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In November, I wrote about a stunning presidential election result—in Romania, where Călin Georgescu, a Trump-friendly and Putin-curious soil scientist turned ultranationalist politician on a divine mission, came out on top in the first round of voting despite having been frozen out of the debate in Romania’s mainstream media and being almost literally invisible in international coverage. Headlines quickly referred to Georgescu as a “TikTok star,” noting that he’d ridden a late viral surge on the platform, where videos showed him running, horseback riding, and practicing judo, among other things; one journalist described the election as the first in which “social media has been more influential than television,” adding that “we have seen how TikTok can defeat mainstream media.” I noted at the time that an impending runoff would test that proposition (again) almost literally: Georgescu was set to face off against Elena Lasconi, a moderate who had worked as a war correspondent and anchor for a private TV network. In the meantime, I wrote, it was “safe to say that the world’s media is suddenly paying far more attention to Romanian politics,” having largely overlooked the vote ahead of time—always an oversight, perhaps, given the country’s important role within NATO and the European Union.
The global media attention continued—even though the election did not. Following Georgescu’s first-place finish, the government of Klaus Iohannis, the outgoing president, declassified documents (following a request, Politico reported, from journalists and civil society groups) that officials said demonstrated a sprawling, last-minute campaign to influence the election on TikTok (one user supposedly spent nearly four hundred thousand dollars to promote pro-Georgescu content), while also alleging a series of cyberattacks aimed at election-related websites; the officials effectively pointed the finger at Russia, suggesting that the campaign was consistent with that country’s meddling abroad and that the Putin regime views Romania as an enemy state. (Romanian officials also suggested that TikTok had enabled the spread of the campaign, including by classifying Georgescu-related posts as entertainment rather than politics content; the following day, the EU’s regulatory arm ordered the company to preserve data related to the vote.) A spokesperson for Georgescu dismissed the declassification of the files as “just another try of the political system to stop him from winning by using the media and the fake news programs.” Two days before the second round was scheduled to take place, however, Romania’s constitutional court canceled the election altogether. Georgescu, predictably, reacted with fury. “On this day, the corrupt system made a pact with the devil,” he said. “I have only one pact—with the Romanian people and God.”
Since then, the crisis has continued to unfold. The day after the election was annulled, prosecutors raided properties linked to the man suspected of spending that vast sum on TikTok promotion; police also reportedly questioned influencers and detained a campaign manager for Georgescu on charges of spreading hateful messages, just as he was allegedly preparing to depart for the African nation of Chad. Later in December, a Romanian news site reported that a traditional center-right party had actually bankrolled a pro-Georgescu campaign online—perhaps inadvertently, but perhaps, it has been suggested, as part of an effort to get Georgescu into the second round as a perceived weaker candidate. On the last day of 2024, an appeals court rejected Georgescu’s challenge to the annulment decision; in January, the European Court of Human Rights, a supranational judicial body (which is not part of the EU), did likewise, ruling that his complaint fell outside its remit. Soon after, the election was rearranged for early May. Early polls suggested that Georgescu looked likely to win (though, as prior to the original election, there were some questions as to their reliability).
Last month, tensions rose some more. Iohannis, who had stayed on as president in the absence of a new one, agreed to step down amid rising opposition. Around the same time, the authorities reportedly began investigating a former journalist who had also worked as a manager of Georgescu’s campaign, helping to oversee the production of his videos; they also raided dozens of addresses linked to a network with alleged ties to Georgescu that, per the BBC, is “allegedly run by a former French legionnaire and militia chief in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” and found “guns, grenade launchers, and gold bullion buried beneath the floorboards.” (The individual in question was previously detained alongside associates following the annulment of the election, with police alleging that they found weapons and lists of politicians’ and journalists’ names in associated vehicles; Georgescu has denied being connected to any of this.) Then officials opened an investigation into Georgescu himself, on grounds relating to false statements and the promotion of fascism and anti-Semitism. Last week, Georgescu nonetheless filed to be a candidate in the rearranged elections—but late on Sunday, elections officials rejected his candidacy. (Georgescu lodged an appeal that was due to be heard today.) Following the decision, a violent, if relatively small, protest broke out in the capital of Bucharest, with demonstrators hurling firecrackers and stones at police. They also reportedly overturned a news vehicle.
The ripple effects of all this have been felt beyond Romania’s borders. Bloomberg noted that the decision to bar Georgescu risked provoking the ire of President Trump—and indeed, the annulment of the election has already become something of a cause célèbre for leading figures in his administration. Vice President J.D. Vance mentioned the annulment as he hectored European leaders about their supposed backsliding on democracy and free speech in an explosive address at the Munich Security Conference last month, suggesting that it had been premised on “flimsy suspicions” and pressure from other European countries. “You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections; we certainly do,” Vance said. “But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.” Where fringe European populism goes, Elon Musk often follows—and sure enough, he, too, has defended Georgescu, most recently describing the decision to ban him from running as “crazy!” in a post on X, the platform that Musk owns. Meanwhile, Georgescu’s team has overtly sought to get the attention of Trump, Vance, and Musk, including by tagging them on X. And Georgescu has reached into the fever swamps of American media: in January, he appeared on the Web show of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and spoke darkly of “globalist” efforts to use Romania to start World War III; per the Financial Times, he also did an interview with Mario Nawfal, a “manosphere” influencer.
(Another story has played out at the intersection of the manosphere, Romania, and the US media and culture wars recently: that of Andrew and Tristan Tate, misogynist influencers who have been charged in Romania with crimes including human trafficking and money laundering, which they deny. Per the Financial Times, the Trump administration raised the Tates’ case with Romanian officials, including during a meeting between Richard Grenell, a Trump envoy, and Romania’s foreign minister at the Munich conference; Grenell denied any substantive discussion of the issue on that occasion, but did describe his support for the Tates as “evident,” and the brothers, who are US and UK dual nationals, were subsequently permitted to leave Romania for Florida; it was unclear what role exactly Trump played in this, but the brothers’ lawyer said, “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.” Their arrival has highlighted something of a schism in Trump’s base: some podcasters and other MAGA cultural figures have welcomed them with open arms—literally, in the case of Dana White, the Trump-allied UFC boss, who embraced the Tates at an event on Friday—though others have expressed revulsion. The story of the Tates seems mostly separate from that of Georgescu, though as I noted in November, and as Politico has suggested, the latter’s campaign videos appeared to mimic Andrew Tate’s “subversive, populist style.”)
But criticism of Romania’s annulled election has not been limited to the US right—left-wing newsrooms and commentators have expressed concerns, too. In January, Alexander Zaitchik wrote in Drop Site News, an outlet formed by exiles from The Intercept (and which Meghnad Bose recently profiled for CJR), that canceling an election result based on concerns about social media dynamics, rather than, say, the legitimacy of the voting process, marked “a milestone in the development of Internet-age information war—one that underscores the fragility of the west’s collective commitment to democracy.” On Sunday, after Georgescu was banned from running again, Ryan Grim, a founder of Drop Site, decried the decision, writing on X: “At least in China the government produces decent housing etc for its citizens. If the West fully abandons democracy, what is the point?” (In some ways, the complex ideological fault lines around the Romanian election in the US mirror those around the work of the US Agency for International Development that I explored recently in this newsletter—and indeed, US funding for media and civil society projects in Romania has at times been marshaled into that debate, on both the US left and the right.)
In Romania, meanwhile, Georgescu and his far-right supporters are not the only voices to have challenged the election annulment—his moderate opponent Lasconi, the former TV journalist, has, too. After the decision came down, she challenged it in similar language to Georgescu, insisting that “God, the Romanian people, the truth, and the law will prevail and will punish those who are guilty of destroying our democracy.” She also penned an open letter to the (then incoming) Trump administration. “The past 35 years we have had democracy, but government and corrupt politicians have failed to deliver for the Romanian people,” she wrote. “I fear we have 15 years to go—maybe less—where no one wants to go: dictatorship.”
Whatever was behind the late surge of visibility for Georgescu on TikTok ahead of the initial election (and my outsider’s view is that the news media should treat thinly evidenced claims of foreign meddling with due skepticism without being naive as to the very real possibility thereof), it’s clear that his political rise didn’t occur in a vacuum, as may have been suggested by the oversimplified headlines referring to him as a “TikTok star” and other early coverage on the part of an international press scrambling to catch up to a story that had flown totally beneath its radar; as the Romanian journalist Andrei Popoviciu wrote in The Guardian this morning, his emergence has “amplified a culture of incendiary revisionism” and “tapped into a potent mix of discontent and nostalgia.” The story is about new communications technology, yes, but also very old political technology, as the New York Times pointed out in a deep post-election dispatch on the complicated legacy of Romania’s twentieth-century history of fascist and communist rule. One researcher called Georgescu’s rise “an indicator of the extent to which Legionary propaganda has slowly penetrated the Romanian mainstream,” a reference to an anti-Semitic movement of the 1930s; another said that Romania can’t “cancel all the fascists” in its cultural history since “we will be left with Nadia Comaneci and Dracula,” referring to a gymnast and a fictional vampire, respectively. (Georgescu has denied supporting the Legionary cause. Glorifying fascist figures is outlawed in Romania.)
There are many other dynamics at work, too, not least a generalized dissatisfaction with Romania’s political establishment, economy, and social services. (“There is a common saying in Romania,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noted yesterday, “that you enter a hospital with one illness and leave with 10.”) As Zaitchik wrote for Drop Site, the electoral rerun in May will give “the government and media” a rare “second opportunity to show how well it understands the dynamics driving Georgescu’s success.” At least for now, it seems that Georgescu himself won’t be on the ballot, even if his story will surely continue.
Other notable stories:
- In yesterday’s newsletter, we noted the arrest over the weekend of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University who participated, and was a media spokesperson on behalf of, Palestinian solidarity protests on campus last year. Now the Times reports that Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, invoked a “sweeping power to expel foreigners” who are deemed to have compromised US foreign policy; Rubio retweeted a government statement accusing Khalil of leading activities “aligned with Hamas,” but officials have not accused him of any concrete ties to the group and, per the Times, acted instead on the rationale that the protests were anti-Semitic. Khalil is a green card holder with First Amendment rights. Already, a judge has ordered officials not to deport Khalil pending a challenge to the legality of his arrest.
- Yesterday, Ruth Marcus, a senior editor and columnist in the opinion section of the Washington Post, resigned; she said that she’d written a column “respectfully dissenting” from a recent edict by Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, forcing the section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” only for Will Lewis, the CEO, to spike the column and decline to discuss the matter further. Lewis’s decision “underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” Marcus wrote. Meanwhile, the news side of the Post is being reorganized to broaden the paper’s coverage beyond politics and to prioritize digital readers; Axios has the details.
- In recent years, Musk’s X has filed a series of lawsuits against Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group that has reported critically on the spread of hateful content on the platform, in a Texas court district that some observers have perceived as favorable to such suits, as well as overseas, in Ireland and Singapore; Media Matters has described the suits as “a vendetta-driven campaign of libel tourism” that has forced it to lay off staff. Now the group is hitting back by suing X for breach of contract, on the grounds that the platform’s own terms of service required its complaints to be filed in San Francisco at the time they were brought. NPR’s Bobby Allyn has more.
- Ken Bensinger and Reid J. Epstein, of the Times, profiled MeidasTouch, an ascendant digital-first progressive outlet whose podcast recently eclipsed even Joe Rogan’s show to top Apple’s and Spotify’s download charts (though Rogan has since reclaimed the top spot). “For its devoted fans, who call themselves the Meidas Mighty, MeidasTouch presents an alternate reality in which Democrats are ascendant and Mr. Trump and Republicans are in a state of collapse,” Bensinger and Epstein write. (Maddy Crowell profiled, and spoke with, MeidasTouch for CJR last year.)
- And Kevin Drum, a respected blogger on public policy issues for outlets including Washington Monthly and Mother Jones, as well as his own site, has died. Tributes have poured in from followers across the mediasphere. Drum “was an inspiration to so many of us,” the Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote. “A lot of the later turns towards wonkery and chart-blogging has its roots in his work. He influenced a generation of young writers—he was fair and independent and took the evidence seriously and he did the work to see old things in new ways. He will be so missed.”
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