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Romanian Supreme Court Cancels Election, Overthrows Results of First Round
Recently, unknown dark horse anti-NATO candidate Călin Georgescu shocked the world by winning a plurality of the vote in the first round of Romania's presidential election. Key to his victory was an intense social media campaign, with a particular emphasis on Tik-Tok.
Romania's Supereme Court has today declared these results null and void. The full opinion setting out their reasoning has yet to be published, but this is almost certainly due to allegations of Russian interference. I have not seen any credible accusations that votes themselves were fraudulently cast, only that Georgescu's campaign recieved improper (illegal?) assistance from Russian media operations. This is IMO the most important outstanding question.
On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad [1]. On the other, throwing out election results based on foreign social media posts seems liable to create a valid threat of a denial of service for elections absent something like The Great Firewall (which is itself a potential threat to open society).
I see why both sides would presumably be frustrated by this, but I don't have a real Platonic ideal of an alternative to suggest. Governance, at least good/fair/democratic governance, is hard.
From the POV of western empire it's hard to argue this though. With examples like Georgia where earlier this year they voted to limit and track foreign NGO funding and this was met by western backed protests. Now that a non western government got elected the west is full tilt on propaganda and encouragement for violent protests and overthrowing the elected government.
Had something similar in Hungary as well where they tried to limit foreign NGO funding and this was met by mass tantrums from the EU who said it was contrary to European values. So apparently European values are that they get to influence others thinking and no one else does.
Looks at last few thousand years of history. The answer has pretty clearly been yes until maybe 1945. And even then, I'm not completely sure whether that was a change in values or just the rhetoric used to express them in polite company.
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