> 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]
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.