All eyes on Romania’s Presidential election because of one man
- By Jorge Liboreiro
-Europe’s fate is playing out in Romania this weekend.
The country has been on edge since Călin Georgescu, a little-known independent candidate, emerged victorious from the first round of the presidential elections, securing 22.4% of votes despite having barely made inroads in opinion polls leading up to the contest. Georgescu’s out-of-the-blue emergence was immediately linked to his strong performance on TikTok, where he has amassed millions of likes with ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious messages.
Experts and journalists rushed to find out who Georgescu actually was. What they found was a baffling mix of Euroscepticism, pseudo-science, profound hatred for free markets, mystical views of nature and climate change denialism, together with on-the-record praise for Vladimir Putin and dead dictators. His ideology fuelled fears that Romania, a staunch supporter of Ukraine and a strategic country for NATO, might soon flip the script and join the likes of Hungary and Slovakia.
Georgescu will face off against Elena Lasconi, a pro-European liberal, on Sunday.
If that wasn’t enough to raise the stakes, a new development sent them to the stratosphere. On Wednesday, President Klaus Iohannis agreed to release a series of classified documents by the intelligence services that suggested Georgescu’s rise to fame was “not a natural outcome” but the result of artificially coordinated action to manipulate and exploit TikTok’s algorithm.
The campaign was likely orchestrated by a “state actor,” the documents said. Although Russia isn’t mentioned as the culprit, the agencies detected similarities between an online campaign in Romania and a previous one that Moscow had conducted in Ukraine.
According to the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), a previously hidden network, mainly operating on TikTok, which had been largely dormant since its creation in 2016, became very active in the two weeks before the first round of the elections. The network’s operators, recruited and coordinated through a channel on Telegram, used methods typical of a state actor’s “mode of operation.”
The SRI also reported that nearly one million euros were spent in the campaign by an individual supporting Georgescu’s candidacy, with up to €950 paid for a repost. TikTok itself admitted to receiving €362,500 from this person last week.
The revelations set alarm bells ringing to the maximum of decibels.
Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, the leader of the socialist party, declared his support for Lasconi in the second round. Other parties also voiced their endorsement and vowed to form a pro-European coalition to stop Georgescu from winning.
Meanwhile, a group of civil organisations asked Romania’s Constitutional Court to suspend the elections, remove Georgescu from the ballot and re-run the first round.
In Brussels, the European Commission announced new measures to monitor TikTok’s compliance with the Digital Services Act and ordered the platform to retain all data related to electoral risks, including recommended content and monetisation features, so it could be used in a (potential) investigation at a later stage.
In Washington, the State Department also voiced deep concern. “Romania’s hard-earned progress anchoring itself in the Transatlantic community cannot be turned back by foreign actors seeking to shift Romania’s foreign policy away from its Western alliances,” a spokesperson said.
Where do we go from here?
At the time of writing, the second round is scheduled to go ahead. An opinion poll with a sample of 24,600 respondents showed Georgescu well ahead of Lasconi. The poll was conducted before the documents were declassified and it’s unclear how much the revelations could influence voters, many of whom use social media, rather than traditional outlets, as their main source of information. As previous elections have proved, bad publicity can easily be turned into strong numbers.
On Sunday, Romanians will go to the polls to choose their next president. In doing so, they might be deciding the future architecture of European democracy.
Credit: Euro News
