Was it fair to rerun Romania's presidential election? | Breaking News & Latest Ireland Updates

Was it fair to rerun Romania's presidential election? — Eastern Europe Reporter On Sunday, Romanians will go to the polls for a second time in six months to elect a new president. This second election takes...

Eastern Europe Reporter

On Sunday, Romanians will go to the polls for a second time in six months to elect a new president.

This second election takes place amid political turmoil over a decision by Romania's constitutional court last December to annul the previous vote on the grounds of suspected campaign irregularities.

But was it democratically fair to rerun the entire process?

Central to the discussion is Călin Georgescu, the candidate who topped the first round of the previous election in November.

Mr Georgescu was not a complete unknown within Romanian political circles. But neither was he a recognisable face to the vast majority of Romanian voters.

The 62-year-old engineer and professor had been the country's representative to the United Nations Environment Programme between 1999 and 2012.

He later joined the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), a party that wants to unify Romania and Moldova, until he fell out with its leadership in 2022 after airing critical views about NATO.

Polls at the start of November showed support for Mr Georgescu at less than 5%.

Three weeks later, he won almost 23% of votes, topping the poll ahead of well-known and seasoned national politicians. It was a shock to Romania's political establishment.

Mr Georgescu's populist, anti-establishment messages had resonated with many young male and rural voters, angry with inflation and the perceived failure of Romania's ruling centrist parties to tackle corruption.

TikTok videos

He shunned television debates and ran his campaign largely on TikTok, going viral in Romania and among the country's large diaspora. There was an element of grassroots campaigning too - religious communities, unions and alternative medicine groups mobilised to support him, according to Expert Forum, a think tank in Bucharest.

In his TikTok videos, he emphasised the importance of maintaining Romanian sovereignty, criticised NATO and the European Union, and advocated for stopping military aid to Ukraine. He also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's nationalist outlook.

Polls tipped Mr Georgescu to win the decisive second-round vote.

However, just two days before that vote,the country's constitutional court annulled the first round results, citing "numerous irregularities and violations of the electoral legislation", and ordered the entire electoral process to be rerun.

After studying declassified documents issued by Romania's intelligence services, the court found that: "The free expression of the vote was violated by the fact that voters were misinformed through an electoral campaign in which one of the candidates was aggressively promoted, carried out by circumventing national electoral legislation and by abusing the algorithms of social media platforms".

Romania's Supreme Council of National Defense also alleged that the election had been the target of hybrid Russian action.

The court's verdict did not mention Mr Georgescu by name, but it was clear that he was the candidate in question.

"Moreover, the candidate also received preferential treatment on social media platforms, which led to a distortion of the voters' expression of will," read the court’s decision, indicating that TikTok's algorithm had preferenced accounts associated with Mr Georgescu's campaign given the volume of traffic they were already attracting.

'Spilt society'

Mr Georgescu called the decision a "coup d'état".

"It was probably necessary at the time, but it is very difficult to praise such a move," Professor Ioan Stanomir, a Romanian expert on constitutional law, told RTÉ News.

The constitutional court, said Prof Stanomir, is "the ultimate guardian of constitutionalism in Romania and is also the guardian of presidential elections".

"It is within the constitutional court's power to act upon these matters."

Mr Georgescu’s supporters have viewed the court’s decision to rerun the election as an establishment coup against their candidate.

Equally, the centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi, who placed second in the first round, criticised the court’s decision. She had stood a good chance of winning the second round.

A number of experts that spoke to RTÉ News believe the court's decision to annul and rerun the vote was badly communicated to the Romanian public at large.

The court’s decision "split the society", Alina Inayeh, a Romanian political analyst said.

"Those who voted for Georgescu, of course, were frustrated that their vote was, as they see it, stolen," said Ms Inayeh, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Bucharest.

To compound his supporters' frustrations, in March, Romania's central election authority barred Mr Georgescu from standing in the re-run vote on the grounds that his previous campaign was the reason for the constitutional court's annulment.

At that stage, Mr Georgescu was polling at 41%, far ahead of other candidates.

Given that he was very likely to win the rerun with an expanded support base, it could be construed that the constitutional court was ignoring the democratic will of four out of ten Romanian citizens.

Mr Georgescu described the decision to bar him as "a blow to the heart of democracy worldwide" and said that "Romania is under tyranny".

Yet, many aspects of Mr Georgescu’s first electoral campaign raise suspicions about the authenticity of his candidacy and support the argument that the annulment was in the interests of Romanian democracy.

Campaign funding

Firstly, Mr Georgescu said his election campaign had zero budget.

This claim is hard to believe given that there was an enormous amount of videos promoting his campaign messages on TikTok, not just on his official channel but on so-called fan accounts too.

One video shows him competing in judo and horse riding, dressed in a traditional Romanian shirt. It appears to be professionally produced.

A serving Romanian magistrate, told RTÉ News on condition of anonymity that Mr Georgescu could have been disqualified "for the simple reason that he declared €0 as election expenses".

Not declaring election expenses violated electoral laws, the magistrate said.

The source requested anonymity because they believed that Romania's Judicial Inspectorate is clamping down on judges who comment on political matters during the election campaign.

Excluding Mr Georgescu from a second-round vote, the magistrate argued, would have provided "an easier way" than re-running the entire election.

Secondly, Mr Georgescu's widespread campaign on TikTok cannot be explained as organic and needed a degree of organisation.

Declassified documents from Romania’s intelligence servicesstated that there were more than 25,000 TikTok accounts, mostly bots, associated with Mr Georgescu and most became active two weeks before the first-round vote.

The document cites that an "extensive network" of TikTok influencers was used, through which Mr Georgescu promoted his electoral campaign. It alleges that the content on pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts was coordinated via Telegrams channels.

Influencers were contacted by email and offered up to €1,000 to display Mr Georgescu’s videos on their accounts, cites the declassified document.

Many influencers did not mark the advertisements as paid content.

The document also states that dozens of fake accounts were created, purporting to represent state bodies supporting Mr Georgescu.

The 62-year-old candidate had gone viral, his TikTok posts amassing 62 million views before the first-round vote.

From 10 to 16 November, one week before the vote, the Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media (BROD) found that there was a 223% increase in the number of his followers on TikTok.

Hashtags featuring Mr Georgescu’s name, such as #calingeorgescu, gained more than 73 million views during the same seven-day period, reflecting a highly strategic campaign, writes the analysis from BROD.

Another report published last February by the French national security and defence service on the Romanian first-round vote also points to a highly-organised campaign involving TikTok influencers to promote Mr Georgescu.

Thirdly, his videos were not labelled as political advertisements, which the court viewed as a form of voter manipulation.

All of this undermines Mr Georgescu's claim that his campaign was run for free, and raises doubts around its transparency.

In short, it supports the argument that the court's decision was taken in the interest of protecting Romanian democracy.

"Georgescu leveraged TikTok’s algorithmic design, exploiting far-right narratives that bypassed transparency rules for political advertising," said Mădălina Botan, a senior researcher who authored the BROD report on November’s election results.

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Following Mr Georgescu's surprise victory, Romania's National Audiovisual Council asked the European Commission to investigate campaign irregularities on social media platforms that breached the EU's Digital Services Act.

TikTok then removed 78 accounts operating from Romania, with more than 1,700 followers that attempted to promote Călin Georgescu's campaign and 5,500 pieces of election-related content in Romania that breached the platform's rules misinformation and hatred.

But the damage was already done.

By January the platform had removed what it called "a network" of more than 22,000 accounts promoting Mr Georgescu and the far-right AUR party, and has removed an additional 5,000 of these accounts since.

The Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters, of which Romania is a member, also studied the Romanian court’s decision last January and concluded that the power of constitutional courts to annul elections should be "limited to exceptional circumstances".

Mr Georgescu’s first-round was an exceptional case, given that, within a three week period, he had surged from a very low support base to top the poll and become one of the globe’s biggest trending subjects on a leading social media platform.

But the Venice Commission report also stated that, when it comes to cancelling elections, the law must guarantee "safeguards such as impartiality".

"Such decisions should precisely indicate the violations and the evidence, and they must not be based solely on classified intelligence (which may only be used as contextual information), as this would not guarantee the necessary transparency and verifiability."

In Romania’s case, the constitutional court took its decision to annul the election after viewing documents from the country’s intelligence services.

The secret documents have not been fully released nor has the court provided detailed evidence about the alleged violations beyond its ruling from 6 December 2024.

In effect, the Venice Commission was indirectly raising doubts over the court's decision to annul the vote.

Main beneficiary

Romania is still reeling from the decision to annul the previous vote as its citizens go to the polls again.

One beneficiary of the whole fiasco has been George Simion, the candidate for the far-right AUR, who is also the party's leader.

Mr Simion is currently leading polls on 30% and experts believe a sizeable number of Mr Georgescu's voters are now supporting the far-right leader. Mr Simion could win a tight second-round vote on 18 May.

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For the re-run election, TikTok has hired an additional 120 cybersecurity and misinformation experts to work on its Romanian election taskforce.

The tech platform has relaunched a dedicated Romanian 'Election Centre' on its app, providing voting dates, links to the website of Romania's Permanent Electoral Authority and information about platform's policies and media literacy tips.

Romania's National Audiovisual Council has launched a public awareness campaign asking people to report suspicious election-related content published online and across traditional media.

The body's acting president, Valentin-Alexandru Jucan, said the case of Romania's cancelled presidential election provided a good example of how state authorities and tech platforms should improve cooperation.

"At the end of these elections, we should be able to propose to the European Commission new reforms on the Digital Services Act.

"We saw how a platform can overturn everything. And the problem is not that someone is using the platform. The problem is when you are using the platform illegally," said Mr Jucan.

Cancelling the vote and ordering the election to be rerun was a drastic move.

But there were simply too many questions around the transparency of Mr Georgescu's campaign.

Those suspicions justified the constitutional court to intervene.

Unfortunately for Romanian voters this decision came very late and has damaged trust in public institutions.

Cezara Grama, a Romanian lawyer with Bucharest-based think-tank Expert Forum, said the constitutional court's decision needs to be assessed "from a wider lens".

Romania's Permanent Electoral Authority, she said, had failed to address the fact that Mr Georgescu had declared zero expenses and income for his political campaign when it was clear that he was running a campaign.

If state institutions and tech platforms had acted earlier and more robustly to curb the reach of suspicion campaign activity, then the constitutional court's last-minute intervention might not have been needed.