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.
It would set a dangerous precedent that you can run and win a campaign without multi-millionaire sponsorships from lobbies.
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.
This is (in most cases) not a thing in Europe, generally political parties finance themselves and lobbying is illegal.
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.
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?
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. "
>An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person who resides outside their country of citizenship
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.
external state actors interfering with elections is a perfect reason to invalidate.
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-...
>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 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.
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?
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.
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.
An analogy would be buying github stars or reddit upvotes for an adversary to get them banned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
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.
Many celebrities do the same as well via their social media presence.
(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.)
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)?
Because this is what our court did.
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?
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.
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.
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.