> the general public is so easily influenceable that allowing them to vote is a danger for democracy
I hate to admit it but he’s got a point. My counter would be that the recent US election was not won by the biggest spender.
Free speech is valuable and worth defending specifically because it has the potential to change minds, not just because people like the sounds of their own voices.
(For the recent US election, people also point to Musk buying Twitter and getting his president of choice and saying this demonstrates why Musk is smart and $44bn was worth it, so are you sure it wasn't won by the biggest spenders?)
> The collection of electoral contributions and the payment of electoral expenses may be made only through bank accounts notified in advance to the Permanent Electoral Authority.
The EU is not involved in directly financing candidates or political parties in Romania, they've already given us tens of billions of dollars to develop our country.
Wow, seems like they're spent tens of billions of dollars in long term election interference campaigns. Are we going to see the politicians elected going to jail over it?
Not quite the same as external party spending huge amounts of cash running political campaigns, while ignoring all the local rules about campaigning. After all Romania didn’t have to accept the EU cash, or spent it. The EU doesn’t force countries to join, just so they can give them billions of euros in the hopes of interfering in a political process years later. A political process that’s only important, because of the development funding. Much easier and cheaper to simpler not get involved, and allow those countries to struggle alone.
If Russia had called them in for not blocking or censoring pro-EU candidates would you not have called that election interference?
Secondly, for political messages it should be clear who the message is coming from! If this organization is coordinating messages that should be public (though from looking them up it sounds like they are already fairly public with it).
Open, fair, and honest elections are important. People always whine on about what the other side is doing but I want that fixed, too and I would gladly work with anyone that wants to fix both but sadly it's much more common to see continuous deflections to the other side (because they know their side is indefensible) rather than a desire for real change.
Okay, name two presidents who visited the NAFO summit.