Just crazy what is happening
Tiktok is only one part of it.
- according to Romania electoral law you need to declare who is financing your campaign
- Georgescu ran videos on tiktok without disclosing who pays for it (or if he paid)
- Georgescu repeatedly said that he doesn’t pay anything for the campaign
- the campaign ran by Georgescu was paid by some crypto-bro without dubious ties
- Georgescu and cripto-bro used 20k fake accounts to run the campaign (as per info from tiktok themselves)
- Georgescu ran his campaign in election day (ilegal in romania)
Now the fun part:
- Georgescu’s bodyguards are known Romanian neo-nazies that are French Legion veterans and that have ties to the Wagner group
No, hey, I’m on board. If the court says there were campaign finance violations I’ll accept that. Not shocked.
The questions is more how come the remedy is to run the election again. If Georgescu’s campaign was found to have done all that, is that not invalidating or cause for criminal liability for members of the campaign? Will they get to run again? What happens regarding the bunch of people who voted for him on purpose?
I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run, but there’s so little info on the legal framework around the decision.
I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run
Can you expand on that? I don’t know much about the political situation in Romani beyond this weirdness, and I’m interested.
So, to the best of my understanding (people over there correct me where I make mistakes), the first run of the presidential election returned this surprise Russian-backed fascistoid in first and the liberal centre-right USR second. Then there was a legislative election that instead yielded the… eh… nominally socialdemocrat PSD as first, democrhistian PNL second and USR third.
There was meant to be a second run on the presidentials where only the two first would be eligible, so USR’s Elena Lasconi versus Georgescu. Now that the first run has been annulled, the process for the presidentials starts over. That seems… like a huge gamble, but it creates a situation where instead of collecting all the votes from PSD and PNL as a… well, non-fascist, pro-EU candidate, Lasconi may not be in the top two anymore or be there against someone else as opposed to running as the common sense national union candidate. From the quotes I see on the press she’s… not pleased about that.
What I don’t know is what the rules are to handle this, and what this means for a re-run when it comes to Georgescu. Is he able to run again? I’ve read that all candidates need to re-enroll and get reviewed for eligibility again, but I have no idea what consequences the ruling has on their eligibility in the first place, if any. It’d seem bizarre that someone gets the entire election annulled on account of seemingly breaking financing and campaigning laws and just… gets to go again?
But I also don’t know what happens if he doesn’t run. Surely even if all those people voted for him out of spite they did so on purpose. And don’t underestimate how many people there are genuinely fringe-right. The “they’re all the same” and “drain the swamp” crap that got Trump elected is no US-only.
