[noemon]

Ok, I had a detailed look at the declassified Romanian intelligence documents (https://presidency.ro/ro/media/comunica ... 1733327193) on the basis of which the election results were cancelled and the craziest part of all this is that they actually don't prove foreign interference or manipulation.

What do they show?

They document a social media campaign supporting Călin Georgescu that involved around 25,000 TikTok accounts coordinated through a Telegram channel, paid influencers, and coordinated messaging.

First of all, looking at it rationally, this is actually a relatively small number of TikTok accounts for a national presidential campaign, and the documents provide limited data about actual impact - they mention around 130 TikTok accounts generated between 1,000 and 500,000 views per video, but don't show comprehensive engagement statistics or evidence of significant voter influence.

Also, importantly, everything described in these documents could just as easily be interpreted as legitimate digital marketing. The documents don't provide concrete proof of foreign state involvement or manipulation - they merely suggest the campaign "correlates with a state actor's operating mode" and draws parallels to alleged Russian operations in Ukraine and Moldova.

The payment rates mentioned (400 lei per 20,000 followers, 1,000 euros per promotional video) are actually standard market rates for influencer marketing, though the documents do allege some payments were made illegally after the campaign period (the guy targeted by these allegations, a Romanian crypto entrepreneur called Bogdan Peschir, denies these allegations: https://realitatea.net/stiri/actual/cel ... 0c3c439f52). The campaign coordination through Telegram channels with specific posting guidelines is exactly how modern political campaigns operate.

What's notably missing from these documents is any concrete proof of foreign state involvement or manipulation. There's no technical evidence of artificial amplification, no proof the accounts were fake rather than real supporters, and no clear distinction between coordinated campaign activity (which is normal) and malicious manipulation.

The documents try to draw parallels with Russian influence operations in Ukraine and Moldova, but the actual evidence presented is circumstantial at best. They note some accounts were created in 2016 but only recently became active - however, this is completely normal behavior when people become politically engaged during elections.

Also, while the documents show Georgescu's popularity increased during this period, they don't prove that the social media campaign caused this rise. There could be many other factors at play - his policy positions resonating with voters, traditional campaign activities, media coverage, public appearances, or general voter dissatisfaction with other candidates.

So that's quite obviously the much bigger story here: that an entire election was cancelled on the basis of what could just amount to an effective social media strategy. Heck, they don't even prove that the social media strategy was effective so in effect it's simply on the basis of the *existence* of a social media media campaign...

In effect, when we strip away all the veneer, what just happened in Romania is that you had the country's top court cancel an entire presidential election because of the existence of a coordinated social media campaign on TikTok that the intelligence services claimed - without concrete evidence - resembled Russian tactics.

That's the precedent being set here, where elections can be invalidated not based on proven fraud or manipulation, but on the mere existence of organized social media campaigning that authorities find suspicious. It's a dangerous path where largely unsubstantiated fears of foreign interference can be used to override actual voter choices, ironically damaging democracy far more than any social media campaign could.

20,000 people on Tiktok supporting their prefered candidate?

Russian interference clearly, they should have been on British OnlyFans instead.

[Decky]

It all makes sense to me, we need to fight against in influence of Putin and his undemocratic ways by (checks notes) bringing in a system of managed democracy where elections are still held but the powers that be decide in advance who people are allowed to vote for. In this way Europe will show how superior we are the Russians with their sham elections and a political system dominated by powerful forces with contempt for the people and their voices.

The whole thing reminds me very much of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty where the people voted against the Lisbon treaty in June 2008 only to be made to vote again in July 2009. Of course once they had voted correctly in favour of the the Lisbon treaty the second time around the result was allowed to stand, there was no nead to run it a third time because the people had came to their senses and picked the correct option.

You could also look at the recent French election where the New Popular Front (a very left wing coalition) won so of course the new Prime Minister was the conservative Michel Barnier. It all made perfect sense to me.

I for one am glad we in Europe don't live in a society where every single important decision is made by distant elites and instead we take our own future in our hands via a system of mass democracy. I can't even contemplate what that would feel like.

[Deutschmania]

So I wonder what will happen , now that the election has been postponed indefinitely . From what I have read , in the JTA article I shall post below , to give a larger background context to the situation , Calin Georgescu is a pro-fascist anti-Semite . So , if elections are to be suspended , this could be considered to be a real world example of "liberal fascism" being utilized to forestall a resurgent neo-fascism . The irony is not only that supposed liberals would suppress the democratic process in order to preserve the liberal order of things , but that an overt fascist would make use of democracy in order to undermine the political norms . Thereby I feel that both are hypocrites , but also to be candid , I sort of wish that the U.S. government were more like that of Romania , in dealing with internal enemies of the constitutional order of the republic . But I fearfully expect that the massive mob of supporters of Georescu will not take this move lying down , but will rise up in an insurrection . So failing this matter to be resolved via ballots , it shall instead be sorted out via bullets . This thereby proves the proverb that political power grows from the barrel of a gun .

Far-right politician who praised Nazi collaborators shocks with top finish in Romanian presidential election


By Philissa Cramer , November 25, 2024 2:59 pm


A politician who praised notorious Romanian anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators has won the first round of his country’s presidential election.

Calin Georgescu ran independently after leaving Romania’s far-right party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians, following his comments and amid accusations that he was pro-Putin. He will now face a liberal reformer, Elena Lasconi, in next week’s runoff; it will be the first election since the end of Communism in which Romania’s centrist party is not an option.

Georgescu’s outsized showing — he took home 22% of the vote, far more than the 10% polls had suggested he would win — comes amid a wave of electoral successes for right-wing populists across Europe and beyond. In Germany, a far-right political party won a state election for the first time since the Holocaust this fall; weeks later, a far-right party founded by former Nazis won Austria’s national election.

Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant right-wing politician, came in first in the Netherlands’ national election last December, not long after a politician once photographed wearing a Nazi armband won Italy’s election. And the far right in France posted stronger-than-expected results in the country’s surprise elections this summer. Unlike those parties and politicians, which traded on anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic sentiment, Georgescu — a 62-year-old former soil scientist — did not outline a thorough policy platform during the campaign. He gained attention for his social media posts, particularly on TikTok, the video app accused by lawmakers in the United States and Europe of promoting antisemitism and allowing foreign actors to covertly influence elections.

Georgescu previously went viral with his praise for two fascists who led Romania in the 1930s and ’40s.

Speaking on a primetime news show in February 2022, Georgescu, a sustainability expert formerly affiliated with the United Nations, explained why he had cited Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as a national “hero,” saying Codreanu “fought for the morality of the human being.”

The comment immediately drew widespread condemnation, including from Jewish groups, because Codreanu led the fiercely antisemitic Legionnaire Movement, which espoused an extreme version of ethnic and religious nationalism that involved political murders and acts of terrorism, until his execution in 1938.

Two years later, the group entered the government of Romania’s pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu, where it stayed until the following January, when it mounted a pogrom in the capital of Bucharest in which more than 120 Jews were killed and several synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed. The pogrom was intended as an uprising against Antonescu’s government, which the Legionnaire Movement believed was insufficiently aggressive in pursuing a campaign against Romanian Jews.

Georgescu also referred to Antonescu, under whose rule at least 280,000 Jews were killed and who was executed in 1946 for war crimes, as a “martyr.”

His opponent Lasconi, a former journalist, ran on an anti-corruption platform but also holds some socially conservative views on topics including marriage. Lasconi’s daughter, Oana, is an anti-Zionist activist who posted a photo on Instagram hugging and kissing her mother while wearing a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf, in the run-up to the first-round elections. If she wins she would become the first female president in the country’s history.

There are around 8,900 Jews currently living in Romania, according to the World Jewish Congress. Romanians head to the polls again on Dec. 8 for the runoff. https://www.jta.org/2024/11/25/global/far-right-politician-who-praised-nazi-collaborators-shocks-with-top-finish-in-romanian-presidential-election

[Deutschmania]

It all makes sense to me, we need to fight against in influence of Putin and his undemocratic ways by (checks notes) bringing in a system of managed democracy where elections are still held but the powers that be decide in advance who people are allowed to vote for. In this way Europe will show how superior we are the Russians with their sham elections and a political system dominated by powerful forces with contempt for the people and their voices.

The whole thing reminds me very much of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty where the people voted against the Lisbon treaty in June 2008 only to be made to vote again in July 2009. Of course once they had voted correctly in favour of the the Lisbon treaty the second time around the result was allowed to stand, there was no nead to run it a third time because the people had came to their senses and picked the correct option.

You could also look at the recent French election where the New Popular Front (a very left wing coalition) won so of course the new Prime Minister was the conservative Michel Barnier. It all made perfect sense to me.

I for one am glad we in Europe don't live in a society where every single important decision is made by distant elites and instead to take our own future in our hands via a system of mass democracy. I can't even contemplate what that would feel like.

It is as Noam Chomsky put it .