The drama surrounding Romania’s shock presidential election result just keeps getting bigger and weirder, with no telling at this point if the nation will accept the outcome, whoever prevails in the second round on December 8th.
Not unusually, Brussels-based critics of the surprise at the polls now allege that social media and Russia caused their preferred candidates to be rejected by voters. A recount could also harm the liberal runner-up in favor of the socialist PM, who could come back into the race after his initial third-place finish disqualified him from the second round of the elections.
The independent so-called ultranationalist Călin Georgescu won the first round with a comfortable margin (23%) last Sunday despite polls showing single-digit support for weeks, which led mainstream parties both at home and in Brussels to blame TikTok and Russia for the results.
In a statement issued on Thursday, November 28th, the Constitutional Court “unanimously” decided to order a recount of the first-round ballots,not long after the Romanian Supreme Defense Council claimed to have found evidence of foreign cyber-attacks designed to influence the electoral process.
According to the country’s top security body
A presidential candidate benefited from massive exposure through preferential treatment given to him by the TikTok platform by not labeling him as a political candidate and not asking him to label electoral content.
Romania’s strategic importance to NATO means that the country was also a key target for “hostile actions by state and non-state actors, especially the Russian Federation,” added the Defense Council, whose members include the socialist prime minister—whose party appointed the majority of Constitutional Court members and who, incidentally, is the most likely to benefit from the recount.
PM Marcel Ciolacu (PSD) was confidently polling at first place in the presidential seat, yet ended up in third—and therefore, disqualified from participating in the run-off—with just 2,700 votes (0.02%) behind the liberal (USR) candidate, the former TV anchor Elena Lasconi.
“If someone stole votes in the first round of the presidential elections, as prime minister of Romania, I will make sure that he will answer to the Romanians,” Ciolacu wrote on social media on Friday.
Naturally, Lasconi contested the Court’s decision and PSD’s “backstage games” which may result in Ciolacu replacing her in the second round.
“The Constitutional Court is interfering in the democratic process for the second time,” she wrote, referring to a previous decision to ban the far-right candidate Diana Șoșoacă from running in the presidential election. “One combats extremism through votes, not backstage games.”
Moscow did not yet respond to the interference allegations, but TikTok “categorically” rejected any claims of preferential treatment and backed it up with data.
It turns out Georgescu’s campaign was only the second-largest on the platform after that of nationalist AUR candidate George Simion, who ended up placed a meagre fourth on Sunday.
Adding up all the content featuring hashtags associated with a candidate shows that the pro-Georgescu camp lags way behind others with just 145 million views. In contrast, pro-Lasconi hashtags amassed 202 million views, Ciolacu came second with 328 million, and Simion came top with 396 million views.
But even though blaming TikTok seems less and less plausible as an explanation of Georgescu’s victory, the country’s telecom regulator called for the platform to be suspended in Romania pending an investigation into its role in the election. Separately, the European Parliament’s liberal Renew group (whose members include Lasconi’s USR) demanded the CEO of TikTok to testify before lawmakers in Brussels.
The recount might also mean that the second round of the presidential elections would be postponed a week or two. By law, the Constitutional Court must validate the first-round results by the end of Friday, November 29th, but the electoral council said it would take days to recount the nearly 10 million ballots from last Sunday.
Meanwhile, the imminent parliamentary election scheduled for this weekend drives the stakes even higher, with no telling how the current, highly polarized discourse will affect the outcome.
