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.