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.
Why do you think you can decide for romanians? They made their voting laws - he violated them. They sort it out.
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...
No.
There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke.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.
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.
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")
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.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
That trust isn’t there when the oversight is from random people at an election commission or law enforcement agency.
That was before 2016. Given how it has failed at that--twice now--it provides no benefit to the nation, only democracy-harming costs.
No, the purpose of the Electoral College is actually very simple: Guarantee States' sovereign rights for Presidential elections in a way that every State agrees (Congressional representation!), while maintaining the clear separation between Executive and Legislative branches.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wtf? Not sure in which Fantasy land you live, but all political candidates receive campaign money from billionaires only "for money and power reasons and not to make life better for the voters".
You're just pissed trump won because Kamala received 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...
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.
Please speak for yourself. I voted for Trump and I knew exactly for whom/what I was voting for.
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.
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.
In both elections Trump running by was the aberration. His wins have been a function of the electoral college in action.
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...
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.
That the establishment and traditional media didn't know him doesn't mean that he was unknown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
He was also the Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016. A very public role indeed.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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-...
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.
There are...campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke
to
the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign"
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
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.
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.
Like “he who gets the most votes wins, even if the powers that be don’t approve”?
Through fair elections, yes. No elections are 100% fair, yes, as it's not practical, but what happened here is blatant cheating through shady funds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you cheat in elections, the results cannot be accepted in any way. Involving shady, undeclared capital in elections is simply cheating and outside influence. It's a big thing, because we leave the governing of the countries to the elected.
Democracy only works if it the results cannot be bought. And while this is never 100% the case anywhere, such blatant disregard for the laws cannot be accepted slightly.
People can vote again, and you lose some money and time to redo the elections (and if people keep voting for the same people after knowing how they came to power, then all is good).
For me the line is very clear because I see it get muddies in Turkey (where I come from) so many times and could see the dire consequences.
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.
Some may downplay the importance of this, but I see it as absolutely crucial.
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
The votes were grossly manipulated through undisclosed funding. This would cancel the results in any democratic country.
but if a South African gave away $1M a day to support his candidate in the US, would that be foreign interference?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
If you could read, you'd understand from my previous comment, I'm the opposite of anti democratic. But whatever, you do you.
The point is that he broke the election law. That is not negotiable.
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......
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aside from that, there's the other matter that must be addressed, that of the criminal prosecution for lawbreaking.
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.
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?
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Austrian_presidential_ele...
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.
“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
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.
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.
Why do you call him "a fscking nazi sympathiser" ?
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.
Why is this wrong?
Huh... you know, I never tought about it like that. But I don't disagree with with this statement. thanks
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"
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.
Is Ukraine being influenced by a state actor? Is Israel? Is Taiwan?
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would like to quote Spock here: "Fascinating..."
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...
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.
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.
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.
It's not really a true people's vote in that case any more, so it seems rather like defending democracy.
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.
the only thing you can attack him for is the lack of reporting of election spending
You elect this guy, you kill democracy. Essentially, this guy's platform was "let's try dictatorship for a change".
And we try to keep the best option that could lead to having a working democracy again in the shortest possible time.
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.
Does fascism stops being fascism when it has popular approval?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
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
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.
(or, at least, pretends to)
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.
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.
It is quite ironical that the main newspaper in the Soviet Union was called la Pravda = "the truth".
Alot of these old Soviet jokes are becoming quite appropriate again. What times we live in.
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 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.
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.
After all, if they are endorsed by the Party, why do you think you can do a better job, citizen?
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.
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".
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 act based on information. If someone controls your information, then they control your choices. This is most obvious in cults.
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.
But Romania has laws regulating election campaigns. Is your point of view that that Romanian courts should not enforce those existing laws?
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.
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.
Tgey got brainwashed into the vote. The other parties had very weak candidates, some with a bunch of corruption issues. People are fed up, most of them had given a hate no-confidence vote which Russia has speculated with bots on Tiktok. It was quite easy for them.
Do you disagree with the above?
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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
The question is: who gets to decide which are nullified and which are not?
> 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.
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....
It's not a new idea that this is a serious problem: demagogues were recognized in the Antique.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If that's how the system works, it incentivizes abuse.
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.
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...
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.
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.
That would be the goal.
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
I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN too.
(I am also curious whether Dang et al. use any relevant monitoring tools.)
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.
Citation needed. I am aware of statements, that influence campaigns are not as elaborated, as you would expect. Not that it does not exist.
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 :)
TBH I'd be surprised if any high-traffic public forum isn't heavily influenced by foreign or ruling-class interests at this point.
It kinda comes with the territory :-)
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.
doesn't necessarily mean
> Russian influence
What exactly is the worry? Undeserved downvotes?
The Russkies must not get our precious bodily fluids.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Yes, and that's a big part of the problem, which is why tiktok is also under fire in this whole situation.
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.
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.
I'm also not talking about a single poll, or ones run by just the left/right, he wasn't polling well anywhere.
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.)
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.)
He's a nobody.
“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?
This is quite typical character assassination, and it's sad that people still fall for it.
I looked up how he's actually associated with the Iron Guard, and it looks like he literally said that they 'also did “good deeds”' [1]. This is literally on the level of "fine people" hoax that the mainstream media perpetrated against Trump!
Why do I think that Calin's right that "far right" also "did good deeds"? Because the same thing literally happened in my country, Slovenia.
Look, WWII was a shitty time. War, and it wasn't necessarily a fight of "good versus evil". In Slovenia, there were "partisans" who were communists, fighting against Hitler's occupation. Of course, having seen the evils of communism, a lot of Slovenians (farmers, city businessmen) opposed communists (and they were right, from a historic perspective!). They formed the "white guard". Unfortunately, Americans allied with partisans (communists), so the white guard allied with Nazis.
Communists won, and wrote history. White guard is almost uniformly - in media, education etc. - known as the bad guys, traitors to the nation, etc. where in fact they were simply people fighting for their lives against communists (rightfully so, communists killed a lot of wealthy owners etc. after the war). Fortunately, the WWII and the aftermath is literally in living memory, so if you talk to the right people, you learn about it...
Looking back, I wish the "Nazi-collaborators" White Guard won. Hitler would have lost regardless, but then maybe Slovenia wouldn't be subjected to another 40 years of totalitarianism and repression by the communists...
[1] https://balkaninsight.com/2022/02/01/romanian-nationalist-le...
https://www.euronews.ro/articole/calin-georgescu-se-dezice-d... - he goes back on some of the things he said and tries to distance himself, but the Internet is forever.
What hoax?
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
>And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally
Not in the west, so you can look up what actually happened.
"Americans allied with partisans (communists), so the white guard allied with Nazis."
This for example would be news to me from a parallel universe. Or from the wiki of alternative facts.
actually, you can even read about it on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Yugoslavia_relat...
There were (and maybe still are) indeed also communist fanatics - but the common red partisan was not a bloodthirsty killer going after anyone who had private property.
So the alignment with the Nazis of the wealthy and privileged happened way before. I am from germany. We had the same story, the common people all did not turn Nazis overnight, but fear of the communist made them align with the Nazis. And the rest is history. I am no expert on concrete romanian or slovenian history. But what I know sounds pretty much the same what I know from german history where I have also first hand accounts. And I strongly disagree to that excuse. The bourgeois did had a choice and it was NOT just between communist or faschism. But they eventually did choose one side - and bear the responsibility. They did fought for a faschist europe, with all implications.
I know several second/hand accounts (i.e. from people who had it happen to their family). Murders, theft, barbarism (stabbing a pregnant woman in her stomach). Some during the war, some after when communists won.
As I said, terrible times. War. No good choices, especially without foresight. I just wish people didn’t praise communists as much as they do, and vilify their opponents.
Well, Nazis were the german flavour of the rise of ultranationalism, racism and fascism, but the movement existed in all of europe. With the first peak in the civil war in spain.
And Hitler was very clear on his plans for the jews and for war to conquer in eastern europe. Anyone siding with him, did make their choices and could have known the consequences. (same goes for anyone siding with Stalin).
"No good choices"
So probably yes. And I won't claim I would have decided much better, if I would have lived in that time. So I am not trying to judge from moral high ground.
But the choice was never binary between Stalin and Hitler, or only in extreme situations maybe. Because you know, after the war in germany - there were also no Nazis anymore. Never have been. They just had no choice. Followed orders. Were afraid of the communists. So definitely not responsible for anything.
One thing you see these days in Romanian But Written In English twitter these days is defense of the good character of Corneliu Codreanu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corneliu_Zelea_Codreanu
He led one of the WW2 Fascist anti Communist groups that were so committed to Nazi ideals, that the actual Nazis asked them to tone it down a bit because they were making them look bad.
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.
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.
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.
Madness. Fascism is everywhere these days, it seems!
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.
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 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...
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+
> 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.
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!
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.
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.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But Putin's Russia isn't "third way" at all, neither ideologically nor in practice. It's a classic traditional authoritarian conservative dictatorship.
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.
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.
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.
maybe a political-science researcher, not from Germany would give a less tone-based definition.
If you were to look into Devil's dictionary for the year 2024, you'd see:
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/)
- people I disagree with.I'm sorry but calling everyone Fascist/Nazist has semantically watered down the meaning.
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!
irony
something one finger something something something three fingers
https://vocabulary1.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-phr...
goldfinger
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s antithetical to democracy.
Now you get it.
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.
the government would just levy sanctions against the third party that failed to report
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.
Where are these records from? Telegram?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
And what about assets owned - not by particular individual, but by their friends or family.
BTW - sorry if that's a bit Too Balkan ;)
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 !
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.