There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the election". I'm Romanian and I'll provide some more details on this:
The country has been a powder keg ever since the results of first round of the presidential elections, with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.
The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law.
There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.
With TikTok being owned by China and their imminent ban looming in the US, there is strong suspicion that state actors are behind this, pushing Calin Georgescu through the algorithm, though this is tricky to prove.
This is not a strong grass-roots movement supporting this guy, it was a targeted effort of massive network of bots spamming his name & tiktok page on random videos on Romanian tiktok videos to push his popularity (this comes from the Romanian equivalent of CIA & other security structures). Tiktok themselves when asked to comment have investigated themselves and found nothing wrong, though they do agree that there are bots on their network and they've removed millions of fake likes & followers in Romania.
In a video posted this summer, Calin Georgescu expressed anti-NATO sentiment which he recanted after winning the first round of the elections. He has also previously declared that we could do with some "russian wisdom" and he's a big fan of the Iron Guard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard), which killed a bunch of political figures in Romania during their time. This organization as well as other fascist groups are illegal in Romania.
Candidates have to declare their assets as part of transparency and it seems Calin Georgescu has not declared all of his assets, which is illegal. There's also suspicions about money laundering, with a house he bought for 250K in 2006 and sold for 1M in 2011 which is unusual. This is somewhat besides the current discussion, just adding some context that this guy is not exactly squeaky clean.
A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security. This is right now in the first stages with no single person being put under indictment.
I appreciate the details, but ultimately I still don't buy it. The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves. Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign. But they still have agency, they liked what they were being presented with, and made the final call themselves on who to vote for.
I'd argue that if you accept that the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign" then the means by which they achieved their objective are not above scrutiny. Elections are a mean for obtaining as fair (that is, unbiased) a measure as possible of the "true" will of the people, and yet we're starting from "yes, the sample has been altered maliciously, but...".
There are (outdated, but still) campaign financing laws designed to prevent this exact scenario and which the candidate apparently broke. If the courts throw their hands in the air and say "whelp, what can you do?" they would be setting the precedence that foreign election interference is only wrong when you lose.
Of course, the analysis rests on fair authorities trying to do good which is a high bar to clear. But letting a cheater get away with it in plain sight doesn't seem fair either.
Flip the actors and imagine how you might feel. Imagine in Hungary if Orban was defeated by a radically pro-NATO, pro-EU guy. And then courts in Hungary ruled that said person was unfairly promoted by Google, Instagram, et al. And so the election had to be completely redone. And then some reason was found to exclude this individual from the next election (as will certainly happen here, or he'd probably just win again).
There would be 24/7 headlines about tyranny, disregarding democracy, and more. The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU. Yet when the wrong candidate wins a democratic vote, suddenly everything is entirely different. The 'rules based order' becoming a joke is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.
Well, if that pro-NATO, pro-EU guy declared having spent no money on their campaign while their Face being plastered all over the place and other proof that someone spent money on a campaign for that person, and there's a law that spending and sources of money for elections must be made transparent then the election should be 100% nullified, just like here.
Feelings are one thing, but breaking laws like here cannot just be brushed of as some people having hurt their feelings.
What I do not really understand is why this hasn't been handled before the election, i.e., why was the candidate with seemingly zero monetary transparency even allowed to be on a ballot?
There is a lot of middle ground between "brushing it off" and cancelling a whole election and throwing the choice of millions of voters to the trash.
In Spain there are violations of campaign laws all the time (and I'm talking by major traditional parties) and they are investigated, but typically the outcome is a fine, or maybe some jail time in severe cases, not invalidating a whole nation-wide election. And I suppose it's the same elsewhere because otherwise we would see news of invalidating elections left and right. Shady campaign financing is not exactly uncommon across the world.
> There is a lot of middle ground between "brushing it off" and cancelling a whole election and throwing the choice of millions of voters to the trash.
If elections are rigged, the results cannot be accepted under any circumstances. Using shady, undeclared capital in elections amounts to cheating and invites outside influence. This is a serious issue because we entrust the governance of nations to those elected by the people.
Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought. While no system is ever 100% immune to corruption, blatant disregard for election laws cannot be taken lightly.
If irregularities occur, people can vote again. Yes, redoing elections costs time and money, but if voters still choose the same leaders after understanding how they gained power, then that's democracy in action.
For me, the line is very clear because I've seen it blurred so many times in Turkey, where I come from, and I’ve witnessed the devastating consequences.
It poisonous to say elections are “rigged” unless you can prove votes were manipulated. Otherwise you’re opening the door to wide ranging grievances to second guess election results. By your logic, the U.S. should have redone the 2020 election because U.S. intelligence agencies pressured Facebook and Twitter to suppress information that could have hurt Biden. Do you really want to open the door to claims like that?
There are a few seemingly minor details missing from the conversation above:
- his support seems to have come exclusively from externally coordinated online campaigns
- his support increased dramatically within the last 2 weeks before the election
Supporting point 1, remember that he declared zero campaign expenses and never explained how he ran his campaign
Regarding the second point, the urgency under which his campaign took off and the proximity to the elections allowed him to elude mass-media scrutiny. A lot of shady details were unveiled since he became popular, which arguably would've made him unpalatable for a lot of his voters
If you want a comparison to the US political situation, this is not your "Twitter did something shady which bumped Trump's result by 2 percentage points"
A better translation is: Chase Oliver wins the White House! (If you wonder who that guy is, Google him - that's what Romanians had to do with CG after the election night; he was on the ballot and you didn't even know it). All while declaring zero expenses. NSA and CIA suspect foreign interference. His only campaign was on TikTok. Looked eerily similar to Ukraine, Georgia (the country) and Moldova's Russian influence campaigns. He eluded TikTok's swarming detection algorithms. He was unknown until late October - the campaign started in earnest 2 weeks before Halloween. Oh, and he actually looks like RFK jr., talks like RFK jr., just didn't have the same notoriety going into the election
>Democracy only functions if the outcomes cannot be bought.
Then by definition absolutely every democratic country/society does not function, because guess what: It takes truly stupid amounts of money to win an election. Ergo, you need to buy the election.
Every single candidate and party and reform movement who have argued for removing money from democratic politics have all lost/failed without a single exception. You absolutely cannot win an election without money, without buying it.
The only saving grace is that the guy who spends the most money doesn't always win.
We can go on for years about how it's stupid you need money to win an election, how the amount of money is despicable, how the world is unfair. Whatever: We aren't living in ideal dreams, we're living in the brutally unfair and practical reality.
Yes, you need stupid amounts of money to win, and I see that as normal in capitalist countries given how significant winning is. However, there's also an obligation to disclose the funding sources so people can decide whether they agree with them.
Some may downplay the importance of this, but I see it as absolutely crucial.
The above posts presented no evidence that the candidate or his campaign spent any money on the election. Obviously someone spent money, but why should that disqualify the candidate.
Should news media companies that report positively about one candidate or negatively about another be required to file in-kind donation reports? Can we disqualify their favored candidate if they don’t?
If we statistically see that there are a lot of social media posts for or against a candidate, should we require all social media posters to file in-kind donation reports?
If poor university students with nothing more than time and access to a photocopier be required to report in-kind donations for posting flyers?
I’m sure in any election we could and would find plenty of “unreported” donations, and if the penalty was removing the offending candidate, it would be weaponized to remove candidates from competition.
There is no “fair” distribution of information. Allowing courts to interfere in elections with the assumptions that they can remedy that fairness is a recipe for tyranny and manipulation.
The only reason courts should step in is when legally established processes related to registration and casting of ballots (objective, observable processes) are not followed correctly.
I think the problem is, you man’s it black and white.
Because 100% fair and transparent is not possible, anything should be allowed.
Democracy is not just the fact that people can vote. While manipulation always happens at some level, even between 2 human beings, I believe there should be a limit for an election to be democratic.
I also believe, based on the facts being reported here, that this candidate was far ahead in terms of manipulation.
Although, in his favour, I’d say I haven’t seen a list of facts on all the manipulation the other candidates have done so far, as I’m sure it’s not nothing.
And the theory that TikTok was in on it seems unlikely, they basically burned themselves with a lot of governments with this. I mean, every single established politician in the whole world will take note that TikTok is a threat to him or her and will throw its weight behind banning TikTok.
The same. If "my" candidate wins in a way that in the long term undermines democratic values, it's still a net negative and I don't want it. That would just empower the "they are all the same" narrative that autocratic politicians use to get to and stay in power.
Aren't you forgetting the essential "while playing by the rules"? Getting the most votes by cheating - and it looks like that was certainly the case here, no doubt about it - is the opposite of democracy. Winning by cheating just happens to be the staple of the very country suspected of interfering. Are you promoting the same "values"?
> the powers that be don’t approve
You are right here. I personally consider it completely normal if the democratically elected powers that be don't approve when someone claims to have won an election - which nobody actually won since the process didn't finish - despite cheating. Winning by cheating is the opposite of democracy. If breaking the law to win is considered democracy, then why is legally restarting elections to win any less so? Hypocritical or trollish preferences aside.
“Cheating” means “manipulating votes.” It cannot mean “persuading voters through means I don’t like.” That opens up a Pandora’s box you cannot close. There’s no limiting principle to draw clear lines about what’s proper influence versus improper influence.
I understand what you are saying, but this is also historically how authoritarian regimes are enshrined, by persuading people in misleading or corrupted ways.
I feel your attitude is a bit defeatist. I think there are mechanisms that can work to protect from deception. For example, transparency of funds, or origin of the message. It's similar to asking for candy bar makers to disclose the true ingredient list and calorie count. It's not a Pandora's box to require this transparency from all politically inclined parties.
And I'm sure other mechanisms could be thought off.
To me, putting in place mechanisms like that and valuing them above even your current opinion of who to vote for matters as much as free speech. It's in the same category. Free speech is another mechanism that even if you don't like what's being said, you should value the right to free speech above it. I think mechanisms to prevent deception are just as important to value even above your personal choice, if you care to keep democracy free.
The scale at which information can be manipulated now, it's easy to be consuming more ideas that are coming from outside your country than inside it without even knowing that all the posts, blogs, tiktoks, tweets, news, memes, and ads you are seeing are not representative of what people in your country are thinking or saying in any proportion, but instead coming from outside your country, orchestrated by rich or organized groups, trying to make you think this is the current discourse, until it becomes the current discourse.
I disagree with that definition of cheating. Manipulating people is cheating. Everyone cheats, just this guy seems off the charts and you have to draw the line somewhere.
Too many people on this thread think in black and white. Because everyone cheats/lie it’s ok to cheat/lie as much as you want.
> “Cheating” means “manipulating votes.” It cannot mean “persuading voters through means I don’t like.”
How selective, rayiner. But really "cheating" means not following the rules of the activity you engage in. Those rules are thankfully codified in election law and not an internet comment.
Just to give you some food for though, I could poison my opponents. Which doesn't "manipulate votes", it just “persuades voters through means others don’t like”. By your carefully thought out definition, I did not cheat, fair win.
On the other hand I could take a whole load of dirty hidden money (from foreign actors) against what the law demands, and use that money to... "manipulate votes", because effectively I manipulated and lied to the people giving me the votes. So, as you'd say, I cheated.
I have no expectations that you're here to let your mind be changed though, because I don't think many of the hundreds of "troll" like comments here come from genuine misunderstanding.
> he who gets the most votes wins, even if the powers that be don’t approve
Through fair elections, yes. No election is ever 100% flawless as perfection isn't practical. However, what happened here is blatant cheating involving shady funds.
If you reduce it to just this then Russia is also a democracy since Putin got most of the votes. This is obviously not a sufficient condition to call something democratic.
> The US would be leading the charge with sanctions against Hungary if not outright "regime change", and the EU would likely even begin working on motions to remove them from the EU.
It's fucking hilarious that this is your argument when in fact blocking opposition candidates and stacking courts and centralising powers and receiving shady money and prosecuting freedom of speech is precisely what Orban has been doing for the past 15+ years, with the EU doing exactly... fuck all about it.
It's like the EU can't win here: if they do something some scream bloody murder interference. If they don't do anything, it's again damn bureaucrats siting on their asses. And it's not always different people holding those different attitudes.
This equation is just wrong, as applies to both Putin and Orbán.
And (ironically) simply convinces people that those who are concerned about Putin's arguably fascist (as opposed to actual Nazi) inclinations are just hyperventilating and overreacting.
"In 2022, a case was opened against him for promoting individuals guilty of genocide and war crimes after various comments on interwar far-right Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and former PM and marshal Ion Antonescu."
To concur, the US and EU are screaming they’re required to report their foreign influence in Georgia — the same as FARA in the US. They deployed their NGOs to influence and led riots in the streets to block transparency about foreign funding. [0] While at the same time in the US prosecuting a media company for not reporting foreign money. [1]
“Rules Based Order” is anything but based on equally applied rules.
We had that in the 1920’s in Spain, where only a group of oligarchs (named caciquism) were dictating whom the persons under their wing where voting for. Needless to say, there was collusion among the leaders and only puppet governments in place
So be it, if Google, Instagram, et al. are influencing a campaign, and it is deemed to be illegal with proof, the results of the elections shall be repeated.
All they have done is giving his supporters a martyr to support. Do they actually think that the mainstream candidates will get the votes of the people who voted for this man?
If anything, this will reinforce their anger and distrust in the system.
I really like how you start from an hypothetical scenario, then extrapolate even more ridiculous hypothetical scenarios to make it sound outrageous...
Of course if you can prove someone cheated an election it should be scrutinized no matter the side.
What even is your point here? That we shouldn't care because you imagine that your political enemies would do the same thing? What kind of argument is that
> is precisely why anti-establishment candidates are winning everywhere.
Anti establishment? Like Trump, Orban, Miley, Fico, Meloni? Lmao the only people saying they're anti establishment are themselves and their propaganda, as soon as they're in place they're very happy to milk the establishment and serve their own interests
I'm the first to criticize the EU but if the only way out is through Russian puppets I'd rather stay in until we find a better solution.
While I think it would be suboptimal you could imagine "rerun the elections if the winner breaks campaign finance law or gets support from abroad" as an established norm in western democracies, but that's not the world we live in and the EU would not accept these shenanigans from a populist right wing government.
That’s different, the austrian example was about actual mistakes in the way votes were counted, cast, who were allowed to vote etc. Not the same as «we blame foreign bots» and someone may have broken campaign finance laws.
Maybe they should. You can cheat all you want but as long as you win, you win. What’s the point of campaign finance laws if they can be broken with no meaningful consequence? The candidate’s campaign gets a “fine” that they pay out of campaign money anyway. But they still can win.
This from a personal view is one of the main current issues with America.
The rules often appear to exist to punish the just and law abiding, while the unscrupulous simply ignore the laws, win their current sportball match, and then rewrite the laws afterward to legitimize whatever the results were. Really common theme with corporate America.
A lot of campaign finance laws are almost flagrantly ignored, or superficially followed, with a light slap and a candy treat afterward. Corporate laws are almost amazing when there's a fine that "actually" matters, and not just a round-off error "cost-of-doing-business." Company makes $10^11 - $10^9 revenue per year, gets a $10^7 - $10^6 fine a decade later? Right, that was like 100th to a 1000th of a single year revenue fine.
Look, that’s a fine point for corporate laws. They should be rigorously enforced.
But election laws are completely different. Enforcement of election laws inherently allows unelected lawyers and judges to second guess voters. It puts the justice system above the electoral system, which is corrosive to democracy. What are the checks and balances on the people enforcing those elections laws?
It happens all the time. The US supreme court stopped a recount of the elections in Florida in 2000. In Berlin, the 2021 state elections went so wrong that they had to be repeated two years later. And so on.
> Enforcement of election laws inherently allows unelected lawyers and judges to second guess voters.
Um, legal enforcement of almost any standard allows unelected lawyers and judges to second-guess "the popular will" — for example, in buying goods and services, many people vote with their dollars for the cheapest option as opposed to quality (as airlines have learned). Without enforcement, this "revealed preference" can drive a cost-cutting race to the bottom on the part of producers — adverse impacts on society be damned (e.g., pollution and other negative externalities).
And voters, in particular, can be subject to buyer's remorse: see, e.g., the recent polling about the increase in the number of Brits who voted for Brexit and now regret it. [0]
No, they shouldn’t. Holding people liable for finance law violations can still provide signals to the public, which may affect their voting. But you can’t allow unelected criminal justice officials to override elections. That’s a path straight to hell, as has been proven time and again in Asian countries that do that.
How would you suggest they be held to account here?
Keep in mind that their ill-gotten gains include votes, and that a criminal's ill-gotten gains of a crime must be disgorged to hold the criminal to account.
Voters can take it into account. But you can’t elevate legal technicalities above democracy. People will not trust the people administering the election laws over the people they voted for.
It’s a “who watches the watchers” problem. Many countries have tried to impose the legal system on elections and it invariably results in destruction of trust in both elections and the justice system.
Developed countries have laws which oftentimes are even applied, like exactly in this case. Some HN audience has obviously a very naive understanding of what a "law" is and that "disrespecting the law" can have consequences.
Nicely said. The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him. Yes, he might have had help in spreading that message, but the message still landed and people chose him.
To now say that the election was invalid when people actually chose him is extremely risky. My guess is it will reinforce a lot of narratives about how evil the west and the USA is. This will only make things worse, and will put the winner in an even stronger position.
People did not choose him nevertheless. He only got 1/5 of the votes and passed to the second round with another candidate. In the second round he would probably loose, but it is not the point.
The point is that he broke the election law. That is not negotiable.
>Yes, he might have had help in spreading that message
Modern mass social media isn't just "help spreading the message", as everyone on this website must surely be aware. It's not a guy handling out pamphlets. It's a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush.
Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.
I stress: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views......
> Modern mass social media isn't just "help spreading the message", as everyone on this website must surely be aware. It's not a guy handling out pamphlets. It's a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush.
I still don’t understand why anyone willingly subjects themselves to mass social media, there’s absolutely nothing of value and disinformation runs rampant.
I know I have blind spots in my knowledge and believe stuff that isn’t true, but I do my best to avoid being misinformed.
>The problem here is the message clearly resonated and people voted for him.
Indeed, that's what a lot of the middle upper class urban Romanians with corporate jobs don't understand, that a lot of the people, especially the older less educated ultra conservative ones, resonated with him and his message so they voted for him.
TikTok didn't hypnotize and mind control them to vote for him, they stil had free will, they just like his message the most. Sure his message was full of lies and pandering but that's every single politician.
Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority? Then what's the point of democracy? You keep repeating elections till your preferred candidate wins?
>Do we discard the democratic process because someone undesirable by the educated middle upper class won by majority?
Why do people on this thread keep hammering on this ridiculous point? He is discarded for breaking the law in multiple points, not because he is "undesirable by the urbanites" or whatever ffs. If it was the "soy globohomo candidate" or whatever you'd call it that was breaking these laws, he should also be suspended.
This is the only conclusion I take from this: you are so anti-democratic that you cannot fathom following the rules impartially, that indeed if a court determines that a candidate broke the law it must be because it is trying to manipulate election results. Because this is what you would yourself do if you had that power, protect "your" guy and persecute the "other" guy?
Who scrutinizes the result? If the people actually voted for that candidate, they won’t trust anybody to look behind the outcome to assess whether it was “fair” or not.
I feel like a large swath of the developed world has forgotten why we have elections. We do it because we don’t trust each other, we don’t agree what’s “fair,” etc. So we establish elections as a way of resolving disputes between people who don’t trust each other. It’s exactly like software security. You create a minimal trusted kernel—the machinery of voting and counting the votes—and then build decision making off the forced consensus generated by the elections.
If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections.
- "If there was anybody whom everyone trusted enough to second guess the elections, to look at voters’ motivations and fuzzy ideas of fairness you wouldn’t need elections."
Lawrence Lessig (well known to HN for his open source law work) proposed that the US Electoral College was created with the purpose of second-guessing elections. (He didn't like the outcome of the 2016 one and was trying to rationalize mechanisms of overturning it).
Lessig:
- "The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that "the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president]." But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people's choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people's choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton's words, "a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice" — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about "winner take all." It says nothing to suggest that electors' freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule "the people" or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel."
I actually think the electoral college is a solution to a problem so obvious to anyone living then that no one really thought to name it: validating an election.
It’s 1789, and you’re designing a voting-based system. You’ve decided each state gets votes proportional to its population in the presidential election. How do you validate that the result you got from Georgia, two weeks’ travel from NYC, is trustworthy? Seals? They can be tampered with. What about special messengers? Someone could impersonate them.
Solution: send dignitaries that can vouch for each other. The elite of neighboring states is likely to know each other, and you establish a chain of trust up and down the coast. Great!
Except these are people with better things to do than to be errand boys. There has to be something in it for them. Solution: they get to cast the final ballot for President. They are electors.
(This is a theory that I have not validated at all, to be clear.)
An adjacent point is that states are free to run their elections as they see fit with relatively few rules. For example most states have a winner-take-all result for presidential elections where a guy who gets 51% of the vote get 100% of the 'seats', so to speak. But that's not necessary - Maine and Nebraska, by contrast, have proportional systems, where they split their vote proportionally.
So how to interpret the results from one state could be quite different (and potentially subject to rapid change) even if you know the results were genuine. So the results of states always would need to be converted, by the states, into e.g. 15 final votes. So the electoral college emerges quite naturally in this context.
Slight correction- Maine and Nebraska do not have proportional systems; they both use the Congressional District Method. Each congressional district votes plurality for an elector, and the 2 remaining electors go to the statewide plurality.
He’s not wrong in that point. But in modern times, electors are chosen by the party or the candidate. Historically, they were chosen by elected state legislatures. Either way, there was a pretty short chain of trust between the voters and the electors.
That trust isn’t there when the oversight is from random people at an election commission or law enforcement agency.
You're disappointed because that's not what the Electoral College is for at all.
No, the purpose of the Electoral College is actually very simple: Guarantee States' sovereign rights for Presidential elections in a way that every State agrees (Congressional representation!), while maintaining the clear separation between Executive and Legislative branches.
And yet we still have laws surrounding what constitutes fair participation in the election.
If those laws are grossly violated and the candidate wins… then what? “Sorry nothing we can do” just means you’re a sucker if you follow the rules.
All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en masse. Enough voters to swing most elections vote primarily on vibes more than anything resembling a coherent or informed political philosophy.
Drought caused food prices to rise? Better kick out the current guy. Random weakening of our biggest trade partner’s currency causing lower prices of goods? The current guy is a genius!
> All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en mass
This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.
I’m not saying what we have isn’t an improvement on that. But it’s also maybe uncomfortably closer to that than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. And it is terrifyingly fragile.
Spread the right kind of vibes and misinformation and you can get enough of the population to believe anything. Hell, upset enough people and they’ll start to do it themselves.
We’ve already seen several countries essentially vote themselves into dictatorships based on misinformation. This may have been a near miss.
There are many steps between "no scrutiny" and "overturn the entire months long electoral process two days before it was supposed to end based on hearsay".
The right thing to have done here was to let the process continue, have the fascist investigated by the relevant authorities for his likely crimes regardless of whether he won or not, have him stand before a judge, and convict him - and, if he had won, have Parliament suspend him and strip his immunity so that this can all happen.
We have laws and established legal frameworks for all of this. The CCR can't just overrule all other procedures and base its decisions on hearsay.
> I'd argue that if you accept that the results were "likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign" then the means by which they achieved their objective are not above scrutiny.
No influence doesn't exist in any country. In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media. In 2016, almost every news outlet in the country were vocally against Trump. Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate. Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced. So people and factions try more and more to impose what is the supposed correct outcome of elections or the definition of democracy.
Why are you using the media as an example? They are at least based in the country they operate.
More damning is stuff like AIPAC, or British Labour's material support for the Democratic party in the last election. Foreign lobbies openly "interfering" in an election in ways less favoured countries never would be allowed to.
There are levels to influence. Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election. This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level.
You think that having bad press, as Trump had, was bad - that's not true at all, there is no such thing as bad press. The fact that the media in the US all went against him was just a freebie for Trump in terms of exposure.
Here, on the other hand, no media outlet reported on him, which is very different - yet mysteriously he got 20% from TikTok alone.
Second guessing an election result based on handwaving like this is completely insane. You do not have a functional mental model of how and why elections work.
Yeah, luckily I don't live in the US where you get a crazy billionaire to fund a certified madman into office, both clearly for money and power reasons that have nothing to do with 'the people' and then let that be valid. No thanks.
>clearly for money and power reasons that have nothing to do with 'the people'
Wtf? Not sure in which Fantasy land you live, but all political candidates everywhere receive campaign money from billionaires specifically "for money and power reasons and not to make life better for the voters", otherwise they wouldn't pay and elections would be worthless to them.
You're just pissed trump won, and ignoring that Kamala received 3x-5x the campaign money from wealthy donors than Trump did. So who's the one being influenced by mad billionaires more?
I don't mean the funding, I mean 'free speech' X prioritising everything in favor of Trump just so Musk (not necessarily Trump) ends up with more power for himself and his businesses. I didn't think Kamala was any good either, but this is a shitshow and I'm happy that in RO we don't do that, no matter what all the 'scamming ignorant/dumb people is democracy, so let it run!' people say; lying to people to get votes is not democratic. We saw how great it worked with brexit and we'll see how great it will work out with trump; the people who voted in both cases had no clue what they are voting for (unless you are rich looking for tax breaks and regulatory de-pressuring, then of course you knew what you voted for; moa moneyz); they are lied to and it will be their undoing.
What are you on about? Kamala's campaign has the same free speech access o X as Trump did.
Same with Joe Rogan. He even invited Kamala for a talk and she refused. But Trump didn't and then people blame Joe Rogan for "helping Trump win the elections". At what point is the Democratic Party gonna admit they fucked up every step of the way to connect with the voter, instead of blaming everyone else?
RO is even worse since we're ruled by the same cabal from the communist regime and their chronies and descendents who are basically in every political party. So it doesn't matter who you vote for, the same people will end up profiting off corruption.
At least the US cabal has some entreprenourial billionaires who create top companies and great jobs boosting their economy. RO politics is just thieves stealing from the economy, so we depend on the EU and their companies hiring here for jobs and economic growth.
Having an assumption that those 5% were real is showing one is far from the reality of sociological "probing". Especially in Eastern Europe. It is far from a precedent and it has happened many times already in the past 20-30 years that the agencies are blind for certain candidates because... they're not paid to see them.
Young people are won over on TikTok, nothing weird about it.
I don't know any of the TikTok people and yet many peers call them celebrities.
This guy broke some rules around elections spending and he will be punished, but calling it Russia interference just because of his politics doesn't have any weight behind it.
If the secret service tells the president it's Russian interference, then it is what it is. The report was declassified and the Constitutional Court has acted on some of the interference complaints, of which there were at least three after the report was published. It has unanimously voted to cancel the election. This is part of the checks and balances of a functioning democracy.
First of all, the secret service did not tell the President it was Russian interference. They said they suspected foreign interference.
Legal decisions can't be based on hearsay from the secret service. Courts take decisions based on proof presented in front of them. For extraordinary decisions, they are supposed to look for extraordinary evidence. The declassified documents are pointing at irregularities, and perhaps a campaign finance violation by one individual. That is a far cry from overwhelming evidence.
I've read the actual reports, they contain facts and details, with names blacked out, not suspicions. They point to Russian interference. They state that the campaign is similar to the ones in Ukraine before the invasion and the one during the ellectrions in Moldova. And the Constitutional Court obviously knows better given the fact that all the judges voted for the same outcome: to annul the election.
You should read them again. They do go into some detail, and they find the following facts:
- CG's campaign was well organized, on Telegram, by many dedicated people (at least some of which are Romanians, such as those identified but blacked out in the MAI report); at least some of these people have a history of extremist and pro-Russian views, but the documents make no mention of any direct Russian connection
- the campaign used large numbers of fake or dormant Tik Tok accounts, and accessed these from many IPs
- Romanian influencers were paid to promote pro-CG messages, and they mislabeled much of the paid promotion videos; some Romanian corporations that funded this are identified but blacked out in the MAI report
- Russia led its own disinformation campaigns in various ways, unrelated to CG's campaign (the SIE report documents various Russian activities, not a single one mentioning CG or any other candidate or party or group of parties)
- the SRI documents mention some data breaches and published passwords; the STS documents vehemently deny that any cyber actor made any successful attack on the core electoral infrastructure
- the shape of the campaign, from content to infrastructure (mass numbers of dormant Tik Tok accounts being resurrected, coordination over Telegram, etc) is veryalmost identical to known Russian campaigns in Ukraine and Moldova
- there is exactly one, non-specific, claim that "a state actor" coordinated with the CG campaign; here it is quoted in full, from the second SRI document:
> the activity of the accounts was coordinated by a state actor who would have used an alternative communication channel to "roll" messages unto the platform
That is the only specific claim that some state actor, and Russia is not mentioned here despite being mentioned in many other places in these documents. So again, only a suspicion of direct Russian interference in the campaign.
And, while these documents suggest those services have more detailed proof of many of the suspicious activities they represent, the Court has not seen any of that proof: they have only seen these documents, as mentioned in their motivation, which constituted hearsay.
But the same Constitutional Court already validated the election results one week ago. It was published in Monitorul Oficial (official publication of new laws and regulations, etc., closest equivalent to US Federal Register). At that time, The Supreme Council of National Defence had access to the documents. They read them and did nothing.
They did not have acces to the declassified reports then and the initial complaints were for something else, voting irregularities in a few named polling stations.
> the secret service tells the president … then it is what it is
That’s an extremely Soviet/Russian mindset. Blind trust is what leads to authoritarianism. Really the opposite of what you’d want in a functioning democracy.
> Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election
Based on the media coverage? Building a narrative around a character is done over time, that's what PR consultants do, in hand with journalists and newspapers owners and advertisers.
> This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%. That's next level.
This is very common in elections. Trump was supposed to lose by a large margin in 2016. Polls aren't votes.
Occam's razor here.. Polling failure and it's very clear from the actual amount of people voting for the guy. Yes you can make a conspiracy theory but it's a bit ridiculous.
Most Romanians that work in IT(and post here) live in their own bubble (because they make 5-10x average Romanian salary) and are totally disconnected from the common folks and can't now believe that the person making less than minimum wage that is serving their 3 euros expresso is not loving it.
Those common folks are similar to the rest of Eastern Europe with strict religious beliefs and very conservative so it's not a surprise they vote for someone that they resonate with.
Similar stuff happened in Brussels where a radical islamist party won seats in the parliament by using TikTok tactics. He did not show up in the polls either.
Pretty sure Trump won the national popular vote this last time around though? And there’s a strong (politically neutral) argument that Clinton could have pulled off an EC win in 2016 if she had taken Trump more seriously - eg: she never once campaigned in Wisconsin [1].
Going back a bit further, and somewhat tying into the topic of the thread, 2016 Trump owes his GOP nomination (and thus indirectly the Presidency) to a Clinton/DNC op designed to weaken the Republican field.[2] That’s not to say that Trump didn’t eventually resonate with the GOP base, but the powerbrokers of the RNC absolutely didn’t want him and yet their counterparts at the DNC were heavily in favor of putting Trump front and center everywhere.
I think there’s a very strong argument Clinton could’ve won the EC in 2016. There was almost no EC bias this year. Trump won the tipping point state, PA, by 1.8, and the popular vote by about 1.5. The country swung 5-6 points right from 2020. But Harris pretty much just parked herself in PA, MI, and WI and kept the swing in those states under 3 points. If she had won, she very well could’ve done so while losing the popular vote.
It also shows that the counterfactuals are misguided. Campaigning makes a bigger difference than the typical margin of the popular vote. Candidates only campaign in the swing states (if they’re smart) so we don’t know what would happen if they were trying to win the popular vote.
Stuff like that is pretty common in Eastern Europe, though. Combine very high levels of apathy and distrust with not very mature party systems plus all the corruption and incompetence (not that it’s that different in some Western European countries these days) and you regularly get random unknown guy/party winning just because they are an outsider and are promising to fix everything (e.g. Zelenskyy is probably the most extreme example of that)
> Macron and Trump were widely recognized as candidate before the election. This guy in Romania was at 5%, no one knew who he was, then suddenly he's at 20+%.
You can say exactly that about Macron in 2017, he never was elected before candidating for the presidential election. His only public role was as deputy secretary-general of François Holland who was at the time French president.
There are laws to limit this, whether they limit campaign funding or the involvement of certain persons. In the Romanian case, the argument is not whether the right candidate won, it is whether campaigning laws were broken.
> In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media.
This canard again. Prove that something unlawful happened, and then you can talk. If you are butt hurt because Marine cannot win an elections then be relieved: she’s likely to become ineligible for 5 years and a candidate that might be able to win the damn thing will have some room instead. If your pet politician is Mélenchon then lol is all I can say. He’s a reason why France is in this shite in the first place.
> Those are example of "state-actor" level influence on elections, but somehow it's supposed to be fine because it was supporting the "good" candidate.
This is completely off-base and intentionally misleading. The media endorsing candidates is nothing like state actors at play.
> Democracy in unironically in danger, but not for the reasons often voiced.
Yeah. Not for the reasons you mention either. The fact that so many people keep repeating these bullshit arguments is part of the problem. Macron would not have had a chance had the others not thoroughly undermined the system for at least a decade before he showed up.
> In the Romanian case, the argument is not whether the right candidate won, it is whether campaigning laws were broken.
> Prove that something unlawful happened, and then you can talk.
Why this double standard? In the Romanian case, nothing has been proven. There are precisely two one-page long reports from secret services saying there were irregularities favoring this candidate. This is barely enough evidence to even start a prosecution, nevermind issue a final judicial decision to overturn an almost finished election.
I'm as happy as anyone with half a brain that Călin Georgescu is not our next President. But the way the courts went about this is undeniably illegal.
> I'm as happy as anyone with half a brain that Călin Georgescu is not our next President.
Aren't you worried about actually getting him (or some pal of his) as president due to the Streisand effect?
I don't know much specifically about Romanian politics, but in general this kind of thing can help rather than harm a politician. He can now claim to be a martyr of the establishment and an opponent of authoritarianism.
In principle, I agree, which is one of the reasons that I think this was a horrible decision.
On the other hand, the court has just shown that it's willing to redo the entire electoral process if the elections don't go the right way. Călin Georgescu will certainly not be allowed to run again. One of the other hard right wing candidates (Diana Șoșoacă) had already been disqualified, for even flimsier reasons, and I don't expect she will be allowed to register either. There is only one far right candidate left (George Simion) - I suspect that they can find reasons to exclude him too.
Whether people might rise up against this or not is unclear. I was dreading some violence last night, but not even a handful of those who had voted with Georgescu, or the far right parties, have taken to the streets (thankfully) so who knows.
> In France during the first elections Macron was elected, he was pushed heavily by the media.
> This canard again. Prove that something unlawful happened
Nobody can prove that, but it wouldn't be the first time that alien powers would interfere in French elections, beginning with USA. There is a long list of US interferences in France on Wikipedia [2] and CIA was very active recently in France [3]
* in XXth century: Monnet, Bastien-Thiry, Guy Mollet, Antoine Pinay, Maurice Faure, Jean Lecanuet, François Mitterrand [0], Algiers putsch [1]
I'm surprised all the discussions here missed an obvious point, even if it's implicit and not explicitly stated: the shady support this candidate had was the only support he had
He's declared 0 campaign spending. For all we know, the only way he was promoted was by a swarm of foreign-controlled accounts bypassing TikTok's own anti-swarming policies, knowingly or not. The growth in his account was not organic. He had practically zero other exposure to justify his growth
Accepting him as president is tantamount to Romania accepting a president chosen by someone very high up in another state. That, for me, is Romania becoming a puppet state of that power, be it Russia, China or both working together
No, thanks, I'm happy with a borderline legal decision by Romania's Constitutional Court. There were enough red flags in the way this candidate conducted himself for his case to not stand as precedent if a legit candidate is challenged in the future for minor (and even maybe significant, but not exclusive) foreign support
I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science front, on the logical consistency front.
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.
Someone should document the amount of absolute insanity that the candidate was and maybe then you'd get it. I just feel relief at this point.
How bad you or I think he is is irrelevant. If the people's decision is overturned when the elite do not like it then the country isn't any kind of democracy.
What if it's so bad it would likely lead to lack of democracy? What then? How can democracy defend itself from democratically electing not to be a democracy anymore? Because make no mistake, this was what this election was about.
You elect this guy, you kill democracy. Essentially, this guy's platform was "let's try dictatorship for a change".
Ok, then the answer is simple for me. We kill it with something that is not fascism. And we try to kill it with something that does not end with the suffering of millions of people.
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.
It doesn't, but if you're in a democracy and the majority well and truly does not want it to be a democracy, I don't think you can stop the transition. Attempting to "save" democracy by imposing a minority will on the majority merely guarantees the end of democracy.
It's rarely as blunt as this, though. Usually people who support such politics will insist that it is democratic, and they do have a point: what they really want is a democracy in which the majority (which includes themselves) gets to do whatever it wants to others.
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.
Dude, you so much reveal what a brainwashing does to the people it is just unreal. We've seen that behavior few weeks ago after the US elections. How the evil has come now what we'll do etc. It is really a sad there're people who decide theirs truth is the only valid one.
Not much worth arguing about in this thread. Multiple sleeper accounts and coopted accounts with the same talking points about how someone who used illegal means to sway votes should just be allowed to take the reins of power with a fine. It's not logical and isn't real discussion just the same nefarious actors using social media to try to sway opinion. Get that good nights sleep and I'm glad your country didn't succumb to this new method of warfare like mine did.
You automatically jump to “anything but fascism” as a solution but that’s not a solution at all. That was Harris & Walz do-nothing strategy advertised as a “just don’t vote for Trump.” This type of anti-campaign is fundamentally rooted at brainwashing us to discount any and all fundamental problems to be solved. Instead, it relies on their constituents to rely on opinions, rather than facts. Relying on opinions and beliefs aren’t inherently bad, but when an entire campaign doesn’t present any other reason to vote for them other than “you’re an idiot if you advocate for a party that claims their election was hacked” or “Think about your daughters future,” that campaign is gaslighting the electorate to believe detractors to those views must be anti-democracy. Lo and behold, 2024 results come in and now the losing party cries “There’s no way the majority of Americans like this guy, early votes must’ve been thrown out.” Congrats, you’ve been brainwashed to only see flaws when your ideas and beliefs aren’t validated and reach for any explanation that preserves your worldview- even explanations that you’ve laughed at when presented by the other side)
It was not a democratic election specifically because of massive foreign interference. Democracy doesn't work with an adversary propaganda channel in your society. This is why RT and Sputnik news were banned just about everywhere in the West. This is why the US has given Tiktok a year to sell their operations to a US company or gtfo. After this I hope the EU follows suit, kicks them out or at least massively fines them into compliance.
> Democracy doesn't work with an adversary propaganda channel in your society.
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.
The correct course of action is to stop the interference before the people vote. Once they vote, the will of the people has been revealed, the ruling party is a sore loser, and you've lost your chance.
They're technically still hold the #1 ballot but now they need other parties to form a coalition, just like in other European countries (Germany, The Nederlands). Which is not that bad, because this party was founded by those trained by Gorbachev's KGB to replace Romania's communist leadership and took the clothes of social democracy. How they came to turn against Russia is not entirely clear. Maybe they tried a balancing act between NATO/EU and Russia as Moldova did in the past, but some factions saw the writing on the wall.
Although in the abstract, we are on the same page, I think it _was_ a democratic election. With interference, a lot of it, but the will of the voters was CG. It's just that CG would have most likely destroyed democracy and destroyed our country.
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.
He seems like a bad guy. If you thought he would manage to kill democracy you're wrong. Especially with the EU support for civil society and the possibility of sanctions if he did something really undemocratic, like demanding a rerun of an election he lost for example.
Orban has been doing his "illiberal democracy" (i.e. not a democracy) thing for 15+ years now. The EU is about as laughably powerless to stop him as I am to stop a punch by Floyd Mayweather. So it's kinda funny you say that.
He does some bad things but he would not get away with anything as extreme overturning an election based on a pretext like this, nor with widespread voter fraud. Eventually he will lose an election, just like Law and Justice in Poland. Judging by the polling trends that could be as soon as 2026:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_H...
The most fucked up part to me is (I’m guessing) the majority of the votes this guy receives were from people that lived under Ceaușescu‘s rule and thought “Yes, let’s bring that era back”. Similar to how domestic abuse victims protect the person abusing them.
You seem to be discussing the Romanian election in a vacuum divorced from the reality that Putin is doing everything in his power to sow chaos in Europe because the calculus just works for him.
Democracy works because it leads to reasonable outcomes for the vas majority of the population. If the election itself leads to unreasonable ones, it ceases to be a good political system.
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.
What "elite" are you talking about? He broke multiple laws that would made him ineligible to run, and therefore he is ineligible to run. Can you explain what's wrong with this reasoning?
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.
He broke multiple laws that would made him ineligible to run, and therefore he is ineligible to run.
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”?
> I lack the willpower to go down the rabbit hole of how bad this guy was. On the political front, on the science front, on the logical consistency front.
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.
I never thought I would say this, but this guy was, honestly, way way worse than Trump. Not to diminish your torture. But it was off the charts insane. Like... A compendium of conspiratorial beliefs.
In a broader sense, the exhaustive storm of BS is deliberate: When the people are too damn tired to care about which story is really true, it changes the playing field to favor whoever is willing to tell the most-pleasing lies.
Eventually it dovetails with the dynamics of: "The way you have to pretend to believe/avoid my obvious lies is a demonstration of my power and an implicit threat to others."
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.
I don't think this is what's happening. There is no confusion.
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.
So? Do you suggest that some people in Romania (and well.. applies to many other countries just as much) should lose the right to vote because they are too dumb and are easily tricked (I mean I certainly agree that they are)? Because what other options are there?
I think most of suggest that large-scale targeted foreign interference, and benefiting from it, should be illegal qnd have consequences which may include overturning results. And that's the case here, as it is in most countries. I don't think we have to explain why.
How many likes from foreigners on tiktok should a candidate be allowed to receive? Are all foreign countries to be treated equally, or are some foreigners ok?
Propaganda channels need to be shut down and replaced with information sources. While originating with politicians, the advertising industry has turned propaganda into a science you can study at University and this is the result - populations, not just dumb individuals, without agency, and democracy just a game to be played by the manipulators. Political truth and spending laws also need to be become agile, because the US election showed you can dump billions into disinformation if you are fast enough to not be blocked until after the election. But it is toothless while someone outside of your legal framework gets to choose the next leader by hiring a marketing graduate and giving them an advertising budget.
They also had Novosti = the news. It led to a fun joke: "Why do we have two newspapers, Truth and News? Well that's because there's no truth in News, and no news in Truth."
Alot of these old Soviet jokes are becoming quite appropriate again. What times we live in.
Independent courts, not the government, need to determine truth, along with penalties for lying or abusing the system. Any government, not just totalitarian ones, will abuse it if they have opportunity. Just have to hope the courts remain independent or that people notice if the government attempts to nobble the system. There are a number of regions with laws like this that haven't descended into totalitarian states.
We had this for a long time in Europe. It forced everyone to recognize that God did exist and that the sun revolved around the earth. Worked really great!
This is true. But nonetheless, it is double edged. Not a fan of closing down sources, more a fan of education and inoculation of the population against misinformation. But that takes decades. And this is now. Not sure what is the best course of action.
The're not losing the right to vote, they just get to do it all over again, hopefully without another state actor tainting the ballot. And without inept politicians combining the presidential and parliamentary elections over the course of two weeks, giving Russia the unique opportunity to manipulate both at the same time. The secret service was probably ignored, because they had the correct assessment ready.
Dunno, people are already brainwashed with Russian propaganda and convinced that the majority party somehow stole the elections, when in fact they're as surprised as everyone else. If they disqualify the guy his votes would likly go to another borderline fascist candidate who's also allegedly backed by Russia. His party took place #2 in the parliamentary elections. He has been formerly declared persona non grata in Moldova and Ukraine, due to unionist, anti Ukrainian actity and links to the GRU. They already disqualified another candidate due to anti EU and anti NATO affiliations, who's also openly pro Russian and a regular at events hosted at their embassy. I think it was a mistake because her votes went to this other crazy person who made it to round two. Russia backed not one but three trojan horse candidates in these elections. This is how important it is for them to derail that country from its Euroatlantic path. Romania now has three right wing parties with over 30% in its parliament and a cancelled presidential election.
That's not what's being disputed and I completely agree with your sentiment. The issue is that electoral campaign law was not respected and thus the elections were not considered "free and fair", but tainted by this shady candidate.
I feel this is kind of stretching the phrase "free and fair". The election e.g. in Venezuela earlier this year was not "free and fair" because the votes simply weren't counted and made-up tallies were published. This is not what's happening here. Here, there is no doubt that people wanted to vote a certain way and the votes were accurately counted to reflect that.
You don't get to use your own definition of the phrase "free and fair" here. Romanian law prescribes that political campaigns need to be transparent in source and funding. They weren't, as per the Romanian court. End of discussion.
By your argument if a country (e.g. China?) outlaws competing political parties then the rubber-stamp single-party elections are “free and fair” because they are in accordance with law. In general the whole point of a “free and fair” election is that the government can’t just change the law and rules to get the result it wants. There is an independent notion of “free and fair” election that is rightly independent of country specific law.
No. There is not. Canada also has campaign spending rules because most civilized nations recognize that equal speaking time is required for a fair election. Otherwise you can’t consider the people to be well informed.
There is no “independent notion of a free and fair election”. Personally I think your idea of a fair election is highly unfair and unethical.
All right so we just get the Russians to spend some money funding the conservative party of Canada via tiktok and then when they win the election we can say ha ha that’s illegal!
> so we just get the Russians to spend some money funding
Ya, that's illegal. If any political party conspired with a foreign state actor to get secret funding and targeted propaganda campaigns on Canadian citizens? You're ok with that?
I think you meant to say, if the foreign state actor independently without the local party conspiring with them, chose to back them up by targeting Canadians with messaging against the other parties and in support of the one they want to win, and you say that's illegal, that would seem wrong.
That I agree. But it still leaves a problem that Canadian have all been manipulated and deceived. At least if it is found out, people should know just to what extent the information they were fed was curated to them by foreign actors to influence you in aligning with their interests. And after that information comes out, if it was that a majority amount of it was, I think it would be fair to have a redo election. Now people could vote conservative again, if they assume that even with that knowledge, they still feel strongly about it.
I'd also add, for future elections, it really shouldn't be possible for foreign actors to target and curate information like that to local citizens, there needs to be safeguards of some sort.
The conservatives claimed precisely this about the last election, but investigators deemed the interference was not significant enough for a redo.
Foreign interference is one of the biggest threats to democracy today. I’d absolutely support a redo of an election, even if my party one, if it was found to be significant enough.
More broadly I think all democracies need to thinking about ways to handle this problem as it’s only getting worse.
.. probably yes, it would become illegal. I don't think that this is the absurdity you believe it is. It can even be the solution. If
* we want candidates to spend ~the same amount of money on campaign and
* Russia interferes
then the state, Canada or Romania, should block TikTok propaganda. What else?
Also I think that if the "same amount of campaign money" rule is proven to be wrong, and they want to go in an "anything goes" way instead, then they should redo the election, and they shouldn't accept the results with unfair conditions.
Not any more absurd than claiming that nobody has the right to challenge the definition of what "free and fair" according the laws of a specific state (regardless if one agrees with that definition or not).
The fair bit requires everyone following fair election laws.
Think of it like a game, it’s only fair if the rules are unbiased and everyone to follow them. There’s a wide range of possible rules for a fair game, but allowing one player to cheat is equivalent to unfair rules.
So sure, you can have fair elections where no candidate needs to disclose their net worth, or fair elections where everyone is registered to share their net worth, but you can’t have a fair election where some people are registered to share their net worth.
> you can’t have a fair election where some people are registered to share their net worth.
Didn't he do that? As for the election spending even if he's lying about the spending they can't prosecute and convict him without delaying the elections for many months if not more.
At this point any outcome seems like a huge failure of the Romanian electoral/political/legal systems.
I was arguing against the specific claim that a "free and fair" election is one that is consistent with the laws of the country the election is being run in.
In fact, I think your response proves my point. What you're saying is that the specifics of the laws matter - i.e, whether or not a election is "free or fair" depend on _what_ the rules of the game are, not only on the fact that they are the rules.
His electoral campaign posts weren’t marked as electoral material. As a voter I thought they are not paid but true opinions of journalists/ influencers that I respect. It turns out that they were actually paid and not marked properly. So he broke the rules. Now I am going to change my vote.
So, you agree with the opinion stated in electoral material if it is marked as official campaign material but disagree with the same opinion if it is marked as paid marketing material?
I would like to quote Spock here: "Fascinating..."
Different person: I might give weight to the word of someone I respect, then change my mind when I find out that person wasn't saying it due to conviction but only for a payout, yes.
I completely understand and fully agree with this idea even if I still have to see one political with a strong conviction that are not paid out in a way or another.
Anyway, if the ideas illegally disseminated through this campaign material convinced the voter to choose this candidate over another, what other choice does he have ? Vote for someone that he wouldn't vote in the first place because of his opinion ?
May be I'm wrong assuming people vote for ideas and opinion...
People will vote for Hitler if you dress him nicely and make him seem to care for your personal problems (Trump die that really well).
The thing is - in a fair election media scrutiny applies to all candidates. This guy flew under the radar, so media couldn't expose him. Therefore it wasn't a fair choice people were given because the mainstream candidates all received significant more scrutiny.
I don't even think you need to dress that person nicely. The film "Look who's back" had an actor in the role of Adolf Hitler talk to random people in the street in unscripted sequences. He readily pulled them over to his side by relating to their everyday problems.
As crazy as the premise is of Hitler getting inexplicable transplanted into the 21st century, the film manages to demonstrate the appeal of these dangerous populists.
You need some basic rules for what's acceptable in elections, or otherwise the winning tactics will be things like threatening or bribing voters. You won't capture the genuine will of the voters if that's going on.
He very clearly broke the law. We could debate the severity of the violation, but it's certainly enough to make you ineligible to run many places.
My question in these events is, so why not investigate it and block the running BEFORE the vote? People only care about illegal hiding of funds post elections? Why even let it go on if you can get evidence so quickly just after? In these 6 days what came out that wasn't out say, 10 or 20 days before voting day?
Because before the first round he was considered a nobody, and the second round was scheduled to happen two weeks after the first round. It's too short of a time.
2 weeks is more time than the 6 days since the election. They could've decided to stop things then. I get what you mean agree it's probably messy with the timings, but one gets the feeling that if you lose you can do all the election fraud you want, which is kind of suss to me because people can use decoy candidates for the fraud and if they lose nobody looks into it.
The law is about what he is spending. If I go and pay for ads on my own initiative, he doesn't need to declare it just like Basescu didn't declare all the stuff NGOs paid for him back in the days.
EDIT: I do find it impossible for him to spend 0 on it though. You have to travel from A to B (at the very least)
Massive election interference should nullify the election. Obviously the evidence bar is high here, but you can't have someone flout election laws and have outside state interference and just shrug you shoulders.
The correct course of action is to take the case to the highest court and get them to make a ruling. They decided a do over because the election is too flawed to continue.
If this guy can run again and isn't wrapped up in a criminal case, maybe they will vote for him, but at least now they have far more information than they did before.
Ultimately, electoral laws exist and have a purpose. If the law was broken, then it must be investigated and the tainted election must be re-run. These laws are designed to prevent exactly what is alleged to be happening, so it is not a case of misusing power.
> If the law was broken, then it must be investigated
Yes, of course.
> and the tainted election must be re-run
No, not at all. First because there is no law that even mentions this possibility - courts should not get to invent rules and regulations.
Secondly because there is no time to take correct decisions of this nature during the short election cycle, and ensure that evidence is properly gathered, rights are respected, and so on. The standard of evidence used to take this decision is barely good enough to charge someone.
'And those with the deepest pocket shall win, amen'
There are reasons why there are rules on how to influence voters (campaign), actually, despite voters having absolute 'agency'. There are problematic influences you know, considered problematic by the society.
While they did have agency, what if they were also lied to? These campaigns to say nice things about a candidate usually come with equally strong campaigns to lie about their rivals. It could all be lies, there could be nothing redeemable about the candidate. We saw similar in a recent election in another country that I'm not going to mention specifically. This is exactly how fascists gain power.
The problem is that lies are common, and sadly, accepted in politics. What was the last time you saw a candidate who didn't lie in their platform?
I know that people like Trump or Georgescu are in a different league in this respect, they lie more and in a more unhinged way, but it's hard to draw a line and say that their votes are don't legitimate becuase their voters were lied to, while probably voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.
> voters for other parties are putting hope in promises that will be unfulfilled as well.
Okay, I'll get specific now. In the US this typically isn't because the Democrat candidate lied, it's because of obstruction from the right-wing. Sure, Biden promised to cancel student debt, but he was met with obstruction at every step from the right-wing. That isn't a lie from Biden, but the lack of results is what we get when voters believe the right-wing obstructionist liars telling them that student loan forgiveness is evil. So then people call out Biden for somehow "lying" about forgiving student loans, and then don't show up to vote for the Democrat in the next election, because "they are liars".
True, but in Spain we have had governments with absolute majority from both major parties, and they still lied, and I think most European countries can say the same.
I agree. he can be prosecuted for not reporting his spending probably, but as long as he didn't ship boatloads of fake ballots it doesn't warrant cancelling the election. the authorities should put a stop to the interference, and if the interference to influence was his advantage, the 2nd round, without interference, would have him lose. Just let the people vote.
I still believe that the main "problem" was that the front runner party that has been in the 2nd round for 10s of years and which has the prime minister as the candidate, didn't make it to the 2nd round. Someone wanted this fixed. Obviously the prime minister who was 3rd in the 1st round made declarations in support of the ruling.
Why are you even commenting here if you don't believe that people should ever share their opinions on anything?
But yeah not a great look for Romania and its political system either way if they have to invalidate the elections and throw away the votes of a significant proportion of the population to stop them from electing a pro-russian/fascist candidate...
Say he violates voting laws and becomes president as a result. Do you get a situation like in the USA where the police just say “well, you won so all crimes are effectively expunged,” or do you have the even more insane situation of the president being prosecuted for violating electoral laws during his campaign?
Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected? "Tough luck, it's too late now, should just stand by and watch the country get taken over".
The laws regulating campaigns have specific penalties outlined for those that disobey them. Election authorities have broad authority to enforce those laws unilaterally during the campaign, without even getting the courts involved, such as having ads taken down immediately, fining those that didn't follow labeling requirements, and so on. People can be charged and convicted for disobeying these laws, through the regular court system.
There is also a law for how the vote results are to be tallied, when they can be recounted, and in what conditions the recount can lead to a do-over of the election (specifically, the law says that only if widespread fraud of a nature that could have changed the order of candidates). The law also mentions when this do-over would take place (the second next Sunday after the decision is taken, which must be within two weeks of the suspect vote itself).
However, no law in Romania stipulates that an election is to be entirely canceled, from the beginning steps of candidate registration before their campaigns, if one candidate disobeyed campaign finance laws and/or electoral ad labeling laws and no one caught them in time.
> The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves.
> Yes, they were likely influenced by a likely state-actor campaign.
That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.
You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.
That's exactly why we have regulations like public campaign spending, radio/TV quotas, &c. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Most likely
> That's not how democracy works, and as a matter of fact, how the human brain works.
> You can't make informed decisions when state actors are working day and night to make you go against your own interest.
It is possible for a brain to do, but it is not common because almost everyone thinks based on heuristics, like you are doing.
It is highly analogous to the rise of science's influence on beliefs and thinking styles in the physical realm, but a different realm. We remain in a sort of dark ages in this regard.
Under this framework, what if you simply bribed people to vote for your candidate of choice: e.g. Here's 20 euro, vote for this guy.
You could still say "The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves."
But this doesn't really pass a smell test for what we want democracy to look like.
Similarly, if you live in a country and you see billions of dollars poured into your election advertisements from USA, Russia, China, etc, you'd be like "wtf are we even sovereign?"
Where I live it's illegal to use a camera within 100 feet of a voting booth to protect the privacy of people's votes. If you tried to take a photo of your ballot, you'd likely get asked by a poll worker to put the camera away.
Wow, this is a worrisome comment because it reveals a huge misconception of the Free & Fair election process.
Elections aren't about defrauding people - you're framing the electoral process as "people have agency to make an X on a voting card, and it doesn't matter what happens until then".
There are laws for elections for some reason. If you're defrauding people, it doesn't represent agency, it represents that people are misinformed.
Have you not been following in the past few years about how susceptible the human mind is to disinformation and manipulation? You fake a positive belief field around a person and a huge number of us flip to align with that perceived crowd. You might disagree for yourself, or want it to be different, or hear people claiming otherwise, but we are very vulnerable to the effect of being surrounded by genuine sentiments (of very marginal perspectives) that have been boosted to appear majority.
If these forces are so powerful, why don’t both sides use them and cancel each other out? It seems like people only invoke these explanations when their side loses, when they win it’s because the voters accepted true and good arguments.
It may seem that, but I invoke it bc it aligns with adversarial desires of hostile states (Iran, China, Russian). I assume some proportion of fake humans are part of any system sowing cultural discord, left or right.
The international consensus is that trump sows international discord with USA's allies. I agree. My analysis has nothing to do with right vs left or sides here
Is it possible the election itself was also "influenced" in a more direct manner? (Where the psywar aspect would serve merely to legitimize the result, rather than create it.)
In a lot of countries there are rules, for instance limitations in terms of spending or similar time on air for all candidates. I don't know whether that's the case in Romania, but it is completely possible to rule an election out even if people voted "freely". I know that typically doesn't apply to the US, but there's a world outside of it
Thats like saying older member of family transferring all of his equity to Asian Pig farm also had agency and decided for himself. He liked what he saw being presented with, and made the final call himself on who to give his lifesavings to.
In other words, democracy is under serious attack and if we think it's worth savibg, we will need to find robust counter-measures against these methods.
It's not a new idea that this is a serious problem: demagogues were recognized in the Antique.
> The people who voted for this guy have agency and decided for themselves
They got brainwashed into the vote. The other parties had very weak candidates, some with a bunch of corruption issues that the press raved about just before the election. The others are just weak and unprepared, even the second runner up, a former journalist who's currently a mayor in a small town. This surprise candidate is no different, but he has an empty discourse that strikes a chord with many frustrated voters, without screaming or being hysterical, much like that Stoianaglo guy in Moldova. Of course, it's all mumbo jumbo, the guy is either deluded or a mythomaniac. People are fed up, most of them have given the current establishment a hate no-confidence vote, which Russia has speculated mainly with bots on Tiktok. It was quite easy for them to do so given that the inept Romanian politicians also set the dates of both presidential and parliamentary elections over the course of two weeks.
You could say the same about people who voted for Brexit, who after the fact when they came to learn what it would actually mean said they would've never voted for it if they knew the implications. But alas, the United Kingdom was on the receiving end of a similar (dis)information campaign. Yes, the people technically knew which candidate they were giving their vote for, but no, they did not know what that candidate actually stood for.
Modern mass social media is a hyper-optimised, hyper-targeted psychological howitzer that would make Goebbels or Bernays blush. It's more than just "an influence".
Ffs I search for cake recipes on YouTube and my suggested videos are infinite hours of the local far-right guy ranting about gypsies and nepalis. Of course it has an effect, of course such one-sided avalanche of propaganda skews and manipulates things. This is obvious and also empirically verified.
I stress this: one-sided. It's not even so much as all the boomers (and impressionable kids) being fed this propaganda for hours on end, it's that it's the only thing that they are fed. Listening to 30 tiktoks in a row of the guy ranting about gypsies and the EU would not be so bad if at least it was followed by some tiktoks giving an opposing views, or exposing that guy's shady business deals and how he pockets millions in taxpayer money! But we all know echo chambers are more lucrative than balanced views....
I think this comes down to a very simple question: Is one open to entertain the notion that well crafted messages targeted through algorithmic platforms can drive people to change behavior.
As an ex Facebook person let me offer this thought:
Either advertisement works or it doesn’t. Looking at my past paychecks and stock price of all tech advertisment giants, I have my opinion.
I think it’s preposterous to think that political choices / votes somehow are in a different category for people than all the other things advertisements are run for.
If medical ads work (why would we regulate them) to “manipulate” or convince people to act or spend against their own self best interest, then why would political ones not work.
And in many countries political ads are allowed and are regulated and have massive ad spend. We shouldn’t spend and regulate now if we didn’t think they’d work, would we.
And the debate is not new. I was at FB for Cambridge analytics and saw the damage mitigation first hand - along with the weird conclusions that no harm was done.
Which is the same we see every time a big tech company announces they banned foreign adversaries running influence campaigns and found no evidence they had any impact.
So we have Schroedingers ad product here - highly effective when the ads are official, as measurable via the ads manager, but totally hapless and ineffective when it’s not run by an allowed source.
Romania is a great one minute past midnight wake up call for western democracies to resolve this cognitive dissonance and get off their high horse of humans being selectively able to resist an industry that has mastered manipulation through scientific a/b testing for decades.
Resolving that doesn’t mean getting rid of the notion of free will … one merely need to remember that people’s ability to make decisions is constrained by the data available to them and their ability to make sense of that data.
And time spent on platform and activity - active or passive collection of data - is the constraining factor there. The channels of information are changing and passive absorption is vastly outpacing active informing at a pace most politicians do not comprehend.
The latest ofcom report in the UK shows a 25% increase (1h) of time spent on phones - the vast majority of which is either video social media platforms - in one year!
Maybe 2016 the effect wasn’t strong enough yet. But it’s 9 years of a/b testing down the road, a rise of aggressive engagement video platforms and political podcast influencers and a pandemic later and in the last year alone we’ve seen a massive change in engagement patterns and where people get their data to sensemake reality from.
Also ex-facebook here, who worked in high severity integrity.
The human mind is not well understood, and we've seen correlation between things like exposure to suicide and self injury content and increased suicidal ideation.
We KNOW that advertising works, we KNOW that opinions can be swayed with misinformation (it's easier to fool someone, than convince someone they've been fooled) - just look at QAnon for a great example.
It certainly has a strong Randian influence, despite that particular ideological leaning being beneficial only to a tiny fraction of the population. That could be indicative of tech culture in general though and not necessarily outside influence.
TBH I'd be surprised if any high-traffic public forum isn't heavily influenced by foreign or ruling-class interests at this point.
It's primarily due to the high net worth or high income of people here. Right-libertarian ideology is more than just a set of economic views, it's also a moral framework that places them at the top. It tells them they are intrinsically good for accruing as much wealth as possible. People seek out tribes that morally elevate themselves, and then retrofit made-up reasons.
Depends on what you consider "influence". There are certaimly pro-Russian, or at least anti-American, posters. As for the idea that it is being targeted by a campaign of bots or payrolled humans, this seems unlikely - HN is good at sniffing out LLMs and to date we have no indication that Russia can find and afford competent English writers in bulk.
There is a curious human tendency since the earliest days of the internet to refuse to believe in the possibility of organic disagreement. The most stereotypical and funny instance of it are perhaps 4chan arguments carried out by insinuating that all opposing posts are actually made by the same person (or, recently: organised by some Discord channel), but the belief that niche comment sections all over the world are flooded by Chinese or Russian government farm comment slaves who are perfectly literate in the local language and culture and would never stand out were it not for their talking points is now being affirmed even by (formerly?) respectable mainstream institutions. I guess this produces the convenient effect that your populace gets strong memetic antibodies against any dissident positions, even as the proposition is transparently absurd. Where are all those people supposed to come from? Even lifelong techies from Russia have telltale quirks in their LKML posts, and little needs to be said about English text in Chinese docs.
Bound to be some - I was debating a pro Russian guy a couple of days ago. But there doesn't seem to be an organised campaign as such as far as I can tell.
Keep in mind that there are plenty of "useful idiots" willing to recite straight up Russian agitprop, usually associated with more extreme political views. On the far right, there's a whole subculture of people who seem to sincerely believe that Russia is some kind of "proper Christian country", whatever that means. On the far left, some people will simp for anyone and anything so long as it is anti-US and anti-West - in that retelling, Russia is somehow "anti-imperialist".
In Russia itself there's also no shortage of people who genuinely support the government and its outlook, and some of those people hang out on Western platforms (often, ironically, using VPN).
Which is to say, you're certainly bound to encounter a certain amount of rabidly pro-Russian takes even in the absence of any deliberate targeting.
Don't know about the latter, but I notice your question seems mighty grey… I'd be shocked if HN, of all places, was exempt from internet meddling. It seems to me to be fruitful ground for manipulation, and for years now I've seen an interesting 'double face' of Hacker News: on the one hand, inclined towards techno-optimism, but on the other hand, the pressure to manipulate viewpoints seems nearly Reddit-like in its focus and determination. It's a bit like Fight Club: the first rule of downvoting suggestions of interference is that you must downvote any suggestion of coordinated interference even before you use voting to push any other desired purpose.
I think this is salient to the question and to the fact that it's a discussion on the subject of interference causing a Romanian court to annul the results of an election, but I'll accept correction if my observations are out of line even in this conversation :)
Based on my reading of many controversial threads around elections, politics and the Russo-Ukrainian war, the entire internet, including HN is infiltrated either by Russian agents or their useful idiots.
The more likely reality which is confirmed by votes to anti-establishment candidates is that many people in Europe and the US don’t like the political direction, no matter how much it’s presented as moral and democratic.
HN is full of all kinds of fun influence, and Dang swears it doesn't exist.
Are you aware that every HN user account associated with a YCombinator company is visible as an orange username to every other HN account associated with a YCombinator company? They sell this as a "Perk". It's a secret club.
It was ever thus. Like, this has been happening basically forever. States support groups that will aid them, news at 11. Now, the Internet makes this a lot cheaper and potentially more effective but that's a difference of degree rather than kind.
I think the steelman for this would be something like: people hear factually incorrect assertions with enough frequency from enough different sources and become convinced that these assertions are true. This is basically of the idea of sockpuppeting/astroturfing. Given that both major political parties in the US deploy such tactics, it is not unreasonable to think that they are effective. And when these tactics are deployed by a hostile foreign power we should be even more upset than when they are used by domestic sources.
OTOH, looking for subtle signs of Kremlin influence in every comment is not without its costs either, one of which is that it tends to make people impervious to evidence or arguments that our policy is too hostile towards the Kremlin.
As far as I undertand there is no voting fraud involved. It tells a bit about the establishment candidates if you can become a president by buying TikTok likes with 1M EUR. Someone needs to take a look at a mirror.
He didn't though and I doubt he could. He got 23% of the vote which is a lot but in no way does it guarantee that he could ever come close to 50% in the second round. He only won because the non pro-Russian (i.e. pro-fascist) parties aren't actually united.
It's a bit funny that pro-Russian ones are considered pro-fascist, even as Russian government is fighting allegedly "fascist" Ukranians, and their official goal of their war is to "denazi-fy" it. "-You're the fascists!" / "-Oh I don't think so, you are the real fascists" / "-No, way, you are!" etc.
But to be serious, and not being too familiar with the situation, if this guy is a fascist, how the heck did he get 23% of the votes? We're talking about a EU country not North Korea or something of that sort.
> if this guy is a fascist, how the heck did he get 23% of the votes?
Many of us are asking similar questions of the country that just reelected a man who regularly and openly expresses fascist sentiments, incited an insurrection and attempted to commit a coup. Comparing Romania to North Korea instead of to that country is an… interesting choice.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck (even if that duck claims that it's an elephant and keeps saying that everyone else is a duck).
I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.
> I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.
Is Putin's ideology a form of "fascism"? Some scholars say "yes", others say "no".
Since you already seem to have a good awareness of the "yes" case, let me share with you some of the "no" case [0]:
> “Snyder is wrong,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.
> Russia doesn’t meet the criteria of a fascist state – there is no ideological party, no hysterical cult of the leader, and no revolutionary new regime juxtaposed to the old one.
> Instead, in Russia, “there is an aggressive, imperialist, authoritarian state with a ruling junta”, Mitrokhin said.
I'm not a fan of Putin – I have always been cheering for Ukraine in the present war, and I think it is disappointing it has not gone better for the Ukrainians, but I suppose hope springs eternal – but I also think the word "fascism" is overused nowadays, and I prefer narrower definitions like that of Mitrokhin – the broader definitions miss significant aspects of what Mussolini was actually on about.
Authoritarian+, and ultranationalist+, ... dictatorial leader+, centralized autocracy+, militarism+, forcible suppression of opposition+, belief in a natural social hierarchy (+ as far as regime goes), subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation+ or race, and strong regimentation of society+ and the economy+
It doesn't tick the most important one, though. Fascism isn't merely conservative totalitarianism; it positions itself as new and revolutionary, the "third way".
But Putin's Russia isn't "third way" at all, neither ideologically nor in practice. It's a classic traditional authoritarian conservative dictatorship.
But revolutionary fascism is but one variant within a broader palette, is it not?
If we substitute "The West and its degenerate values" for the usual enemies, then Stanley's definition seems to describe Putin's regime quite succinctly:
In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly:
[A] cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.
I would agree that Putin is not an archetypal fascist in all categories - but he does seem be on the spectrum.
This is the point where there's a lot of disagreement. The OG Italian fascism is explicitly revolutionary, as were its contemporary offshoots like NSDAP, Iron Guard, Arrow Cross, Ustashe etc.
My personal take is that if you remove this requirement, there's no clear distinction between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism, with the two getting conflated.
We need to better language to describe the new breed of postmodern terror-driven autocrats like Putin, and post-truth / antidemocratic Western leaders like Trump.
But at the end of the day, it's academic. The real question is, what to do about them.
> Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."[28] Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascists—especially when they're in power—have historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.[30]
So, rather than purporting to define "fascism", the article acknowledges it has many definitions and it is contested which one is right. Read in the context of the whole section "Definitions", I don't think the opening sentence should be read as a definition, except in a very vague ballpark sense, which isn't meant to be used in decisively answering the question of whether any particular thing is an instance of it.
Furthermore, it mentions key elements of historical fascism – anti-communism, anti-conservatism, and anti-liberalism – whose presence in Putin's Russia is debatable. Putin has criticised communism, but he tends to go for nuanced and qualified criticism rather than the demonisation of it which was historically found in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany or Franco's Spain. He isn't anti-conservative either. Nor is he rhetorically opposed to parliamentary liberalism – he is accused of undermining the substance of it, but he pays it lip service, unlike Mussolini and Hitler who demonised it.
The first actual definition it gives in the "Definition" section is this:
> Historian Stanley G. Payne's definition is frequently cited as standard by notable scholars,[31] such as Roger Griffin,[32] Randall Schweller,[33] Bo Rothstein,[34] Federico Finchelstein,[35] and Stephen D. Shenfield,[36] [37] His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:
And the first of those three concepts is:
> "Fascist negations" – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
I say Putin lacks all three – he isn't anti-liberal (you can say he is in a contemporary sense, but not in the historical sense that Mussolini was, which is I believe the sense Payne means), he isn't anti-communist (again, not in the sense Mussolini/etc were), and he isn't anti-conservative.
You are trying to align a governance type with a political spectrum.
It’s a category error.
Fascism has nothing to do with the policies, and everything to do with whatever is necessary to retain power, given the society fascists intends to rule.
He can’t be a monarchist, he doesn’t advocate for mercantilism!
> Will they end the system that empowered them once in power?
This is one of a couple of points where the lack of a precise definition causes the perspective to fall apart. Liberals would do exactly that by instituting democratic liberalism in a country after coming to power.
Changing a system isn't fascistic. Even replacing isn't characteristic of fascism (although what is beyond self-identification), the French are up to Republic #5 and republics generally aren't fascist. It is necessary to evaluate the change and impacts of the change in context to work out what the nature of a political thing is.
Fascists may participate in a peaceful transition of power in order to gain power, then do not allow for peaceful transitions of power in the future. Jan 6 was an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power. Just like the Beer Hall Putsch. Unsuccessful, but totally unambiguous.
Yes, obviously, changing a system isn’t fascism.
Doing so in a way that prevents any other future system change or peaceful transfer of political change is Fascism.
How is this even complicated?
We all come up with rules. Everyone follows the rules. We can all decide to change the rules, but again everybody decides what those rules are, and those rules allow for future changing of rules and actively support the peaceful transition of power. Sometimes there’s somebody who says rules don’t apply to me and I’m the only person who gets to make the rules forever and if you disagree with me I’ll kill you. One activity is not fascist, the other is.
The difficulty is fascists never say they are fascists. they don’t advertise it. They will swear up and down that they’re following the rules, and will abide by the rules right up until they’re powerful enough, that they can just kill everyone who opposes them.
> Doing so in a way that prevents any other future system change or peaceful transfer of political change is Fascism.
Instituting a monarchy isn't fascism, so that definition doesn't work either. Dictatorships aren't automatically fascism; communism for example was explicitly in opposition to fascism. The fascists in fact inflicted huge casualties on the communists despite both ideologies being authoritarian dictatorships. You're running in to the major problem in defining fascism - if a group of people don't say "we are fascists!" then there isn't anything unique that identifies the fascists.
> The difficulty is fascists never say they are fascists. they don’t advertise it.
I swear I drafted my comment before I got to this part. That is literally the only way of identifying fascism. It is a self-identification. It is like being part of a club - the only way of knowing who is in the club is talking to the people/club management. Or if they otherwise identify themselves with a funny hat or something. They didn't actually stand for any particularly clear cut ideologies.
So, when Ian Kershaw, the esteemed historian of Nazi Germany, said that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall", you are telling me he was wrong? Because you seem to think it is much more of a clearcut question than he does.
Yes, Ian Kershaw is precisely right! It is very difficult to define because it is a means by which one, either a person, a party, an ethnicity, whatever, pursues and attempts to preserve power regardless of the will or interests of the people they intend to have power over.
The difference here is that anti-fascists have ethical and moral standards, create and support political systems that make it possible for them to loose, celebrate those losses.
It’s difficult to define a barbarian, but you definitely know it when they come to your town.
No, you are putting forward one particular definition as the "right" one, and arguing all contrary definitions should be ignored, even when proposed by esteemed scholars in relevant fields – which is the complete opposite of Kershaw's point.
Ahh, so we lack a definition, no one is fascist, and killing political dissidents is equivalent to fair and legal elections.
Good is equivalent to evil, because both are hard to define.
He can’t be a monarchist, he doesn’t believe in mercantilism, which random authority says is an essential part of monarchism. Plus, how do you define monarchism? You can’t.
Humanity is so fucked.
(Btw, this problem has been decisively solved by the paradox of tolerance, and was solved in the 40’s, when the apparently undefinable, thus never repeatable, original fascists did their thing.)
> Ahh, so we lack a definition, no one is fascist, and killing political dissidents is equivalent to fair and legal elections.
No. One can condemn a regime even if one doesn't agree with labelling it "fascist".
I'm sure we both agree that North Korea is a brutal and inhuman dictatorship, but I wouldn't call it "fascist" and I doubt you would either. Because "brutal and inhuman dictatorship" is what really counts here, not whether it is "fascist" or something else.
Putin's regime is closer to some Middle Eastern or Latin American military dictatorship than to 1930s/1940s fascism. 1930s/1940s fascism was highly ideological, Putin's regime is post-ideological (Putin doesn't care what your ideology is so long as he gets to stay in charge)
> You are making a distinction without a difference.
I think it is obvious that your objectives are very different from mine. What's "without a difference" given one set of objectives is a key difference given another.
> That you do so with such voraciousness, makes it seem like you are keen to defend those labeled fascist/authoritarian/etc.
No. I'm interested in having a historical argument about how to define "fascism" as part of "history for history's sake". You seem by contrast primarily interested in defining words to rhetorically assist you towards some political end.
> Split hairs all day, the gulag doesn’t care.
I've lived my whole life in Australia. I think it is very unlikely that the current or any foreseeable future Australian government is going to start putting people in anything resembling gulags. To suggest otherwise is rather alarmist.
Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context. I also don't care in this specific scenario for musings of individual researches or small groups. Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute, especially considering it basically matches https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism and https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism , today's Russia still hitting all checkboxes.
Wiki, Merriam-Webster, and Britannica already made compilations for us, came to the same conclusion, and I don't see any reason not to just use what they ended up with. I doubt the two of us, or even the entirety of remotely interested HN could reasonably claim we can do much better.
I also disagree with claims about Putin's regime that you made, but feel that it is not worth arguing.
> Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context
Which specific quotes are you claiming I have "taken out of context"? How have I done so?
> Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute
This site is supposed to be about "intellectual curiosity". [0] Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
> Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
Is it? I personally consider research in classification to be of relatively low intellectual value, especially in the already poor sciences of psychology and sociology. So the expectation of value from it, intellectual or not, is extremely low.
I mean, just take "cited as standard by _notable scholars_", "focuses on", and "anti-communism". Then ask yourself: what if the communism did not exist as an idea yet until after 1945, e.g. USSR being just another western democracy, and the holocaust and WWII still went the way they did, would Germany no longer be "fascist"? Somehow I asked myself that question right away, but none of the _notable scholars_ did.
This is why in this thread the fact that masses can be manipulated by wordplay seems more interesting than classification of societies. I'm more intellectually curious about what to do with that problem.
You seem to be using the term "fascist" to mean the same thing as "authoritarian"/"totalitarian"/"tyrannical"/"dictatorial"/"oppressive"/etc.
If you use the word in that way, then the Soviet Union was a fascist state.
But, to someone in the period between the World Wars, that would have seemed nonsensical – the Stalinists and fascists were at war with each other, on the streets of Italy and Germany, in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. Both may well have been evil but only one was fascist.
Because there's another sense of "fascism", in which it refers to a specific type of authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny/etc devised by Mussolini and his associates, as opposed to just authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny in general. And in that sense, whether anything non-Italian counts as "fascism" is going to depend on which elements it has in common with the Italian archetype, and how significant you think each of those elements are.
I don't know where you got your first statement from (and without it the rest of your comment is meaningless). I gave you the list of criteria from Wikipedia and you pretended that it only had one item for some reason.
Stalinists/bolsheviks hated the Socialdemocrats just as much if not more than the nazis for quite a while. Does that mean that both groups couldn’t be socialist at the same time?
After Stalin decided to (literally) bankroll the the German invasion of France the French communist party openly and directly supported Hitler and Nazi Germany. Until they suddenly become the greatest enemies again purely due to “ideological” reasons after Barbarosa..
When it comes to totalitarianism the actual ideological differences become sort of meaningless. If Stalin tells you that the Fasicsts are the good guys now or that liberals/socialists/anarchists/etc. are just as bad, well.. it means that they are. Any diversion from the (very flexible) party line is just as bad as supporting the opposite side (or occasionally even much worse).
I’m not saying that there is no difference between Fascism, Naziism or [Stalinist/Bolsvhevik] Communism, far from it. However trying to define these as some sort of coherent ideologies based on fixed beliefs and principles is somewhat pointless due to their extremely shapeshifting nature.
Fascists don’t come out and say: Vote for me, and I’ll commit genocide, and have thought police and assassination squads!
No: fascists want power, will use that power to take aways yours, and have absolutely no compunction about lying, cheating, and stealing to get that power.
Fascists will say till they are blue in the face that you are violating their rights in order to get power, and will claim to support those rights right up until they get power. And then? Freedom of What now? To the gulag with you!
How about people that say that actual fascists were good people and have anti-smemitical discourse and use word for word fascist speeches and denie the existence of victims in these hideous systems? How do you call those?
> There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the election".
For the record, I'm personally not thrilled by the idea that people have voted for an extremist. However, the situation you're disclaiming certainly seems to be the actual case.
The rest of your comment essentially boils down to "I think that the people who voted for him, should not have voted for him for reasons X,Y,Z"...which doesn't change the fact that people did in fact vote for him.
You're reducing elections to voting, while it is only the final stage of a proper democratic process.
First comes the preparation of the public opinion — it is campaigning, political advertisement, debates, etc. This shapes the voting outcome.
At this stage it can be heavily influenced by foreign actors (adversaries), this is why in most countries there are laws regarding the transparency of political campaigns (funding, ads, and so on). You can't let China elect presidents in your country...
> doesn't change the fact that people did in fact vote for him
It also doesn't change the fact that if Russia didn't pour a lot of money into his campaign, he wouldn't have gotten any votes.
As far as I can tell, there is no actual evidence of foreign interference, unless you count "using a foreign app" as foreign interference. The tik-tok accounts that they speak of could have been created by anyone.
Actual evidence points to people mobilising themselves, including printing propaganda and putting it up on walls, see Arad county as an example https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html
> Voting is the only thing in the democratic process
Voting is not the only thing. If it was, Russia or Belarus could have been considered democracies — people get to vote there (in case you didn't know). You can research why those countries are commonly considered autocracies / dictatorships, despite holding elections.
> If the people are easily convinced by tictok, that's on the voters
If people are easily addicted to heroin, is that on them by that logic? Ok maybe. Now imagine if China were smuggling heroin into the U.S. specifically to destabilize American society — would you still blame the people? Or might you consider it reasonable to fight against that?
No, Putin would have won in elections even if you removed fraudulent votes (there is a fraction, but it is not at all decisive). He wins not because of it.
In those kind of countries elections are won way before the voting takes place. So the voting is just an act of the regime's legitimation and is irrelevant regarding the outcome.
No, the rest of the comment is mainly a list of crimes that are alleged to have been committed in financing the political campaign, which is the grounds for the anullment
The question remains: why did they vote for him? What was the motivation?
The ads, or matching of the fundamental values represented by him. Protest? Or something else?
Of course this is futile play with thoughs while democracy is in danger from the benefitiaries themselves (demos), apparently not knowing what and how to do with it, paid influencers and social platforms shepherding them to wherever those want. It happened before.
> The question remains: why did they vote for him? What was the motivation?
Is it typical in most democratic systems that one has to justify their vote for it to be counted? Or does that only happen when the incumbent is unhappy with the outcome?
It is good to know because of understanding. To know if there is undue influence or the problems depicted are only illusions and no reason to intervene.
A state of confusion in the victim is one of the main symptoms of information warfare, and what makes it so effective. The source and extent of the attack can never be clearly determined, and it's easy to dismiss it altogether with allegations of fear mongering, xenophobia, sore loser syndrome, etc.
We've seen this in many countries over the past several decades. The Cambridge Analytica leaks should've been enough for lawmakers around the world to realize that there's an entire industry behind these operations and to take action in the interest of national security. Yet major regulations haven't been passed, and even the proposal of a TikTok ban is highly controversial.
We're living in strange times, and I fear it's going to get much worse before it can get better.
What if a rich supporter prints flyers and buys ads without telling the candidate? If that automatically disqualifies a candidate, his enemies have a strong incentive to do the same.
So any third party can spend a bunch of money without the knowledge of the candidate that they purport to support, purposefully not report it, and then that candidate can be disqualified?
If that's how the system works, it incentivizes abuse.
No, you would still be on the hook for breaking electoral law by not reporting spending, even as a private individual not part of the election. This wouldn't be relevant for making a few flyers as the law won't come after you for that, but spending hundreds of thousands on tiktok bots will definitely cause a stir.
Right, so what about if I don't like a candidate and I intentionally pump 1 million euro into her campaign so she gets disqualified? This is what the parent is asking about.
I don't have a clear answer on that for you, but nobody was disqualified in this situation as the election was annulled and will restart from scratch.
This hypothetical situation though is a bit unlikely, as we're talking about quite a lot of money to pump into someone's campaign and anyone doing this will still be subject to attempting to manipulate the electoral process if they do not abide by the law, which could land them in jail and lead to an annulment of the electoral process.
Sure, but right now we're talking about a situation in which quite a lot of money has been pumped into someone's campaign! This situation is proof that people are willing to interfere in the election. The problem is that once you introduce the idea that the election can be "annulled" a bunch of people are going to be motivated to hack the election to get it "annulled" in some way.
> a bunch of people are going to be motivated to hack the election to get it "annulled" in some way.
There will be trials for this, and both the people who bought the ads (if they can be found), but more importantly the media publishers who pocketed the millions will have to answer questions to prove this was legal.
You can't unilaterally "pump some millions" to buy some electoral ads. Someone pocketed some millions and will need to show receipts.
As you well know since you are Romanian there are not many cases of people tried and in jail in Romania for corruption.
Now take a state actor and imagine that they are responsible. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend there will be repercussions for this mess except - if possible - make people trust even less the 'system'.
Not many cases? There are many people tried and jailed for corruption, including previous mayors, senators, ministers, more than one prime minister even. Of the many possible critiques of Romania, not jailing corrupt politicians is among the weaker ones.
Most of those cases of even the prime ministers were just for show. Getting a suspended punishment while not having to pay anything back from bribery and no repercussions. This is equivalent to how I punish my kid, stay in the corner for five minutes and promise you don't do it again.
If you also relatively think the couple that are actually in jail they are too few for the amount of politicians or general corruption that is in prevalent Romania.
"but nobody was disqualified in this situation as the election was annulled and will restart from scratch" - how is this logical?
Nothing will change from the annulled election to the new election (candidates will not be invalidated, TikTok will still be there). So if the annulled election was invalid on whatever criteria, the new election would also be invalid on the same criteria...
If i spend money on all the other candidates and don't declare it, will they get disqualified? Or is this a rule that only gets applied when the wrong person wins=?
You would be in legal trouble for breaking electoral law. Based on what happened today, if there is proof that the electoral process was tainted, the elections can be annulled by the constitutional court.
>You would be in legal trouble for breaking electoral law. Based on what happened today, if there is proof that the electoral process was tainted, the elections can be annulled by the constitutional court.
So, your stance is that any foreign nation can disqualify any candidate they like by running a few ads for them?
This is not a "stance", I'm mostly talking about the law, and that's something that judges decide on, not myself.
Foreign nations are not allowed to be involved in the electoral process in Romania by law and could lead to the annulment of the electoral process, which is what happened. The process will start again from scratch, nobody was disqualified.
Since political advertising is and needs to be regulated, it needs to be regulated. What platform allowed the unauthorized ads to be run and who are we putting in jail? Local TV, radio and print gets held accountable, but a stick needs to be taken to foreign owned social media companies to make them acknowledge their social responsibilities.
But why would the result of the new elections be different unless they disqualify that guy? It's not like there is a way to somehow force his voters to forget the illegal ads etc.
look, the law requires this declaration of funding. There is a constitional article in which the elections must be correct. By doing this, there is an unfair situation and the corectness of the elections is no longer guaranteed.
Also, there is no natural growth of a candidate from 5% to 22% in two weeks. It was a massive attack on the people minds with very well crafted messages, practically saying what the people want to hear. This is no work of a person, it points out to a state actor with such vast resources.
What you're missing is that in this particular case the outside interference seems to have been the only support he had
He's claimed zero expenses and his whole stated strategy was "my rise is God's will"
Romania's NSA surmises in this case "God" may have been Putin
So, to answer your question, your spending needs to do some 100% of the heavy lifting in their campaign to match this precedent. In other words, you'd have to be the only guy propelling them. Which nullifies the hypothesis of a candidate you'd want overthrown
> he candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law
Does Romania have the equivalent of US PACs? In the US an organization not related to the campaign/party can receive donations and make flyers, ads, etc.
Not really, and all the money needs to be declared anyway. I'll give you an excerpt of relevant law text, some stuff removed as there's a lot of fluff:
Election campaign expenses shall comply with the following conditions:
a) come solely from contributions by candidates or political parties;
b) they shall be incurred only with the prior approval of the competent financial trustee;
c) they must fall within the limits provided for by this law;
d) to be made by electoral competitors only for the promotion of their candidates and electoral programs.
(2) 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.
[...]
(11) Candidates' contributions for their own election campaign or that of the political party that nominated them may come only from donations received by candidates from individuals, from their own income or from loans taken by them from individuals or credit institutions.
[...]
In the event of the commission of an offense provided for by this Law, in violation of this Article, the sums of money related to the electoral expenses incurred in violation of this Article shall be confiscated and paid into the state budget
The financing of the electoral campaign, directly or indirectly, by natural persons who are not Romanian citizens or by legal entities of a nationality other than Romanian, is prohibited, with the exception of financing by citizens of Member States of the European Union who are domiciled in Romania and are members of the political party to whose electoral campaign they are making a financial contribution.
Thank you for doing the research.
There seems to be an awful lot of people that just can't get the fact that other countries can have different laws.
...and that the EU has many different countries, too.
Here's a private message archive from one of 40 Romanian counties, volunteers organized themselves and printed the propaganda out of pocket, without having been asked by the candidate to do so. I reckon the same happened everywhere: https://the5star.github.io/cgarad/messages.html
The reality on the ground, so far, supports the theory "voting will continue until you elect the one we want you to elect", I've seen no actual proof otherwise, only opinions by old people in positions of power.
> ...with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.
Obviously I'm no expert in Romainian voting procedures, but how does that make any sense without there being vote tampering? The polling must have been able to see him coming. It is hard to see even a state actor successfully pulling off that sort of insane last minute blitz without resorting to a mind control ray.
Polling did see it coming. But the growth was so unprecedented, the pollsters questioned their sanity (read: methodology, or at least sampling bias)
The campaign propelling him happened during the two weeks preceding the election. Enough to create a wave of enthusiasm, just short enough to fly below the radar (of him properly getting scrutinised)
Romania's NSA report suggests the campaign was a copycat of campaigns in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Romania either had an X factor that made this one succeed, or the state actor managed to nail the way it calibrated the campaign this time
A couple of other possible explanations: 1) People voted who don't normally vote, the main reason Trump has often overperformed polls. 2) Pollsters wanted to avoid a preference cascade.
I think 1 is the most likely reason. It's important to remember Romania is much poorer and more corrupt than the typical Western European country which means the established political parties are both less popular and more vulnerable to disruption by (in this case somewhat unhinged) outsiders.
The part that I don't buy is that this is the way that campaign finance violations would ordinarily be handled. Would an election that was won by one of the mainstream parties be completely overturned and rerun if it were found that they violated some campaign procedure laws? I doubt it.
This isn't a few forgotten expenditures, this is a candidate which reported no spending on their campaign and which allegedly had support from a foreign state. You can get away with some things, but we're not just talking about a technicality.
From what I know the law says that they have up to 15 days after the election to submit their finance report, which is what allowed this to slip by undetected.
He would not be my choice for candidate, but if the entire claim is that he won because of TikTok (and not because of voter suppression or ballot stuffing) then overturning the election was a complete fuckup. If polling showed that much less support then the poling did not take into account how modern voters act.
I should stress that I disagree with everything he stands for, but if democracy is to mean something we have to accept that what people freely choose to vote for is who wins.
Was there voter fraud? If not the election was legitimate and you should not complain. Trust me when I say that as someone who is from a dysfunctional democracy, where rioters recently overthrew the government that had won the last election in a landslide.
Once you start saying that the election results are invalid because “the people were misled” or because of ancillary legal violations, or similar excuses, there is no logical stopping point to how far that goes. This is what happened in Bangladesh, where I’m from. People always complain that there was this or that reason why their party didn’t win, they have protests over who won, they boycott elections and then complain the results are invalid because their party didn’t participate. You cannot run a democracy that way. It’s impossible to have a democracy when you try to second guess voters’ reasons for voting the way they did.
It looks like they cancelled the elections because the wrong candidate won and now they are scrambling for anything that will justify, after the fact, what they did. Meanwhile, they hope that "he is evil and supported by the Russians" is enough to make people mind their festive holidays rather than what the government is doing.
Is there more round(s) where this guy could have been eliminated rather than cancelling the election result? That's the bit that confused me. Seems dangerous to strike down results when they appear to come from people voting like idiots rather than election voting machines being hijacked.
> The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law.
its very possible that HE didn't spend anything. that's how US political campaigns work. the vast majority of spending is by third parties.
> this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media
Anyone can buy ads and flyers.
If your rejoinder is "It's against the law to buy ads for a candidate if you're not officially part of the campaign" - who cares? Nothing is stopping e.g. me from buying tiktok ads in elections (domestic or foreign).
Tik tok is one of many news sources in Romania. If a local journal decides to support a candidate after that one of its big advertiser asks them to, do we cancel the election?
TikTok is a social network where anyone can post any video they want, using it as a news source is very dangerous. And no, the election wouldn't be cancelled if a local journalist supported a candidate, though it's not an apples-to-apples comparison with a social network potentially messing with the algo to support a candidate and not respecting electoral law with regards to sponsored ad content.
Depends heavily on where you live. I live in a place where donations must be declared and are capped per person. This ensures we know where the money came from, and prevents disproportional influence from rich people.
An obvious hack to bypass this is to assemble "a group of citizens" who start spending money to campaign for a candidate without any direct connection to them, but in such case, there's a special commission run by retired campaign finance people that analyzes the spending and can take action like demand a candidate to pay back over-cap portion of the money spent to advertise them, even if someone else paid for it. In the worst case, this can be escalated to the Supreme Court, who has the authority to scrap and re-run entire elections if the impact of illegal practices is deemed large enough to sway elections.
So far, this system has produced a very transparent campaign financing environment. It was heavily tested in the first few years and withstood attacks remarkably well. A shadow figure of a political party used a retail network they owned to run a huge advertising campaign for a keychain that depicted the mascot of a major political party in their colors. The party was never directly mentioned, but you were blasted everywhere with their colors and the same animal as their mascot. After years of legal battles, it was deemed an illegal donation and the party had to pay for it all back with penalties. It was such a financial blow that the party underperformed for the next few electoral cycles due to constrained finances. No-one dares to try these tricks since then. Both financially and politically, it's cheaper to respect the rules.
For many years, political and economic conditions in Romania have been ripe for this sort of breakthrough. Blaming it on Russian interference and the support that Georgescu generated through the social media platform TikTok — factors cited by the court on the basis of declassified intelligence reports — is to miss the larger point.
The FT is the opposite of a pro-Russian outlet. This is the first time that I see a European mainstream paper acknowledge broader issues, which gives some hope. The article also makes the valid point that nationalistic movements are not unambiguously positive for Russia. This is a self evident point, which has also been suppressed for the past 10 years.
This is different. He was basically unknown, last visible in politics in 1996 or so. He isn't a member of any big party and by that I don't mean just the mainstream ones, but like, the top 10 parties in the country.
We're not talking about an established candidate with pre-existing support, and this was just the first leg of the election with multiple presidential candidates, not the run-off, so don't compare this to Trump v Kamala.
I'm also not talking about a single poll, or ones run by just the left/right, he wasn't polling well anywhere.
I don't have knowledge about the polls but someone made a good point elesewhere. His share of the vote might have increased after the Constitutional Court banned another (far right) candidate because they didn't like her discourse (crazy, right?)
https://tvpworld.com/82727489/romanian-pm-suggests-constitut...
Rather ironic that the PM criticized that decision while praising the court for this latest intrusion.
But yes, I agree that a 17-point miss by "the gold standard of Iowa polling" is almost inexplicable unless it was done as a last-minute act to persuade marginal voters to vote for Harris. (Selzer herself says that she thinks the poll's result motivated Trump voters, the preposterousness of which is all the more indication that she intentionally skewed the result.)
am I understanding correctly that you're suggesting that an Iowa poll was artificially made to favour Harris in order to get more people to vote for her?
Yes. People naturally like to vote for winners, and those who look like winners.
There was *massive* news coverage of the Selzer poll's surprising result, with accompanying breathless commentary discussing how this was proof that hordes of Republican women were indeed secretly[1] voting for Kamala. Cue the tens of thousands of Redditards' comments on how Harris would surely win not just Iowa but Texas, Florida, Ohio, etc.
[1] For example, the Julia Roberts-starring TV ad <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCPck2qDhk> showing how women could and should secretly vote for Harris and not tell their horrible husbands.
(Beware; the cringe level is so overwhelming that if your brain doesn't shut down in self-defense your computer might explode. There is a reason why the ad is not linked directly anywhere on Reddit except a handful of posts with a half dozen comments. If Redditors saw it as truly "stunning" and "brave", it would have been reposted 100 times, each time with 20K upvotes and 3.5K comments.)
We can certainly see that a powerful entity is working very hard to show that Georgescu is the devil. Meanwhile:
1. We didn't see any proof or any official claims that he did anything wrong, only speculations. There is certainly no justification for cancelling the free elections.
2. The spotlights are only on him, there is no analysis on how the establishment candidates used social media or the source of their campaign funds. Claims that PSD and PNL used public funds for their campaigns were quickly forgotten and not investigated.
3. Ask any Romanian and they will tell you how corrupt the government is. They control the justice system and the Constitutional Court. Any claim that they are on the right side of the law is laughable.
Not forgetting the elephant in the room: free people went to express their choice via a free vote and that freedom was taken from them. In an EU country !
I agree with 95% of what you said, but TikTok is about to be resurrected by the Trump administration. There’s no way they will let it go under, it has helped them tremendously, and they will reward corporations for loyalty
So we all agree that it's actual people and not bot that voted for this guy right ?
Does it mean that whoever control the most popular social media in Romania also controls the result of political election ? That's more terrifying to me than just a candidate funded by Putin and who lied, it's a whole generation of 'tiktok zombies' voting for whoever their influencer tell them to !
Is their no education or political education in Romania ? Legal age to vote got to be above 18, so it's not just kids anymore.
People voted, the question is how big of an impact do these bots have when it comes to promoting content on social media, because it seems like a lot. There's also a huge issue with TikTok being owned by China, which is not an ally nation to Romania, and with China's support of Russia in their ongoing war against one of our neighbors our intelligence agencies are suspecting foul play.
I don't think this is specific to just Romania, a lot of people are glued to their devices on a daily basis in search of something to satiate their dopamine hunger and they'll take whatever they get fed by the algorithm.
Critical thinking is not something our educational system does well, we're more focused on getting you to learn things like a robot and reproduce them for an exam. The lack of real educational reforms is something we'll keep seeing the effects of for decades to come.
Is not really breaking news that people can be influenced through media, is it ?
I'm not surprised that the people in power had the brilliant idea to use this pretext to cancel the free vote and put back PSD on track to win (after they lost the race). But I'm amazed that so many educated people manage to rationalze it and are going along with it - while claiming to value democracy !
You seem surprised. This has been happening all around the world for several decades now. The Cambridge Analytica leaks made it evident that there's an entire industry pulling the strings of democracy behind the scenes.
Given enough time, dedication and not much resources anyone can get a group of individuals and entire societies to think and do whatever they want. This is straight from the advertising playbook, delivered via the greatest propaganda machine ever invented: the internet, adtech and social media.
Cambridge analytica was laser focused on voters from a few American 'swinger' state, it used lot of data to show personalized posts that would play on one fear or wish to get them to vote republican.
This is tiktok influencers...
Yes, as a libertarian, I'm astonished. Everyone over 18 should be able to think for themselves and at least be mature enough that promoted and sponsored politicians from tiktok influencers don't have your best interest in mind.
I'm not above everyone else, people can fall for propaganda, especially when it's well made. I studied Nazi propaganda movie, they are extremely clever in the way they make you think what they want you to, and admittedly in the right condition I would fall for some of the less extreme idea, but here it's a new low, it's an insult to intellect.
If that's what people fall for, they are no more than apes with smartphones.
This is not much different from what CA did in many countries, not just the US. TikTok is the most popular platform today, so it makes sense that these tactics would migrate to it. Besides, CA was just one company of an entire industry doing these operations, which includes state-level actors. This industry is very much alive and prospering today.
> If that's what people fall for, they are no more than apes with smartphones.
You claim not to be above everyone else, but then say this. We're all susceptible to psychological manipulation, and we know that propaganda is very effective. Just because you haven't been manipulated in this specific way, doesn't mean you aren't in other ways, whether you realize it or not.
> Does it mean that whoever control the most popular social media in Romania also controls the result of political election ? That's more terrifying to me than just a candidate funded by Putin and who lied, it's a whole generation of 'tiktok zombies' voting for whoever their influencer tell them to !
He led one of the WW2 Fascist anti Communist groups that were so committed to Nazi ideals, that the actual Nazis asked them to tone it down a bit because they were making them look bad.
> I looked up how he's actually associated with the Iron Guard, and it looks like he literally said that they 'also did “good deeds”' [1]. This is literally on the level of "fine people" hoax that the mainstream media perpetrated against Trump!
The hoax was and is that Trump called white supremacists "very fine people". As the transcript shows, that remark was specifically in regards to people disagreeing with the notion of removing statues of slaveholders and Confederates. Trump went on to say
>And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally
Did you read the part, why the allied rather supported their ideological enemies, than the iron guard? What I understood, they aligned with the Nazis quite naturally.
As far as I know, Americans supported Italian partisans (of any color, but the majority of them communists or socialists) against the nazi-fascists, so I'm not terribly surprised they did it elsewhere.
I would ask myself first, why the partisans want to kill me.
There were (and maybe still are) indeed also communist fanatics - but the common red partisan was not a bloodthirsty killer going after anyone who had private property.
So the alignment with the Nazis of the wealthy and privileged happened way before. I am from germany. We had the same story, the common people all did not turn Nazis overnight, but fear of the communist made them align with the Nazis. And the rest is history. I am no expert on concrete romanian or slovenian history. But what I know sounds pretty much the same what I know from german history where I have also first hand accounts. And I strongly disagree to that excuse. The bourgeois did had a choice and it was NOT just between communist or faschism. But they eventually did choose one side - and bear the responsibility. They did fought for a faschist europe, with all implications.
It’s obviously different than in Germany, where nazis were (mostly) homegrown.
I know several second/hand accounts (i.e. from people who had it happen to their family). Murders, theft, barbarism (stabbing a pregnant woman in her stomach). Some during the war, some after when communists won.
As I said, terrible times. War. No good choices, especially without foresight. I just wish people didn’t praise communists as much as they do, and vilify their opponents.
Well, Nazis were the german flavour of the rise of ultranationalism, racism and fascism, but the movement existed in all of europe. With the first peak in the civil war in spain.
And Hitler was very clear on his plans for the jews and for war to conquer in eastern europe. Anyone siding with him, did make their choices and could have known the consequences. (same goes for anyone siding with Stalin).
"No good choices"
So probably yes. And I won't claim I would have decided much better, if I would have lived in that time. So I am not trying to judge from moral high ground.
But the choice was never binary between Stalin and Hitler, or only in extreme situations maybe. Because you know, after the war in germany - there were also no Nazis anymore. Never have been. They just had no choice. Followed orders. Were afraid of the communists. So definitely not responsible for anything.
The country has been a powder keg ever since the results of first round of the presidential elections, with Calin Georgescu coming out of nowhere to win the first round, with classical polling showing him below 5%.
The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is impossible as there have been flyers with his face on them, plus ads on social media. This is against the law.
There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.
With TikTok being owned by China and their imminent ban looming in the US, there is strong suspicion that state actors are behind this, pushing Calin Georgescu through the algorithm, though this is tricky to prove.
This is not a strong grass-roots movement supporting this guy, it was a targeted effort of massive network of bots spamming his name & tiktok page on random videos on Romanian tiktok videos to push his popularity (this comes from the Romanian equivalent of CIA & other security structures). Tiktok themselves when asked to comment have investigated themselves and found nothing wrong, though they do agree that there are bots on their network and they've removed millions of fake likes & followers in Romania.
In a video posted this summer, Calin Georgescu expressed anti-NATO sentiment which he recanted after winning the first round of the elections. He has also previously declared that we could do with some "russian wisdom" and he's a big fan of the Iron Guard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard), which killed a bunch of political figures in Romania during their time. This organization as well as other fascist groups are illegal in Romania.
Candidates have to declare their assets as part of transparency and it seems Calin Georgescu has not declared all of his assets, which is illegal. There's also suspicions about money laundering, with a house he bought for 250K in 2006 and sold for 1M in 2011 which is unusual. This is somewhat besides the current discussion, just adding some context that this guy is not exactly squeaky clean.
A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security. This is right now in the first stages with no single person being put under indictment.