I'm no lawyer and can't be arsed to do the proper research but for Georgescu to be able to declare he had 0 campaign spending while everyone knows that the tiktok campaign cost 20-50 million euros is insane to me.

If they aren't already prosecuting him on this I guess technically it's legal but such a weird loophole in the law. Any spending towards promoting a candidate should be public knowledge imo. EDIT: he was claiming bullshit like GOD chose him and that's how he got that good of a result. I guess his God is the people in the shadows that made his tiktok campaign lol

> For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls

I think they did it for many reasons but not because he didn't show up in polls.

Top ones are:

- PSD didn't advance in the second round and they had the leverage to pull it off

- Georgescu was clearly anti-NATO so maybe the US pulled strings

- Danger of having a president with Russian sympathies

- He was claiming that he didn't spend a single dime on the election while everyone in the know knows that his tiktok campaign cost sever million euros

I mean that the only evidence that his votes came from the TikTok campaign is that he didn't show up in polls and unexpectedly obtained a great result. So they automatically assume the delta between expected and obtained votes are people manipulated by the TikTok campaign (which apparently are assumed to have become some kind of zombies whose opinion doesn't count).

Out of the fourth reasons you list at the end, only the fourth is not pure authoritarianism (why wouldn't people in a democracy be free to elect a president that dislikes NATO or likes Russia if that is their will?). Campaign funding fraud has happened in many Western countries but typically it's handling by imposing fines, maybe some jail time, but definitely not cancelling the result of an entire election.

I'm not naive enough to believe we live in a true democracy. IMO this cancelling was good for 2 reasons : first I believe Georgescu is a nutjob, second.. if there was any doubt that we don't live in a true democracy now it's pretty clear.

And considering the level of education of most of the Romanian population I believe having "true" democracy would destroy the country. I understand this may not be a popular opinion but I'm trying to be realistic here lol

I actually sympathize with all that. Over the past few decades, I have slowly become increasingly skeptical about true, unfettered democracy being the best form of government. In the past, although the level of education probably was worse than now, the fact that people got their news from rather centralized sources controlled by elites acted as a "nutjob filter". With social networks, we are witnessing what should be the true power of democracy (people electing candidates in spite of what the elites think), but it can easily create monsters.

I just wish the Western world would drop the hypocrisy in this respect, and stop claiming to defend more democracy than it actually does. A relevant problem is that democracy is often used as an easy excuse to keep people content. Singapore is a hugely successful country in most respects, with better quality of life than most Western countries, but we shouldn't take example from it because we have democracy! China is constantly growing and improving the quality of life of their citizens, is still behind most of the West in that respect but on the path to overtake us, but it doesn't matter, we have democracy! Maybe if we weren't constantly claiming the moral high ground, when as you mentioned our own democracies are at most relative and the difference with more authoritarian countries is a matter of degree; we could be more self-critical and focus on actually fixing things.