpret the law, but this is the case with every high court everywhere and it boils down to "who watches the watchers?".

Yes, the CCR can probably get away with what they’ve done, but when we’ve finished processing this there’s good chances that the decision will be proven to have been made outside of the court’s strict mandate.

And even if they have a good excuse, the optics are very bad and potentially fatal for whatever is left of the trust in Romanian institutions.

Who will decide that the court has acted outside its own mandate? They are the only authority on constitutional matters. If you're referring to "the people" - based on what I've seen there's no street protesting going on over this.

> And even if they have a good excuse, the optics are very bad and potentially fatal for whatever is left of the trust in Romanian institutions.

Completely agree.

I don’t know. Probably the posterity :)

Given political support (with the exception of Lasconi) for the annulment, I expect that nothing will happen in the near future.

What I stated was not fa tally wrong, you are misinterpreting the law or my assertions. I have stated, and showed several times in different comments, that the law did not have an explicit power granted anywhere in the law to annul the entire electoral process.

While the CCR is indeed preeminent in its interpretation of the law, it's every citizen's right to evaluate the law on their own and decide with their own mind if the courts are fair in their interpretations of the law. If the CCR came tomorrow and said that X will be the next president for the next five years because they are the best suited to do Y, I wouldn't have to accept their view as a fair reading of the law/Constitution. It's not like I'm claiming I have some right to block the Court's decision, I'm just saying that by my own mind they are in blatant disregard of the legal framework.

Regarding Article 52, paragraph one, there is no proof of fraud. In fact, if I’m not mistaken a vote recount was done and the court accepted the results as valid.

There is an allegation of foreign influence which has not been proven in a court of law.

IMO the court has acted beyond its mandate and only made things worse.

By the way, where is the report from SRI? The internet is full of newspapers which quote it, but don’t link to the original document. From those articles, there is no smoking gun against the candidate themselves. Just some guy which paid people on Tiktok, with no statement on that guy’s connection to the candidate.

Here are links to the SRI reports [0][1], taken from this news site [2] (where you can also find SIE and MAI reports).

[0] https://s.iw.ro/gateway/g/ZmlsZVNvdXJjZT1odHRwJTNBJTJGJTJG/c...

[1] https://s.iw.ro/gateway/g/ZmlsZVNvdXJjZT1odHRwJTNBJTJGJTJG/c...

[2] https://m.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/politica/klaus-iohanni...

We're getting in murky waters about legally debating what constitutes as "proof" to a court that is the sole authority on the constitution and whether they need something to be proven in a different court to act. The vote recount you mention was a different court decision, not connected to this one, which stemmed from a new complaint.

While there is no smoking gun against the candidate, the declassified documents show that intelligence agencies believe a foreign state actor to have been involved in the candidate's TikTok campaign.

Europe?

"The truth is that the Americans will eventually make themselves hated by everyone, even by their most unconditional allies. All the manipulations the Americans imagine are contradicted by events."

— Charles de Gaulle

And now you know why they need to spend so much money to buy and influence media outlets all over the world. Tip: it is not because media is such a profitable industry...

France under de Gaulle is hardly a bastion of freedom and liberal democracy, I have a hard time taking anything he said or did post-WW2 seriously

By "France under de Gaulle" do you mean the French Fifth Republic which was proposed by de Gaulle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic

Hint: That's the current government of France to this day. To me, that is a liberal democracy.

I would recommend reading "When France Fell" for more context on de Gaulle. You are talking about a complicated figure. I also would point out that he faced attempts on his life for getting France out of the former colony of Algeria.

> All the manipulations the Americans imagine are contradicted by events.

What does this mean?

WMD in Iraq is an instance of this.

> Americans will eventually make themselves hated by everyone

Who's everyone?

Your quote is way out of context.

"See, even in NATO, which the Americans built with their own hands, which is their thing, have you seen that? The NATO parliamentarians declare that the Multilateral Force is nothing but a big joke. The truth is that the Americans will end up being hated by everyone. Even by their most unconditional allies. The Multilateral Force would be one more trick. All the tricks that the Americans imagine are denied by events. It is more and more true. Look at their so-called détente."

— Charles de Gaulle, November 6, 1963,

Europe is just getting adjusted to the new reality and the reality is not black-and-white.

Russians didn't discover magic words that they use to hypnotise people and make them vote for pro-Russia candidate. In fact, everywhere in the world the incumbent politics are losing ground because the system is in crisis and people are looking for a change everywhere and Russia appears to be able to propel politicians who are closer to the their politics simply because the incumbent ones screwed up.

Is America different? Just a month ago in the American election – those who are anti-establishment and pro-Russian won.

US and Europe will go through a soul searching and hopefully will come out of this in a better shape. It has to go through this because the ideology collapsed, economy doesn't perform and the hypocrisy is unbearable anymore.

For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making the world better place better than they do?

Can you tell me if US is about freedom and respect of the international law, borders and trande? If so why they support Ukraine against Russian invasion and then support Israel who occupies Palestinian territories since many years?

Can you tell me why people should drink from paper straws when the rich fly private jets?

Can you tell me why the capital can go anywhere but people should be stopped at the borders?

Can you tell me how the economy is s great when so many people suffer?

The west is in crisis, the ideology doesn't hold and the economy doesn't provide and all the Russians have to do is to point it out. They don't use spell, they just tell what everyone sees. This needs to get fixed, let's hope that the damage wouldn't be too big.

Technology has changed the landscape of possibility very quickly, and our institutions are not keeping up.

The world will need to figure out ways to deal with the new reality. Social media have made it far more lucrative to make up whatever than to report on facts. Meanwhile it's harder than ever to run a sustainable business in journalism.

Meanwhile autocrats have noticed that it's cheaper than ever to run massive campaigns of propaganda and misinformation abroad, because they don't have to involve anywhere near the number of local accomplices.

LLMs are accelerating the trend.

You're right that the US democracy is in crisis as well.

> the ideology collapsed, economy doesn't perform

Economy doesn't perform, but ideology has collapsed only in minds of ordinary people. Politicians, stakeholders and various media outlets are very much invested, and still push that the current course is the only correct way and the bright green future as designed is unstoppable. Reminds me of the arrogance of the ruling party slogans from before 90s.

In Moldova the magic words were bribery. Thankfully they didn’t work.

I'll bite.

> For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making the world better place better than they do?

Because the EU is a bunch of democracies, and a few of the biggest ones do not want to accelerate electrification bad enough to threaten parts of their industry/economy right now. This tracks with the electorate; support for green policies is rather low across the board, almost every nation has different primary issues.

> Can you tell me if US is about freedom and respect of the international law, borders and trande? If so why they support Ukraine against Russian invasion and then support Israel who occupies Palestinian territories since many years?

The Ukraine war is the most clear-cut aggressor/victim situation in a long time, even compared to setups like the Vietnam war: There is not even a puppet government with any legitimacy that the Russians could be claiming to act in support of, and there is no credible casus belli either. It's just blatant expansionism at the cost of a sovereign nation.

Israel/palestine is a complicated mess-- it is basically a civil war of sorts, and the Americans DO support people in Gaza/Westbank a ton (humanitarian aid).

> Can you tell me why people should drink from paper straws when the rich fly private jets?

Note: The non-private jets are a much bigger problem actually, but since there's not enough popular support to curtail air travel significantly, the easy pro-environmental actions happen first.

> Can you tell me why the capital can go anywhere but people should be stopped at the borders?

Because the people inside those borders don't want other people with no capital wandering in. The capital alone (or its owners) they don't really mind as much.

> Can you tell me how the economy is s great when so many people suffer?

Can you be more specific on this? I'd say the economy is not great, not terrible, and its about the same for the people (talking about central Europe here).

> few of the biggest ones do not want to accelerate electrification bad enough to threaten parts of their industry/economy right now

Do you see the problem? Those in control screw up and they expect to get bailed out by forcing people to buy their inferior and expensive products.

> The Ukraine war is the most clear-cut aggressor/victim situation

It's actually not that clear cut and if you apply the same filters for both of the countries you will see it. Try testing for internationally recognized borders and the situation is same for the Israeli invasion and Russian invasion. Test for separatist movements and you will find very similar things, test for minorities getting attacked and you will see that its quite similar. Not the same but when you pick something like "Russia must respect the internationally recognized borders" and you don't apply the same for Israel then you are a hypocrite, you are not doing it from standpoint of a principle but due to your own interest and if you are doing it out of your own interest people start asking why I'm paying for it? Where's my cut if this thing pans out?

> The non-private jets are a much bigger problem actually

I don't know if that's true or not but you ask people to sacrifice their comfort for a common cause, then everyone should do it.

> Because the people inside those borders don't want other people with no capital wandering

But then people start noticing that it's not the poor immigrants who want to work who buys al the properties. Some people want the poor stopped at the border and the rich welcomed. Others want different things, a lot of people don't want oligarchs buying all that property and leave it empty.

> I'd say the economy is not great, not terrible

In the case of the US elections, there were many opinion polls showing that people are not satisfied with the economy. They are also not satisfied with many other things related to the economy. Just yesterday someone killed an insurance CEO at a filthy rich location and so many people were cheering for the killer.

> It's actually not that clear cut and if you apply the same filters for both of the countries you will see it.

Pretty much clear. Unless you watch Russia Today everyday. If you throw away tons of Russian lies it is clear expansion invasion.

Russians did this many times. Annexation of Poland, Finland, Baltic states and more recent annexation of Ichkeria and occupation of Georgia.

>Pretty much clear. Unless you watch Russia Today everyday. If you throw away tons of Russian lies it is clear expansion invasion.

You are misrepresenting my argument. I don't say that Russian are innocent, I say that Israel is just as guilty.

How is it "expansion invasion" if peace terms offered by Russia, which are now public knowledge with recent documents leak, shortly after invastion didn't include any new territories for Russia? Ukraine walked away from that offer.

It was a bluff to make a weaker Ukraine.

Just a reminder to that moment:

1.Russia sponsored separatist movement in Donbass with money, weapons and agents. 2. Russia directly occupied Crimea while lying they do not. 3. Russia signed a Budapest memorandum to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders and restrain to use force against it. 4. Russia signed a series of Minsk peace treaties.

Why you think that they really offered a peace in a good faith? History of modern Russia, USSR and empire show any peace treaty or other international documents with nothing, just a waste of the paper.

Russians always lie. That's putty western world are blind because Russian bribes are too good to miss.

What is this?

Those peace terms included Russia getting to annex Crimea, stationing troops in Donbas (eastern Ukraine), Ukraine retreating all of their troops, Ukraine being neutral (permanently non-allied).

In return, Ukraine would have gotten some guarantor states safekeeping its newly drawn borders (but Russia would have been able to veto any action of those guarantor states in case someone, possibly Russia, attacked the Ukraine again).

This seems a bit of a complete joke to me? Can you explain, why, exactly, Ukraine should have taken that offer? This is basically "I give you everything we are currently fighting over, in return I get an absolutely worthless promise from a serial liar". No deal.

Which leak are you referring to?

> Try testing for internationally recognized borders and the situation is same for the Israeli invasion and Russian invasion.

I do not understand your point. Ukraine has borders that were recognized by Russia itself (Budapest Memorandum). They violated those borders when they annexed Crimea-- their excuse: those people want to be part of our empire-- ok.

8 years later they marched on Kyiv-- whats even the excuse for that? Do you think the people in Kyiv want to be liberated from their president, and governed by some Russian oligarch?

If Russia is in a similar situation than Israel, then were are the massive acts of terrorism against Russian citizens comparable to October 7th? Where are the missiles fired towards Moscow, before 2014?

I don't know why you interpret my comment like that, I don't support Russia, I say that Israel is just like Russia from that standpoint.

Are you by any chance assuming that Israel is absolutely innocent, therefore I must be claiming that Russia must be also innocent? It's the other way around, they are both aggressor and invaders. Anyone claiming that countries shouldn't invade other countries and respect the internationally recognized borders then should support Ukraine and Palestine.

The new puppet government was ethnic cleansing the local Russian populatin. So It's not so clear cut. The fact that's it a puppet government is easy to confirm. Just ask yourself where Zelensky came from and why he stashes his generational wealth in the states. Why ban elections if the Ukrainian people are still really behind them. Also Ukraine is not getting helped for free. More like they've mortgage their land and resources to the likes of Blackrock and other banking interests. That will keep the future generations in indebted servitude, while they rob them of their resources. This is just Western colonialism. Ask any Indian how fond they are of British colonialism.

> The new puppet government was ethnic cleansing the local Russian populatin

Yes, this is what Russian state media insinuated.

If Russias utmost effort was to protect the minorities in Ukraines east, spearheading a peace-keeping effort would have made a lot of sense (even stationing army there, possibly).

But this is not what happened, Russia fanned the flames in that region instead, aiding the separatists with undercover soldiers and materiel `(this is very well documented because they shot down a civilian airliner by mistake, which pissed of the dutch victims and their government to no end, investigating the whole clusterfuck in excruciating detail).

> The fact that's it a puppet government is easy to confirm.

Insisting on Zelensky being a non-democratic puppet government is a bit rich after Putin had his last political opponent poisoned, but ok...

> Why ban elections if the Ukrainian people are still really behind them

Because they are at war.

> Also Ukraine is not getting helped for free. More like they've mortgage their land and resources to the likes of Blackrock and other banking interests. That will keep the future generations in indebted servitude, while they rob them of their resources.

So Russia trying to annex the Ukraine is actually a plot by western colonialists? Why is Russia helping those colonialists in your opinion? Who exactly are those colonialists? Germany? UK? France?

Navalny went through a trail (Russian legal process), was found guilty of corruption and died in prison of a blood clot. Please provide proof of poisoning ...

Alexei Navalny's popularity within Russia was always a western media fabrication, and at best a whole lot of wishful thinking. Navalny was a fringe candidate, with about the same amount of popularity as Chris Christi, and pushed and financed be the same neocons. To what degree Russia is democratic can be disputed, but the fact is that Putin still has the backing of a vast, vast majority of Russian people.

There are J6 political opponents still rotting in jail on decade long sentences over protesting a highly suspicious election. Some have been kept in solitarily confinement (torture) and some have also died in prison. So Jailing political opposition is done in the states at this point too. Trump survived two assassination attempts. Biden a less popular candidate (as proven by this election) had his justice department attempt to jail him for hundreds of years.

>So Russia trying to annex the Ukraine is actually a plot by western colonialists?

Russia voluntarily let Ukraine secede from the USSR under certain conditions, which they have not kept. If Ukrainians have a right to self determination. Clearly under the same principle that Russian majority that lives in eastern part of Ukraine does as well.

> If Ukrainians have a right to self determination. Clearly under the same principle that Russian majority that lives in eastern part of Ukraine does as well.

Russians were not a majority in eastern Ukraine. The split was roughly 55% Ukrainian, 40% Russian, 5% other in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, and much less in other oblasts Russia has officially annexed - Kherson was 82% Ukrainian and 14% Russian.

The right to self-determination applies to distinct "peoples". It's not very well defined, but generally understood as a globally distinct ethnicity living on their historic territories. Native American tribes could exercise this. They are a distinct people living on their historic land and without their own established state anywhere else in the world.

This right does not extend to ethnic minorities living in other countries. Russians have already exercised the right and have a country, they don't get to claim any piece of land on the planet that has Russians living there. Russians have about as strong claim to eastern Ukraine than Israel has to Brooklyn (22% Jewish). I think it would be pretty insane to argue that Brooklyn "should belong to Israel" purely on this, and start a major war that drives away millions as refugees, kills hundreds of thousands, and razes many East Coast towns to ground.

The exact percentage of Russian ethnicity is is a little hard to determine, and varies through out that region. The fact is that the Eastern region of Ukraine historically voted for pro Russian candidates. And after being annexed, again voted to be part of Russia. Presumably the people that live there, hedged their bets on who would treat them best going forward, and came up with Russia multiple times.

We have a similar situation in Canada where the Province of Quebec has a large percentage of francophone speakers (French Heritage). If one day, Canada were to try to join the US, a large percentage of the Quebec region would either decide to form their own country, or link up with France in some way. Even more so likely if the Anglophone Canadians would start ethnically cleansing Quebecers.

If you believe in the principals of democracy, then you should support the will of the local population to self determination under such circumstances.

All this talk of democracy, but Zelensky's party will not hold new elections, because they've lost the support of the majority of Ukrainians. So if not the interests of the majority, who's interest does this party represent going forward?

> The fact is that the Eastern region of Ukraine historically voted for pro Russian candidates. And after being annexed, again voted to be part of Russia. Presumably the people that live there, hedged their bets on who would treat them best going forward, and came up with Russia multiple times.

That's simply not true. Pre-war surveys showed 1% support for joining Russian Federation in Kherson and up to 13% in areas with the largest number of Russians. So it was a fringe idea even among ethnic Russians. Leaked surveys conducted by Russian military admin after the invasion showed similar low levels. They got 99% support in their fake referendums only through extreme intimidation:

  Moscow-backed forces are going door-to-door armed with machine guns forcing Ukrainians to vote in "sham" referendums that will annex newly occupied areas to Russia, sources have told the Telegraph. Voting began on Friday morning and is expected to continue until Tuesday, with polling stations featuring see-through ballot boxes and armed guards set up across Russian-controlled parts of the Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, as well as Russia itself. 

  Ukrainians living in territory that Moscow has taken since the start of the war have been told their families will be massacred if they refuse to take part, with soldiers sometimes even leaning over their shoulders and watching them as they vote. “We are forced to go under the pretext of being shot. If we didn’t go, they said that they would shoot or massacre the whole family,” said a resident in Severodonetsk, Luhansk Oblast, who wished to remain anonymous due to fears of reprisals. “We're scared. At the referendum, turnout is required or arrest or worse. Many are being forced with a threat to life.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/09/23/gunmen-goi...

If you care about the free self-determination of local population, then this is the polar opposite - plain coercion by foreign invaders.

The exact percentage of Russian ethnicity is is a little hard to determine, and varies through out that region

But the comparative proportions identifying as "Ukrainian" or "Russian" in the last pre-war census is not, and in fact, in this wonderful utopian future we now live in. And even starting from scratch, you can easily zero in on a reliable answer to this question within minutes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Ukrainian_census#National...

I invite you to look at the numbers for the 5 regions which Putin is currently intending to grab (and which the Trump administration apparently intend to just hand over to him, with an order of fries on the side), and tell us what you find there.

Even more so likely if the Anglophone Canadians would start ethnically cleansing Quebecers.

The thing is, under normal circumstances they most definitely would not. And if you were to go up there today, and tell them that 10 years from now they'd all be at each other's throats, with one side insisting it just had to ethnically cleanse the other and they no longer had any real choice about the matter -- they'd look at you like you were crazy.

And that was pretty much the situation in Ukraine, until very shortly before 2014. What changed that was (to some extent) various political events. But what pushed these changes of sentiment into violence was -- a tide relentless propaganda and disinformation.

Of exactly the type you are echoing, above.

"in this wonderful utopian future we now live in, you can easily zero in on a reliable answer to your question within minutes (even starting from scratch):"

Russia voluntarily let Ukraine secede from the USSR under certain conditions, which they have not kept

Please identify the specific treaty/protocol you are referring to, and which clauses you believe Ukraine has violated.

Clearly under the same principle that Russian majority that lives in eastern part of Ukraine

There was no such majority before Russia's invasion of 2014 (as explained in the other comment). It seems you may be confused by the fact that there were higher numbers voting for pro-Russia parties, or who spoke Russian/Surgyk. But that's not the same as being, or identifying as "Russian" -- any more the fact that English is the dominant language in Ireland means everyone living there must be "English".

This is one of the most important things to understand about Ukraine.

The poisoning of Navalny is well documented. Involvement of the FSB as well.

Just read the wiki article for a quick summary, or e.g. the bellingcat reports for details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexei_Navalny

Navalny was a patriot that fought corruption and abuse of power in his nation-- would he have won elections in Russia? Probably not, but he was most certainly highly inconvenient for the corrupt oligarchs there (Putin among them).

Regarding J6: I don't doubt that some of those protestors had good intentions. Do you suggest letting perpetrators go unpunished if their attempt at a coup is incompetent enough, and fone with "pure" intentions? Because I feel that sets a very bad precedent for a democracy in general; I don't think you would find a majority for this, either.

> If Ukrainians have a right to self determination. Clearly under the same principle that Russian majority that lives in eastern part of Ukraine does as well.

First-- the Donbas is not a nation, which is what makes it more complicated to exercise any self determination in general. So that situation is different from Russia vs. Ukraine already.

Second-- Russia being primarily concerned about regional autonomy of eastern Ukraine is a pretty transparent sham, because they never actually stood up for the autonomy of those regions-- they annexed them instead, after sending soldiers there to further escalate the situation.

> Not the same but when you pick something like "Russia must respect the internationally recognized borders" and you don't apply the same for Israel then you are a hypocrite

Ahem... You're suggesting that Ukraine killed over a thousand Russians and took them hostage, and thereby provoked a war? That would actually be the correct analogy. No, Russia simply invaded because it felt it could. The situation is very different to Israel and Gaza and you're deliberately leaving out the fine details that make the difference.

>Ahem... You're suggesting that Ukraine killed over a thousand Russians and took them hostage, and thereby provoked a war?

Maybe, just maybe you could have a look at what Gaza was like before the said event. It was blockaded by Sea, Air and Land. It was oppressed and occupied, not to mention the settler terrorism in West Bank. It is a myopic view to hold that it was peace before the Oct 7 incident.

> and the Americans DO support people in Gaza/Westbank a ton (humanitarian aid).

Humanitarian aid doesn’t help preventing bombs kindly donated by the US from falling. The large difference in casualties (what is it? 40 Palestinians for every Israeli?) tells me it’s not a civil war, but an extermination.

Israel settling occupied territories doesn’t earn them much sympathy either. If you want a buffer to feel safe, annex and protect the people who live there while fully demilitarising the land.

The only country that has ever granted Palestinians concessions without deaths is the US (e.g. the desettlement of Gaza), and that is only possible because we have leverage over military aid.

It's also the country that consistently blocks any sanctions against what the rest of the UN perceive as countless war crimes committed against Palestinian civilians by the IDF.

>Americans DO support people in Gaza/Westbank

Americans !== America.

Personally, I think that the goal of a vibrant, thriving democracy is to allow and encourage participation from many groups of citizens. This will result in the government pursuing multiple objectives at the same time.

This necessarily means that you're going to have to make trade offs. Is it more important to have cheap EVs or is it more important to keep good jobs in country?

Maybe in this case we'll decide on good jobs in our country, and then look at other ways that climate change can be addressed. Maybe we won't.

Asking why an entire country doesn't do 100% of the things it could to address a single issue seems almost intentionally naive.

Maybe it's the idea of a "country" that's flawed? Certainly it is, we live on a planet and are all impacted by the environment. Previous social structures are no longer applicable and are causing damage. It's only a matter of time before they're rethought.

> For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars?

This is a very strange criticism. Why is it wrong to try to make impact on the environment without fully destroying the domestic industry? Let's follow up on this a bit further. If the EU counties did in fact become hardliners on the environment to the point of fully destroying their own industries, then you would no longer attack the perceived "hypocrisy" but would instead attack their policy of deindustrialization. So you don't seem to have problems with hypocrisy, you instead seem to have a problem with environmental movement/policies as such or at least insofar as they are implemented by the EU block.

If the EU countries completely abandoned their environmental slogans, and went on an ultra-industrial path, would you still be a critic? Given your other comments (why can capital travel but people cannot?), something tells me that yes, you would. It is difficult for me to perceive your criticism as anything other than coming from a supporter of an _ipso facto_ enemy economic block. You are not interested at constructively helping EU countries anymore, you are looking for a hammer to destroy your chosen target with.

One thing about social media is that it allows anyone to have a voice. The problem of "anyone" is that it ignores the fact that we do not live in a post-human utopia, we live in a real world where the concept of an "enemy" is real. There are real people out there who seek our destruction. This is not a pleasant thing to speak about but it is something that seems to be unfortunately the case. Because English is such a popular language, chances are the enemy speaks English and is on social media. What content do you think he posts?

This is a fallacy. People are not buying Chinese instead of European because they want destruction, they buy it because the European industry failed in making better or cheaper products.

If we are bailing out an industry, this can't be on the shoulders of the public who doesn't have anything to do with the failure. If we are going to save it, make sure those responsible for the failure are paying too. You are asking for Europeans to pay almost half a year of their salaries to save these industries, then at least take away the properties of those involved in the failure. Maybe it wouldn't change much but are in this together or not?

They are bailing out industries when a lot of local jobs are bound to it, so it’s not correct that the public doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Tell me again why 400M people should pay a half a year worth of salary as extra to buy an inferior car to save the jobs of those who failed to make a good product? Let them fail, pay them unemployment to prevent social issues then go get the cheap good cars and pay a bit more tax for social security. Cut out the shareholders and executives.

If you do that often enough, at some point the state won’t have enough money to pay the unemployed any more. Also, there are reasons why the same product can be manufactured more cheaply in China than (say) in Germany, that have to do with different standards for labor rights, safety standards, and so on, not with anyone failing to make a good product. And it’s not like China doesn’t subsidize its automotive industry as well.

A lot of the things that we buy in Europe are already manufactured cheaply in China with different standards etc. We are moving a lot of manufacturing back to Europe, mostly in the eastern part of it. That part is still 'cheap' aka they can put the made in eu logo on the box, pay employees eastern Europe prices and ask buyers western Europe prices.

The same thing with the eu car companies... they even took the money from the states where they had factories (Germany, Belgium, France) which greatly subsidized them, increased their profits and margins then moved to the next EU state and beyond.

At a certain point, if you don't approve of another regions labor policies, you have to buy less of their exports, otherwise you won't be able to produce your own goods.

Better? That needs a proof and I bet you won’t be able to find a peer reviewed example.

Cheaper? You raise an easy target here if you ignore the massive subsidies, completely different financial systems and politics. China ignores international trade rules and Europe, USA etc. can’t ignore this if they want to save their industry and - at the end - democracy.

Peer review for cars? Interesting mental gymnastics. Just let people buy whatever they want.

> you ignore the massive subsidies, completely different financial systems and politics

Cool, China subsidizing EU's fight against climate change. Get the free money, save the climate and spend the money you saved on something that you want instead of forced.

Thank you for acknowledging that it’s not possible to prove that Chinese cars are better. After all, you’ve already retracted your initial claim.

> Cool, China subsidizing EU's fight against climate change. Get the free money, save the climate and spend the money you saved on something that you want instead of forced.

Your mental gymnastics needs some training if you think that importing cheap cars instead of selling and exporting your own cars and therefore protecting your own industry and jobs is a better deal or mechanic for EUs fight against climate change.

Maybe you are unaware of „The WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures disciplines the use of subsidies, and it regulates the actions countries can take to counter the effects of subsidies.“?

https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/scm_e/scm_e.htm

> if you ignore the massive subsidies

The EU subsides their car makers just the same. Part of Renault belonged to the French government for the longest time and all the governments are providing incentives to drive the sales of new cars.

See the cash for clunkers program that was running for years after the 2008 crisis.

Using tax payer money to artificially reduce the cost of a new car, If that is not a subsidy, then what is it?

It's always the same: rules for thee, not for me. Most of the accusations western countries make are just projections in reality.

> Russians didn't discover magic words that they use to hypnotise people and make them vote for pro-Russia candidate

Well, someone else discovered not the magic words but the magic timing of when to tell them and how to surround people with the right words: i.e. the social media algorithms.

Don't shoot the messenger. The actual problems being pointed out are the root cause.

People were unhappy before and nothing like this happened because of it. International interference was always very difficult.

More transparency is a good thing, even if that comes from "international interference". The problems exist, try to hide them at your own political risk.

The point is foreign election interference is no longer difficult, dangerous, or expensive, and is incredibly effective.

It's not "dangerous" to expose the truth, even selectively. More information is better, especially when it pertains to things our government is keeping from us.

> More information is better,

Not always, as cherry picked information is, in essence, a lie: it misrepresents reality by showing a narrow sliver of it that supports an argument that's not supported by the full set of observations.

The world sucks for most people. The world is better than its ever been for most people. The world can be improved a lot for most people. Those three things can and are all simultaneously true.

Unfortunately, improving the world requires engaging deeply with issues and many people now prefer to speak in terms of grand historical narratives and emotional arguments that stitch sparse data points into a large story far vaster than the data can support.

Incumbents losing elections is what is supposed to happen. It's a sign of normal times, not of a crisis.

One of the key principles of a republic – both ancient and modern – is that personal power is bad for the society. Leaders are a necessary evil that must be tolerated (if only barely), but they also must be changed regularly.

>One of the key principles of a republic – both ancient and modern – is that personal power is bad for the society. Leaders are a necessary evil that must be tolerated (if only barely), but they also must be changed regularly.

In Romania not only we change them regularly but we also have PMs and ministers in jail for crimes they commuted, we are not like other countries where same president or prime Minister was in power for 30 years.

Incumbents losing elections can be fair. But only if the winner played by the rules at least loosely and the win wasn’t orchestrated by a foreign party, especially an adversary.

Unless you are Russian or Chinese you shouldn’t have a president ‘chosen’ by them. So props to the Romanian authorities for taking action and not allowing a president beholden to Russian interests.

Nobody is claiming the candidate didn't play by the rules. Rather, some agency has asserted there was "a mass influence operation" in his favor - apparently they're not even asserting an organized conspiracy.

There's a big problem with that claim. Intelligence agencies have a long history of making this claim of Russian control over elections all over the world, and it's always been lies and nonsense. What even is a "mass influence" operation? Sounds like the same thing as a political campaign to me? If it's really on a mass scale it should be pretty easy to prove and work out how to stop it next time, shouldn't it?

Such claims are never proven because they aren't true. Back in 2016 when Trump and Brexit were still fresh, the sort of people who didn't like those things were trying to explain their loss. The Clinton campaign came up with the Steele dossier and the American press ran with it. This was the origin of the "Russian influence" claim and back then it was usually described as being done through social media bots. Academics flooded the literature with papers that claimed to prove the existence of such Russian bots. I used to work in bot detection so was interested to read some of these papers, and found they were all based on academic fraud:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...

Given the long history of this type of claim, a rational person will have to assume that it's a plot by Romanian intelligence to overturn an election and treat it accordingly.

I’ll bite although this really feels as unlikely as trying to change the mind of a Russian troll. A few things really sunk your boat there.

First, you started on a wrong foot. He is literally accused of breaking the law by not declaring his assets. This is trivially proven by the fact that… he didn’t declare his assets. In my reasonable person circle that’s called “not playing by the rules”. Very Russian.

Second, at best you can say only “claims can’t be proven true” but you still went one step further to make multiple strong claims you yourself cannot prove (e.g. “because they aren’t true” or “intelligence plot”). “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, or “teapot calling the kettle black”, also good topics for your blog spam.

Third, you denounce people claiming conspiracies to get their way by claiming a conspiracy to get your way, like any “reasonable” person would. Romanian intelligence and constitutional court got together to overturn the people’s will to vote pro-Russia. Perhaps, to use your own words, your claims cannot be proven because they’re not true.

Lastly, going back to the Romanian elections and using very reasonable logic like the very reasonable people we are. Is it often the case that a pro-Russian extremist candidate nobody knows of, who polls close to 0, and basically campaigns only on TikTok, soars ahead in top position in any EU country that was historically and consistently pro-West for a long time? All without any outside interference?

My claims are all correct to the best of my knowledge. If you disagree with any, state which ones and why. You've engaged in a lot of handwaving and assertions that I must be wrong, but no refutations.

> Is it often the case that a pro-Russian extremist candidate nobody knows of, who polls close to 0, and basically campaigns only on TikTok, soars ahead in top position in any EU country ... without any outside interference

Yes. This has been happening across the world, and in every case it results in the same kinds of attempts to void democracy by the incumbents. Other countries where this has happened: Germany (AfD), France (RN), the UK (Reform), the USA (Trump), and so on. All accused of being popular only due to shadowy, unspecified manipulation by Russia, all with zero evidence. In most cases the claims don't even make logical sense to begin with.

So there's nothing unique about Romania in this regard. Incumbents collaborate with journalists to force through unpopular policies without allowing any coordination against them, social media takes up the slack. It's just a really good way to spread messages outside the control of local governments. Of course politicians use it.

> He is literally accused of breaking the law by not declaring his assets

We're talking about the BBC story which covers annulment, and it says: "The court's decision comes after intelligence documents were declassified, suggesting Georgescu benefitted from a mass influence operation – conducted from abroad – to interfere with the result of the vote." Nothing here about tax or assets. Maybe he has broken the law, maybe he hasn't. Given the rate at which bogus show trials are deployed against political outsiders these days, I'd reserve judgement on that.

You presented your opinion as incontrovertible fact, and everything else as lie or conspiracy because you didn’t see proof. Then you put the caveat that it’s “to the best of your knowledge” which basically turns the incontrovertible fact into common opinion. What’s more, best of your knowledge also incentivizes having little or selective knowledge in order to be able to claim anything as fact.

Case in point, you made such a hard case for everything being a conspiracy involving constitutional courts and intelligence agencies, all claims of foreign interference being lies because you haven’t seen proof, and everything you say is solid... until it turns out your only source of information was a single partially read article.

And you still maintain that you’re right despite still not reading anything else on the topic because it must be disinformation.

The candidate himself declared 0 campaign expenses despite obviously spending for a campaign. The court also noticed this obvious fact. Foreign interference doesn’t only mean someone hacking a TikTok algorithm but also external parties illegally funding a foreign agent’s election. With large amounts of undeclared funds you can sway an election which is illegal for obvious reasons. Being foreign funds just makes it worse because they sway the elections towards foreign interests. Do you expect a country to just ignore that, whether people on the sidelines who read one article proclaim it’s totally fine?

P.S. Someone is trying to set your house on fire. When you try to top him he says it's his right and wants to see evidence from a court showing that it isn't because he read an article that says otherwise. That's where yours and fellow "freedom fighter's" comments are right now. Except in this case the court actually already spoke and you're still sure you know better.

My blog posts go over the factual ways in which the claims of Russian bots on social media have been incorrect in the past. Bad use of statistics and logic, things like that. To my knowledge there are no factual errors in my analysis but if you find one, let me know.

To make this clearer: if someone asserts something objective about the world and their proof is invalid or missing, we have to assume they are wrong. There have been many claims about politicians being successful only due to Russian influence campaigns, and each time those claims were investigated the proofs were invalid or missing. That is a factual claim.

What's a subjective opinion is that this generalizes: if the last 99 times were wrong, the 100th time is probably wrong too, even without a deep investigation. You can disagree with that, but why would you? Your priors should be strongly against these claims having any merit by now.

> The candidate himself declared 0 campaign expenses despite obviously spending for a campaign. The court also noticed this obvious fact.

And yet that's not the justification for annulling the vote that's being presented. The rest of your paragraph slides smoothly between assertions of fact and speculation - that he must have spent lots of money, that the money must have been coming from foreigners, that those foreigners must be Russian, and that such funds are the reason he won. Those are all very subjective. For instance, Trump was outspent massively in both elections that he won. Apparently you can't just "sway" an election with money: other things matter more.

> Russia appears to be able to propel politicians who are closer to the their politics

Not really, they propel useful idiots. In the US that would have been Robert Kennedy Jr. In Germany it's whatever clows AfD has, in Austria it's the FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl. Basically anyone that would either auto sabotage that country, the EU, like Viktor Orbán or be pro-Russia, like the Georgian Dream.

In Romania it's a RFK Jr. like nutcake figure with new age, peace and love, vaccines bad, water has memory, nazis are patriots, etc beliefs and with a discourse that sounds all right at the surface but practicaly says absolutely nothing except that it's littered with trigger narratives, just as if it were the Heaven's Gate website. His campaign was pumped by Russia on Tiktok using dormant accounts two weeks or so before the election. Also on other US based social networks and on Telegram to a lesser extent. 2M people voted for him out of 9M, some because they hate the current establishment, others saw him as an outsider, when in fact he's actually part of an old boys network, others actually believe his mumbo jumbo. It turns out he's also linked and promoted by fascist groups, some of which are actual former French Foreign Legion soldiers, run a mercenary group in the DRC and survival training workshops in the mountains. These are also linked to a rather controversial Eastern Orthodox bishop who is known to be pro Russian, so this candidate also got promoted through church networks. His campaign was in part financed by a crypto entreprenour with dual Romanian and South African citizenship who currently resides in ZA. The candidate declared zero political advertising expenses.

Anyway, I hope Tiktok gets massively screwed by the EU after this. Because this is in the Comission's hands now. The candidate's fascist friends might be soon visited by a SWAT team and they'll probably find firearms. The candidate, I dunno, he's probably going to flee to another country if he ever gets indicted.

> In the US that would have been Robert Kennedy Jr

We should not forget about the orange elephant in the room.

In Austria, Haider took over the FPÖ in 1986. In 1999, when Russia was completely weak and had other priorities, the FPÖ already had 26% nationally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Party_of_Austria

In Germany the AfD rose to around 10% after Merkel let in millions of refugees in 2015. It had nothing to do with Russia at all. It is currently polling around 18% because the economy is bad and people are tired of U.S. subservience and want Germany to make its own decisions.

The concept that right wing parties are somehow beneficial to Russia in the long run is absurd to the extreme.

In Ukraine, literally the Bandera supporters are the best fighters and the most anti-Russian. When in history has it ever been beneficial for a country to support nationalism in an enemy country. It does not make any sense.

This whole thing is just a narrative of the forces who want to keep down "EU-first" movements.

> This whole thing is just a narrative of the forces who want to keep down "EU-first" movements.

Sure. There is documented evidence of both FPö and AfD ties to Russia. Maybe it was different in the '90s but now Russia promotes a similar conservative agenda and it's in most cases financing the European far-right. There is no easier way to destabilize a country than to make it implode by polarizing its society, as seen in Syria, Georgia.

https://www.dw.com/en/austrias-far-right-fp%C3%B6-party-unde...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/afd-spionageaff...

I disagree with your defense of Ruzzia

1 there is well known that social media and itnernet companies can target content for each person

2 we known from Cambridge analitica and similar that if social media company wants he can make a user depressed, sad etc

3 we also observer that irelevant bullshit is pushed very hard in social media, as an example transgender stuff, it is pushed so hard that my family thinks that Romania is in danger because of EU and their transgender agenda, children will be manipulated to change their gender, You can see how fake stuff about thois topic is pushed on social media, my family never had contact with transgender people, maybe they know one gay person in their entire live but LGBTQ is such an important topic in election that they might decide whot o vote based on this Ruzzian bullshit

4 we also seen same shit with COVID , yes the virus exists even if the pro Ruzzian candidates do not belives it or thinks God send him the naturalistic cure, based on how hard this conpiracies were pushed in last years you have conspirationist vote conspirationists, so if you want their vote you either lower yourselves to that level or try to fight Ruzzia and china to bring a bit of intelligence back.

5 anti emigration is a big push on social media, and fascists in Europe really push on this, but tell my, will italians or Spanish people in the city that studied at the university go and work in the farms, in the hot summer instead of the poor immigrants? Did you also seen how crimes are immediately blamed on the immigrants by the internet trolls before the identity of the criminals is known, and sometimes the criminal is a native, but the trolls pushed so hard on the fake news that it was immigrants that sometimes the immigrants were attacked based on fake news started by Ruzzians and belived by right wing less inteligent people.

So in Romania the people that voted for the Kremlin guy , voted him because they want a strong man that is anti transexuals and LGBTQ, anti minorities, that belives in the same conpirations and hate same groups as they hate all because Ruzzia trained them to hate those groups of people and believe those conspiracies.

They did not vote because of economical policies the fascist guy proposed.

I did not defend Russia. Let's stop pretending that everything is perfect but the adversary found magic words that can show to people and sway their opinions. Influencing people is indeed possible and Russia definitely doing it but this tale about showing social media posts and making them vote the way they like is just a caricature.

They are able to do it only because of the failure of the others to address the concerns of the electorate. Sure, they lie but they all lie. The Russian propaganda is very well crafted and does address the concerns that others don't want to touch. It's not a spell, it's not magic words, its not hypnosis.

You are under the impression that the Ruzzian influencisg started a few weeks ago.

Since you are so smart and see the reality I am to blind to see, show me with facts the damages the transexualss done to Romania sto make a large part of population to vote an anti LGBTQ person. There should be some examples you can find since this is a major thing this traditional voters are talking about and is important on who they vote.

>>For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars? Can't stand others making the world better place better than they do?

Because China Gives Two Shits about the environment. Them and their "developing country" tag. They will burn the coal until there is no more, along with India.

Because China Gives No Shit about democracy, or human rights.

China isn't shy to show force. The "west" is already at war with China but hasn't realized it. Heck, they still don't accept war with Rusia started over a decade ago

“ For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars?”

This is talked about in many treasury departments. China supports some businesses an order of magnitude beyond the competition because they are a state/corp hybrid model and this allows those businesses to sell below material costs. This eventually destroys competition for future price raises and is a good long term strategy that only authoritarian countries can afford.

Other Countries like in the EU are hesitant to let China destroy war machine production capability so they apply tariffs to right-size the actual cost.

Each of these are a result of neo-*ism constituencies failing. Dialectically, we've reached the point where the contradictions are so great they have become impossible to maintain. Each of these crises are a direct product of those contradictions. The only viable path forward is addressing these contradictions head on. Any attempt at doubling down on existing ideology will inflame the contradictions further.

> The west is in crisis, the ideology doesn't hold and the economy doesn't provide

So democracy (the ideology) doesn't hold? And the US economy is currently the envy of the world - yes there's a big housing problem that needs addressing, but if anything the losing party was the one that put up some kind of plan to deal with it, I don't see the winning party reducing housing/rental costs as they're from the landlord class.

> Can you tell me if US is about freedom and respect of the international law, borders and trande? If so why they support Ukraine against Russian invasion

Because Ukraine was invaded by Russia thus impacting Ukrainian freedom and borders? It seems pretty obvious.

Isn't it democracy when a candidate gets more votes than the rest? The only way to undermine democracy is to reject the results of the elections.

If propaganda from the "enemy" really is that effective, then either it's rooted in truth and resonates with the electors, or we have to admit that the general public is so easily influenceable that allowing them to vote is a danger for democracy, which means democracy isn't really worth much in the first place.

No, this is about common rules for everyone. Campaign material had to be marked as such and campaign finances had to be declared. One candidate blatantly failed to do so and won the first round. The court took a bold decision.

Can you show me where the EU disclose its compaign financing for the romanian presidential election? They've certainly been putting the finger down in the scales far more than the russians

The Romanian court had evidence of Russia putting the finger down and breaking the rules. You, on the other hand, are just accusing.

Oh? Is there some dispute that did EU called Tik Tok about these elections? https://apnews.com/article/romania-tiktok-elections-european...

If Russia had called them in for not blocking or censoring pro-EU candidates would you not have called that election interference?

The EU don't have to disclose something like that, as Romania has a central authority that handles this stuff, as per the law:

> The collection of electoral contributions and the payment of electoral expenses may be made only through bank accounts notified in advance to the Permanent Electoral Authority.

The EU is not involved in directly financing candidates or political parties in Romania, they've already given us tens of billions of dollars to develop our country.

>The EU is not involved in directly financing candidates or political parties in Romania, they've already given us tens of billions of dollars to develop our country.

Wow, seems like they're spent tens of billions of dollars in long term election interference campaigns. Are we going to see the politicians elected going to jail over it?

Your facetious comment doesn't really add anything to the conversation, this isn't Reddit.

Tens of billions of dollars of development funding, which Romania obviously wanted, given they went through the trouble of joining the EU, and then went through the trouble of getting hold of the EU cash and spending it.

Not quite the same as external party spending huge amounts of cash running political campaigns, while ignoring all the local rules about campaigning. After all Romania didn’t have to accept the EU cash, or spent it. The EU doesn’t force countries to join, just so they can give them billions of euros in the hopes of interfering in a political process years later. A political process that’s only important, because of the development funding. Much easier and cheaper to simpler not get involved, and allow those countries to struggle alone.

That implies campaign material and finances are capable of swinging an election, surely that affirms the statement you’re replying to? Namely:

> the general public is so easily influenceable that allowing them to vote is a danger for democracy

I hate to admit it but he’s got a point. My counter would be that the recent US election was not won by the biggest spender.

If campaign material was not capable of changing the minds of the electorate, nobody would waste time effort and money on it.

Free speech is valuable and worth defending specifically because it has the potential to change minds, not just because people like the sounds of their own voices.

(For the recent US election, people also point to Musk buying Twitter and getting his president of choice and saying this demonstrates why Musk is smart and $44bn was worth it, so are you sure it wasn't won by the biggest spenders?)

Democracy is when the candidate the globalists want gets the most votes.

If they dont, then you can claim "election interference" and misinformation and then call for a do over.

Who are these "globalists" and what does that word really mean for you? Because the wikipedia article is a doozy.

The term doesn’t have to be a dog whistle. The financial and corporate elite want open borders in order to maximize rent-seeking and depress wages.

But we already have open borders in the EU. If you're referring to allowing in migrants freely, that's deeply unpopular in Romania and no candidate is in support of it.

> The financial and corporate elite want open borders in order to maximize rent-seeking and depress wages.

I want open borders so we can put a taco truck on every corner. Immigration is good.

Open borders means open to illegal immigration.

No one is arguing that immigration isn't good.

You can have taco trucks with legal immigration.

> Open borders means open to illegal immigration.

I know what it means ;)

> No one is arguing that immigration isn't good.

You'd be surprised how many people argue exactly that. But I digress, I was just making a poorly-timed joke.

CAN you have taco trucks with legal immigration?

Say you live with your family in Juarez right now - what do you think statistically your chance of legal immigrating to the United States is (and lets up the ante, say you have legit proof that every mafia boss in Mexico is hunting you and every member of your family)...?

I'll give you a ballpark - your chance of legal immigrating is similar to me marrying Gisele... there is a chance, I am very good looking but you know...

Majority of people arguing "illegal" vs. "legal" immigration simply fail to look at statistic to see that "legal" immigration is vaporware - just a term to use to try to prove some point which cannot be proven with that argument...

> Open borders means open to illegal immigration. No, open borders mean that the immigrants are legal by default. It doesn't mean the borders aren't secure enough for your paranoid xenophobic liking.

> No, open borders mean that the immigrants are legal by default.

I suppose that's one definition of it, a more extreme version. No country on Earth has this kind of immigration policy. It would be unsustainable.

> It doesn't mean the borders aren't secure enough for your paranoid xenophobic liking.

Ad-hominem attacks are not necessary. My wife is second generation immigrant. Her father is first generation, they do not support illegal immigration either. He came here legally and the people that come here illegally take away resources from those who want to come here legally the right way.

No biggie, they'll have another chance to pick a correct one. And another if they don't choose wisely

That is almost the definition of democracy — when they stop getting additional chances, that's when it stops being a democracy.

"Almost" is doing heavy lifting there.

Why would they need additional chances when they have already expressed what they want? Oh, they dared to vote for a candidate that doesn’t suit the powers that be, so they’ll vote again and again until they choose the preselected candidate.

The cold war communist boogie man hasn't gone away. Russia is apparently all power and has infinite reach into global elections, but at the same time, getting destroyed on the battlefield and about to lose the Ukraine conflict any moment now.

Russia is well balanced against the aid everyone else is giving to Ukraine; it's a war of attrition, where both Ukraine and Russia are being worn down and nobody's quite sure which side will collapse first.

Other than just being cheapskates, the west has a fear that {if Putin fears his regime may collapse, he may personally order the use of nukes}, and also that even if he doesn't and Russia does collapse then rogue actors may steal some of the nukes.

building military is much much more expensive than paying influencers.

Russian propaganda machine is incredibly strong, because it was perfected on their own citizens for basically century now. They spend billions on pure propaganda.

While with military - they relied on propaganda as well. They projected power while not picking conflicts with anyone who can punch back.

West has nothing against russian propaganda machine and this is what thrtuthly terrifying to be honest.

Many people are easily influenceable, which is why there are rules around campaign funding and transparency. It doesn’t mean that we have to give up on democracy (what would be the alternative?), it means that the rules have to be enforced.

I don't buy it. People aren't that easily influenceable; they are just extremely tired from decades of failed liberal policies and out of alternatives. The populist right-wing wins we're seeing all over the world are the expression of the immense frustration people have with the system.

You want democracy to work? Give people real choices, not the usual binary bad or more bad. Make them feel like their vote matters for once.

I observe for myself that I am rather quickly influenced by the information I take in. Since I’m aware of that, I’m diligent in the information I seek out, and can therefore compensate for some amount of misinformation. Other people aren’t necessarily aware or diligent in that way.

I’m not satisfied with the voting choices either, but I do have some understanding of why they are the way they are. It is a nontrivial systemic issue, and voting populist does not improve that situation.

You seem to see a dichotomy between the politicians that provide voting choices and the rest of the population that votes. I don’t see it that way. The politicians are part of the population, they represent the population. I won’t tell you to go into politics to try to change things, but if you did, then maybe you’ll realize why it’s hard, and that how things are is a function of human nature, of the particular country’s specific political system, and of the world being more complicated than many people recognize.

> The only way to undermine democracy is to reject the results of the elections.

Do you actually believe this? Voter suppression and intimidation tactics don’t exist? Elections are always valid, no matter how they were facilitated?

Obviously, as long as neutral observers can guarantee the voting. But in this case, there is no question about the validity of the results; there are no voter suppression and intimidation tactics here. Those seem to be far more common in the US, with electoral nonsense such as gerrymandering, no ID required to vote, mail-in ballots, and so on.

Yep, you've stumbled upon a 'secret' fallacy that most know. People can be made to believe anything, or you can arrive at any conclusion you want from pretty much any premise. Not even in science is there consensus.

What kept things in check so far has been that in the West, the elites have been benevolent. But now the masses, thx to social media and global comms, can be influenced by others.

Welcome to our post truth planet.

Because this is what happens when the country is ran by corrupt and/or incompetent politicians. I've seen what people are posting and commenting here, blaming everything on Russia, but this is exactly the same message that the far right uses when they blame everything on the EU.

The thing is that when the 2 biggest parties in the country come to govern together, they have no opposition, they weakened out justice system, weakened the secret services to gain power and be able to do whatever they want, they allowed and ignored the rise of far-right parties thinking they would use them to scare people into still voting for them and now we're here.

There was so much evidence that both this guy and the other 2 extreme parties are doing a lot of crap and getting all kind of external support, but they just ignored them and hoped to use them, thinking they will never get above a certain level. You had vloggers and online people showing signs of all the fake accounts and crap that was being promoted and the authorities just pretended not to see anything. Then they banned one of the 3 heads of the far right side, and this just made things worse, because instead of letting the far right eat themselves up (because they are so insane, that they can't help but fight each other and fragment their share of the votes), they allowed this absolutely insane (in the worst way possible) charismatic guy gather even more votes.

Now all of the sudden, after ignoring and pretending not to see anything, thinking that these far right candidates will help them, the establishment realized they messed up and now decide to take extreme measures and basically say that 9 milion votes don't matter. This won't end well...

A similar thing happened in Austria in 2016 where election results were cancelled due to campaign finances violations.

Yeah, but here it's so obvious. The BEC (Central Electoral Bureau) should have checked constantly the campaign spending. They didn't do that, probably also not to upset the ruling parties that were doing their own financial "optimizations" for campaign spending, and completely ignored the fact that this guy that was doing influencer campaigns and was promoted all over TikTok was declaring nothing, so 0 spending. When you ask the institutions that are supposed to guard our country and democracy to close their eye so you can do whatever you want, you shouldn't act surprised when someone even more evil will take advantage of that.

> Why is there barely any resistance to blatant attempts to undermine democracy?

Because of normalcy bias[0] after the fall of the USSR. The West assumed that we'd all hold hands and walk together into the future but that was not the case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Yeah, right. Holding hands.

Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival' [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-penta...

You misspelled "hot war".

Ah, yes, we must protect democracy by... checks notes.. canceling the democratic elections because we don't like the results.

Because we are afraid to call the war being a war, because our armies have gone to shit and the US won't back us.

Because just as much effort is spent by Russia to present the appearance of a broad variety of demographics all uniting to mock and make light of the very idea that Russia is spending great effort to undermine democracy and get their people in there.

That's pretty fundamental. I've seen these efforts be real heavyhanded. It's almost more important to hide their tracks as it is to push 'vox populi' that appear to advocate for a political outcome. They really try very hard to not be publically associated in these things.

What with various things out of TASS, MTG etc recently, I think they're trying to have it both ways, and both ride on general public skepticism of their role while also publically threatening those who are privy to their works.

"Undermining democracy" is when you win an election. "Protecting democracy" is when an unelected court unilaterally removes an elected candidate.

In most locales, courts being unelected is by design. It's how a system based on checks-and-balances is supposed to work.

Democracy: keep politicians who are failing the people and their countries economies in office because of the goodness of their hearts and the virtue of their stated values.

If the people vote differently, cancel the result because that's not democracy. For definition of democracy, see above.

Democracy has worked exceptionally well, relative to any other option, for generations. Far more free, prosperous, and safe and stable. The idea that it's somehow incompetent or incapable or uncertain is bizarre, on a factual basis.

'But Brawndo has what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!' '...Okay - what are electrolytes? Do you know? Yeah. It's what they use to make Brawndo.' 'But why do they use them in Brawndo? What do they do?' 'They're part of what plants crave. 'But why do plants crave them? 'Because plants crave Brawndo, and Brawndo has electrolytes.'

Also: you forgot to disagree with my definition of democracy and basically said "yeah, but this hypocrisy works"? So if the only valid vote is for "the right people", why bother with voting at all? Just put them in charge and be done. That would still be democracy, right?

Do you have a different solution than democracy? We've already tried communism in Romania for like 45 years and it was garbage.

For the parliament election that happened last week, the winning parties of parliament were the establishment parties. They did lose some support compared to 4 years ago, so democracy is definitely working, but they still have reasonable backing by the people.

So when Russia interferes with our politics it’s cold war, but when CIA does it’s just another day?

Europe has made it's own bed and now it has to lie in it.

Why is the far right rising on the old continent? Is it because:

A: everybody is stupid B: people realize that the mainstream media has been feeding them propaganda for the last 30 years and decided that they want change.

You can't keep ignoring a part of the population and then claim that they are not voting properly. At some point some kind of reckoning is inevitable.

Options A and B are definitely not the reason why far right is on the rise in my opinion. It boils down to more basic things, like a healthy economy, immigration, health care, rising cost of living, and various country specific issues.

>It feels like Europe is asleep at the wheel

Obviously not, because a European court literally just overturned the results of a democratic election due to foreign influence on the voting population.

Because only the French know how to deal with their government.

So annoying when the proles don't vote the way they're told

I mean, the proles did vote the way they were told. The problem is that they didn't vote the way "the party" wanted them to.

They voted for a candidate who broke established Romanian law ?

The next logical step should be to jail these pesky bad voters. If they supported the candidate, whose crime was to campaign on TikTok, then they are clearly complicit in that crime and put the democracy in danger. May be they even use TikTok themselves!

I'm sure all this can be convincingly justified using the "paradox of tolerance" phrase.

The problem is they were told which way to vote by the Kremlin's proxies. And in a sneaky way. There's some history there:

>During the Soviet occupation of Romania, the communist-dominated government called for new elections in 1946, which they fraudulently won, with a fabricated 70% majority of the vote.

and then they were stuck with an iffy Russian backed dictatorship until:

>Ceaușescu greatly extended the authority of the Securitate secret police and imposed a severe cult of personality, which led to a dramatic decrease in the dictator's popularity and culminated in his overthrow in the violent Romanian Revolution of December 1989 in which thousands were killed or injured.

After that they probably thought enough with Russia rigging elections and imposing dictators already.

It will take another generation or two for the Romanian commies to disappear. The majority of those in power, starting with Iohannis, the justices of the Romanian high court, and the rest of the parties grew up as young communist. It's hard to change their Marxist upbringing.

Putin paid candidate should not be just disqualified - prison is proper for that.

Russians paid tiktokers, let’s nullify the election - Democracy ROCKS

There have been breaches of vote counting systems.

So recount should take place, not another vote.

Recount does not exist in the relevant Romanian law. And recount was done, with no change of the outcome, so they cancelled it completely.

No, that is not what happened. Not at all.

The money trail leads to Romanians paying for stuff out of pocket, not Russians. All bank accounts in here are Romanian https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html

this looks like a, korean scale:), miscalculation and about to be corrected, korean style, and for the "court" involved, they better hope its south rather than northern methods

I believe a direct attack on elections should be treated with the seriousness of an act of war. However, I guess that proving with absolute certainty that it was Russia's doing could be challenging.

Romania needs some more American political thought leadership. Such an neglected area.

The imperial psychosis of the American liberal seems to be the waters in which we swim. It's no wonder populism is winning. The blind are at the wheel.

In a european democracy, things are pretty clear: Influence from Russia and China is forbidden. Influence from the USA, Germany, France is permitted. There are countless examples.

Care to name a few examples? Also, USA, Germany and France are allies to Romania as part of either NATO or the EU.

Russia has invaded Ukraine, our neighbor and we have a pretty good reason to stay far away from them, not to mention some historical bad blood with many tons of gold we gave them for safe-keeping in WW2 that they never returned, or the crimes the red army did while retreating through Romania at the end of WW2.

Sounds like you're agreeing with the comment above, but just saying that it's a good thing.

It is a good thing to stick with your allies and not side with potential enemies. We've been warring in Europe for centuries and we've managed to stop and get along, but Russia is still at it for some reason.

When people pretend to be confused about why Russia wouldn't want Ukraine in NATO, or why Putin would be under immense pressure to defend the Russians in the east, it's not because they intend to have a good faith discussion.

Centuries of war are irrelevant. Talk about this one. And start in 2014, or even before if you're in the mood.

> why Putin would be under immense pressure to defend the Russians in the east

This has approximately as much credibility as trying to argue that Hitler was defending German citizens in Poland and France. Much like Germany with its concentration camps and Gestapo was a very dangerous place at the time for any German (and other people), Russia in 2024 is one of the most dangerous places for any Russian (and other people). Freedom indices place Russia near the end of global ranking[1]. The mere act of writing and performing an anti-war poem can get you raped by police and sentenced to years in a horrible penal colony[2], where poor conditions and lack of medical care slowly kill you[3]. If you insist on pursuing the "defense" narrative in either case, most people will rightfully label you severely misinformed, malicious, or braindead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_o...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/12/28/russian-poet-sen...

[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur46/8805/2024/en/

You ignored "provide a few examples" part.

How about the simple fact that banning TikTok is even thought about but banning all US Social media is not? That is definitely picking sides and anti-democratic. I agree TikTok can cause problems, but no more than Facebook etc. Ban all or ban none.

Current campaign was conducted over TikTok and not over Facebook, isn't it?

Indeed. Well-established parties created an aggressive media campaign against CG over these last two weeks. The problem was that even today, the odds were clearly for CG. So they had no choice but to take this last solution, an anti-democratic decision. Undeclared money should not be more important than people's votes.

Courts can sometimes be used by Deep State actors to bring about political change.

https://www.voanews.com/a/timeline-of-events-leading-to-the-...

Here is a timeline of events leading up to the prime minister’s resignation.

July 2: Demonstrations take place in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, to demand the cancellation of a quota system in civil service recruitment, which reserves 56% of jobs for people from various categories. Students say this is discriminatory.

The demonstrations started after the *High Court reinstated the quota system in June, overturning a 2018 government decision to abolish it*. While the government appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, students refused to wait for the outcome and demanded a new executive order canceling the quotas.

Hasina of Bangladesh was not ousted by deep state actors though...

Maybe your point is that courts can play a significant role in changing the leadership?

I can point to videos which provide more receipts. This sequence of events was predicted by people 9 months before it happened. US was taking a keen interest in Bangladesh elections which it never did before. US said, "ensure free and fair elections to officials or else your Visa to US will be cancelled and other penalties." These things are all documented.

I think this is right place to use the metaphor of Rupert's Drop. Deep State knows the weak tail point and applies pressure to shatter whole nations, societies. It takes time to see Deep State in action. But once you do, you can't unsee it.

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