Just crazy what is happening
So now that a cout has ruled that there was foreign interference to such a degree that a presidential election has to be redone: At what point does this get treated as an attack by NATO or the EU?
That’s very difficult, because there was no violence involved in the interference.
It’s an attack nonetheless, just on our way of life instead of an actual physical target and there have been plenty of those too.
I’m getting so fucking tired of Western democracy just eating shit and shrugging in the name of not escalating.
We keep shrugging and we’re all gonna be living in Russian aligned autocracy in the next fifty years.
I haven’t read enough about this, but if this was 1000 accounts convincing a million people to vote for a guy, how is that different from anyone else campaigning? Except if it violates public campaign financing law and you had an unfair advantage from a foreign adversary in what should otherwise be a transparent level playing field…and even then things are never completely level and transparent.
Because a foreign power influencing an election is fundamentally different than a domestic campaign. The foreign power has their own interests, which are potentially at odds with the interests of the electorate.
Ostensibly, if you campaign in country A and are a citizen of country A, then you’re “in the same boat” as the electorate. Of course, with economic stratification this becomes increasingly less true (fast food worker may live in same country as $$$ donor, but they are effectively living under different policies).
I understand, but you have to be extremely specific about how you frame foreign/domestic distinction, because these guys are prying from every angle to turn an open society’s vulnerabilities and contradictions against itself. We need a broad-spectrum solution to this (one is cognitive vaccination through education, but it is too late for adults) and until we do, democracies are going to be on their back foot against the global oligarchy, because offense is much more effective than defense against this.
The specific case you seem to be making is if state actors deliberately aim a campaign at your voters. But what if it is only their multinationals, oligarchs, corruption and dirty money, what if it is interest groups, or what if it is “NGOs”, or “the markets” and hedge funds, or cultural products, or what if it is simply large groups of netizens of a friendly state who talk up a specific candidate?
Maybe it is clear when russia does it, but they fumbled it this time with Romania, because they were so effective that it became obvious. In most cases it will not be this obvious and they will use multiple of the methods described above. All I am saying is that once they get inside voters’ heads, it’s hard to go and say that it is illegitimate because the people were influenced by effective propaganda.
PS: I still am not sure what happened here, there seem to also have been cyberattacks and leaking of credentials to make the election insecure, but the messaging is mixed because in the middle of this there are references to tiktok. I assume it is something similar to voter register data being leaked, which helps laser-target disinformation. I just hope this doesn’t turn against us when we want to vote out someone and can’t because foreign interference made the voters do it.
This made me reflect on multiple interesting ideas.
This has been a case of hidden-intended foreign interference, where foreign interests have supported a candidate without making it openly. Even patriotic people should feel against this… unless may be they have already voted for it, humans are like that.
An interesting alternative would have been that, for example, Elon Musk (which may still be popular among some people) decide from the beginning to openly support such candidate, trying to influence positively the candidate’s success with all his resources. Being an European country, this would be also foreign interference. You may see where this reflections are going…
Lastly, imagine a similar situation to the previous one but with a national powerful lobby. Is not foreign interference, but is the same kind of action in the end, a particular interest investing in a political candidate. This happens everywhere, and has proved to be very successful for them, with grey lines drawn mostly on direct money donations in some countries, which nowadays is a bit of a scarce control anyway.
Now, I find hard to believe that some candidate would be able to convince you that, despite benefit of being openly supported by a particular group of interest, will not represent it but the promises you want to hear once the interference is openly public… yet, considering all the media control those groups of interest invest on, I think we already are in a situation were all candidates of success in democracies around the world have strong conflicts of interest with such groups… and probably has been like that from the beginning of democracies.
It seems easy to imagine that many may find justified such actions (call out invalid the elections) under evidence of foreign interference but I see a grey line on the mechanisms that happened here, and we still do not call on responsibility to the voter on reflecting what is voting, specially when the media is influenced in spread a particular consensus or debate.
I am afraid that hope is only on the voting individual capabilities to react to media and to judge the reach of these conflicts of interest and the intelligence to decide how to vote (even to non favourite candidates or even voting in white), because in the end, a democracy blocking foreign interference can still be in the practice just a national group of interest blocking a foreign one.
I’m really curious about what the hexbear version of this post looks like…
Anulled =/= Cancelled
Title make it sound like the country went through an autocoup and there are no more elections, which is not whats happening.
Wait, how does that work? If the influence was social media messaging it’s not like… you now, they are reversing the messaging. The voters who got convinced presumably remain… you know, influenced.
The worry would be that this would prompt people to double down, while normies would stay home because revoting is a hassle, which could backfire.
Of course, Romanians are remarkably detached and cynical about their own democratic process and participation is typically very low, so who the hell knows what happens next. Man, this stupid century sucks.
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.
