Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.
Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.
Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.
From e.g. Wikipedia:
>At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
D'oh!
>That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen
How convenient he got fired, everything is good now, surely the Commission does not hold the same views as him! Are you really this naive?
And don't get me wrong, I support neither Georgescu (a typical conspiracy theorist nut) nor AfD (who only argue that the evil immigrants are at fault). But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place. If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
> And don't get me wrong, I support neither
It is not about who you support and what your favorite color is.
I didn't call anyone stupid. I have been deceived many times in my life. It happens to all of us and it is happening to you now.
> At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
Yes, that is the issue with misinformation, isn't it? It works. Otherwise nobody would care, would they? Misinformation is incredibly destructive, for example it caused Brexit, which was based on mostly lies, some of them famously written on a bus, along with algorithmic manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, that were never properly challenged leading to the referendum. This is all well-known by now and easily verifiable.
> How convenient he got fired
He didn't get fired, you are making things up. This is precisely the sort of misinformation that destroys democracy. He had resigned months before this appearance on French TV because of frictions with von der Leyen, who tried to block him from being reappointed. By the time he gave the interview, he was already a private citizen and his resignation had nothing to do with this incident.
Also, and importantily, he never claimed that the problem was that any party of candidate was "bad" or "not acceptable". Breton framed his remarks around enforcing EU law against foreign interference, specifically in the context of Elon Musk's (a foreign actor, by the way) support for the AfD ahead of Germany's snap elections. He said: "Let's stay calm and enforce the laws in Europe. They did it in Romania and, obviously, it will have to be done, if necessary, in Germany as well".
The misrepresentation that you are repeating was initially posted on X by the account Visegrád 24, a well-known propaganda account that constantly posts lies and disinformation with an anti-EU bias.
> But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place.
Unfortunately there is indeed one European member state that is suffering democratic backsliding and that is Hungary, but this is not the EU's fault. Otherwise, everything you wrote is demonstrably false.
> If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
AfD has not been banned, and the issue is not them being on my side or not. There are plenty of political parties that I dislike in Europe and I don't want them to be banned. I only wish to ban parties and candidates that break the law, namely by receiving illegal funding from out geopolitical enemies because, unlike the "nationalist" post-truth movements, I am actually a patriot and I love Europe, open societies and liberal democracy.
But it is? They forced Romania to do a re-election because they didn't like the candidate. And they still try to force Chat Control, try to bypass the unanimity rule and the EU commission gives itself more powers every day with authoritian laws like the DSA. As a European, I don't get the USA's EU-fetish. It's not better here than in the US.