Romania Bars Candidate from Presidential Race | Hacker News Reader

Romania Bars Candidate from Presidential Race

nytimes.com

8 pointszo15 comments

Good for them while the other elections with Russian shills were not called off. So now you have Russian shills elected in Austria, Germany, UK, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech.

Also disturbing that openly fascist supporters are even in government, cultural organizations and press editorials in most Western European nations.

It became a huge mess.

Sad to see the middle finger shown to all supporters of this candidate. IMHO this will probably result in further polarisation of society.

Romania has certain laws pertaining to running in an election, which this candidate has broken. Regardless of any connections to Russia, you have to declare your spending, you have to be transparent about how much you invested into your campaign and there are limits as to how much you can spend.

If a candidate ignores the law, they are barred from running. That is the basis of democracy.

I do agree that it should be noted that this was the winning candidate from the first round, and so a lot more care should be placed into making sure the case is airtight and no errors were made in the investigation.

Do you think there should be no such laws? Or do you think the courts have made an error in their judgment?

Not OP. But it's hard to untangle this entire mess. On the one hand, this person & party is kind of the "choice" made by a large chunk of the people as per the votes, and yet (if true) he's broken certain laws that somehow invalidate said votes.

How do we take this and not see that Democracy is only "Of course it's what the people want! But only if they want it the way we say they can and only if the candidate isn't X/Y/Z."

Like at the very least there should be a mechanism that transforms this kind of election result oddity into a new referendum of sorts so that the people feel like they've at least been heard and that it was all legitimate. Or perhaps a cooling-off period where said campaign finance law implications "wear off" and then the applicable party gets a new election, especially if they won a non-insignificant amount of votes.

Because right now, all that people are seeing is: Popular candidate that's anti-EU and anti-Ukraine Involvement is being de-platformed and kept off the ballot by the EU. Are we trying to make Romania blow up, or are we using this as proof to show the populace "you belong to us, do as you are told, plebs".

Let's be honest, with the rise of China in power, now globalism is not viewed as beneficial anymore. In Romania there is a saying, "If someone jumps off the roof, you don't have to follow him." This applies to the current trend of breaking the law established by Mr. Trump and his team. As in Ukraine, definitely there is an interest in Romania's natural resources, and Georgescu is offering them in exchange for gaining the presidency. https://x.com/RealAlexJones/status/1894521825310228765 (min 25) Basically, now that rare elements resources are limited from China, they need to look for other cheap sources like Eastern European countries, similar to Ukraine. Ceausescu had this "living in the Golden Age" brainwashing campaign while people were starving in dark & cold apartments. Georgescu is also promoting a similar false narrative and is trying to awaken a nationalist broken group that was buried during the transition to EU and democracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com