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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.
What does "Subvert" mean.
People can learn things and share opinions with those they talk to. That's how we arrive at decisions about who to vote for. Without a great firewall no election can truly be safe from foreign influence, because individuals will always internalize the influence of their foreign friends.
I think that means I agree that this is a tough nut to crack. I'm not sure there's a hard line, we might have to choose somewhere on the gradient and draw one.
Hopefully we'll all arrive at some agreeable middle ground. "rules of honorable culture war"... Perhaps something where you're allowed to influence online friends but to do so with a government backed media campaign is a culture war crime? (this is just a spitball in the direction of the vibe... I doubt the UN would actually pass this.)
Of course I say "we"... but I'm not Romainian. I merely say "we" because... its a nut America has yet to crack as well. It's something every country needs to figure out.
There is no way such a rule would be backed by the Western countries unless they could get reassurance that it would never be applied against them in the court of public opinion. A quick search reveals USAID spent $63 billion in 2024, and this is not counting other allied financial moves like the EU's offer of more than 10% of Moldova's GDP as a loan to help the pro-EU candidate. (Imagine the pandemonium if Georgescu's campaign had a promise of a $35B loan from Russia attached to it if they leave NATO!) Then, there is the circumstance that Western culture is "Universal Culture". The West out-spends and out-memes its adversaries on its periphery regularly; losing one rare match is not a good reason to throw a tantrum and quit the game.
The EU financed and even gave weapons to the revolutionaries that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014, installing an EU-friendly government instead of the previous government, which was oriented towards Russia. That kicked off the current Ukraine situation.
There isn't even a veneer of fair play and there hasn't been in a long while. To be fair, I would not expect fair play from Putin. But the EU as an institution is converging towards the same kind of thing, in the name of "defending democracy" to boot. I don't like either, but I have to live in the EU and Putin is far away, so one of them I hate theoretically but the other one I by now hate viscerally.
One might have imagined that the Russian-advocated attempted self-coup the preceeded the culmination of Maidan (and, of course, the reversal of the EU association agreement that preceded the Maidan political crisis) might have had something more to do with kicking off the current Ukraine situation, but I am glad to see a non-American attribution for once.
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