TikTok v. TV in Romania

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In this very busy year of elections worldwide, it’s safe to say that the presidential contest in Romania didn’t garner all that much international media attention. When it did, the coverage often focused on George Simion, a far-right candidate who was seen as “looking strong” and a threat to continued Romanian military assistance to neighboring Ukraine in the latter country’s war with Russia; stories also mentioned his support of Donald Trump, his background as a soccer hooligan, and his party’s giant Vlad the Impaler posters and slick TikTok videos. Sometimes fringier candidates merited a mention, including in the context of their own antics on TikTok. One candidate was filmed standing on his head as a political stunt—the idea being that Romania had been turned upside down by its current rulers—but then dropped out; another, who was ultimately banned from running by court order, made overtly pro-fascist and anti-Semitic remarks on a TikTok livestream. Should such scandals and narratives “become a fixture of Romanian politics rather than a blip,” Politico wrote last month, then Romania “will certainly garner more international attention—for all the wrong reasons.”

Despite the focus on these characters, the expectation among many observers was that Marcel Ciolacu—the incumbent prime minister, who represents an establishment party that was founded from the ashes of the country’s Cold War–era communist regime—would most likely be elected president. (Like many other countries, Romania has both a president and a prime minister; the former role is ceremonial in some respects but has the power to appoint the latter, as well as significant responsibilities in the areas of foreign policy and defense.) The polls, we were warned, weren’t “hugely reliable”—making the outcome “very difficult to predict”—and yet “most analysts” foresaw Ciolacu progressing from the first round of the presidential election to a runoff against either Simion or Elena Lasconi, a more moderate pro-Western candidate. The website Romania Insider asked: “Who will join PM Marcel Ciolacu in the second round?” Other regional outlets described the election as a “two-horse” race, and predicted that, whatever the result, it would be “likely to deliver very little change.”

Romanians voted this past weekend, and in the end, it was Lasconi who sneaked into the runoff, ahead of Simion. Surprisingly, she also beat out Ciolacu—and more surprising still was the identity of the candidate who finished in first place, with close to a quarter of the vote: Călin Georgescu, a Russian-sympathizing ultranationalist and vaccine skeptic with a doctorate in soil science who, as the New York Times put it, has “cast himself as an avenger sent by God.” Even if you had been following international coverage of the election, you are unlikely to have known who Georgescu was—media critics are wont to say that a politician or issue has gotten “no coverage,” but rarely is the charge almost literally true. As far as I can tell, none of the Associated Press, Reuters, or Agence France-Presse even mentioned Georgescu’s name before yesterday. (He was certainly absent from a recent Reuters article headlined “Who is running in Romania’s presidential election?”) When I searched Google News for his name this morning, I found literally one result in English from the period between January 1 and last Friday—a crude measure, but striking nonetheless.

Georgescu’s success was a massive shock to many inside Romania, too. He had only polled in single digits ahead of time. “Never in our thirty-four years of democracy have we seen such a surge compared to surveys,” one commentator told the BBC; another told Balkan Insight that while there is clearly “​​a significant demand in Romanian society for a politician like Georgescu,” he couldn’t say precisely why in the absence of “high-quality sociological data on what Romanians want.” (Suddenly, complaining about the Times’ election night Needle feels quaint.) It would appear that Romania’s mainstream media also overlooked Georgescu’s candidacy. He did not appear in major televised debates. When he cast his ballot on Sunday, few reporters were present to see it, according to AFP. After the results became clear, reporters waited for him outside his campaign HQ—a/k/a his house. 

But Georgescu was visible on—you guessed it—major social platforms, not least TikTok. Since his first-round victory, headlines in several international outlets have referred to him as a “TikTok star”; according to Politico, viral videos on that platform variously showed Georgescu running, practicing judo, and riding a white horse in a traditional shirt, and were “often produced with the subversive, populist style of controversial influencer Andrew Tate, accompanied by dramatic music and subtitles.” (Tate, who is known for his openly misogynistic content, has been charged in Romania with human trafficking, among other offenses; he denies wrongdoing.) Georgescu has also been active on YouTube; during the pandemic, he reportedly made a video that showed him bathing in an icy lake and extolling his immune system. This year, according to Politico, he went on a podcast and said that COVID does not exist, adding, “the only real science is Jesus Christ.” 

Analysts have suggested that Georgescu was able to use social media to consolidate generalized anti-elite sentiment, especially among rural and young male voters, while skirting traditional forms of scrutiny. “It’s a TikTok win,” Ion M. Ionita, a Romanian historian, told the Financial Times. “You don’t need a party. You just need to go viral on social media, and he has gone viral for sure.” The journalist Dan Tapalaga told Balkan Insight that this was “the first election where social media has been more influential than television. We have seen how TikTok can defeat mainstream media.”  

All this, of course, resonates strongly in US media circles at the moment; indeed, it appears to be just the latest installment in the global story of far-right political figures using nontraditional platforms to circumvent the traditional press. (In this sense, Politico likened Georgescu to the young French far-right leader Jordan Bardella, whose media strategy I wrote about recently in this newsletter.) Of course, each version of this dynamic has its own specifics. Since neither Georgescu nor Lasconi got 50 percent of the vote in the first round, they will have to contest a runoff scheduled for December 8. (In between times, Romanians will vote in parliamentary elections this coming weekend that will determine the broader makeup of the government.) Simion has already backed Georgescu. But the more centrist Lasconi could yet have a better shot at consolidating support. We’ll have to wait and see.

If the first round of the presidential election was proof that TikTok can defeat mainstream media, then the second round will test that proposition almost literally: before entering politics, Lasconi was a longtime journalist and anchor on PRO TV, a private network; among other things, she covered the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. In general terms, Romania boasts a vibrant and diverse independent media sector; the country ranked several places higher than the US on Reporters Without Borders’ most recent index of press freedom worldwide. And yet, as elsewhere, the industry faces challenges: not only from the fragmentation of the information space suggested by Georgescu’s rise, but also from declining trust (even if, by some measures, individual outlets including PRO TV remain reasonably well trusted), political pressure, editorial meddling, frivolous lawsuits, and other types of threats and harassment. (Two years ago, one journalist who authored an investigation into plagiarism allegations against the then–prime minister said that photos stolen from her had appeared on adult websites, and that her messages to the police about the issue were subsequently leaked.) It’s not hard to imagine the election results further bearing on this climate; again, we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, it’s safe to say that the world’s media is suddenly paying far more attention to Romanian politics. In addition to its consequential—and sometimes mind-boggling—particulars, the first-round election result played into global story lines that are of particular importance right now, from the furious turn against pandemic-era incumbents pretty much everywhere to the heightened unpredictability of modern-day electoral politics and, of course, what it all says about the media. Even absent the weekend’s drama, we perhaps should have been paying closer attention in the first place: Romania, after all, is one of the biggest countries in the European Union by population and is a key member of NATO that borders Ukraine at a moment of increasing peril on that front.

Recently, I wrote in this newsletter about a pair of key votes—a presidential election and accompanying referendum on whether to enshrine a pro-European orientation—in Moldova, a small country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. (Incidentally, Simion, the candidate who perhaps attracted the most pre-election focus in coverage of the Romanian election, is banned from Moldova, which views him as a security threat; his party has advocated unifying with the country.) Those votes seemed to attract more international attention ahead of time, not least due to the claims of extensive Russian interference with them. The same has not been alleged in Romania, and yet, given Georgescu’s past praise for Putin, it’s fair to imagine that Moscow is watching closely. “People are saying this is how you hack a democracy,” one expert told the Financial Times in the wake of the election results. “Everyone was looking at Moldova a few weeks ago…but this is a country of twenty million.”

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, The Guardian published an investigation finding that Israel used a US munition in a strike that killed three journalists and wounded three others in southern Lebanon last month; the journalists who were killed—Ghassan Najjar, Mohammad Reda, and Wissam Qassem—all worked for outlets that were either supportive of or affiliated with the militant group Hezbollah, and one was buried with the group’s flag, but The Guardian found no evidence that the trio were “anything but civilians” and noted that killing journalists is a violation of international law, regardless of their political affiliation. Three legal experts told The Guardian that the strike may have amounted to a war crime. Also yesterday, Human Rights Watch published a report of its own on the incident and described it as “an apparent war crime.”

• For CJR, Jem Bartholomew profiled Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, and spoke with journalists who are entering the “uncharted territory” of covering “a president-elect who owns a controlling stake in a social media company.” In other news about the election and its aftermath, the Times reports that Natalie Harp—a young aide who has been described as influential in channeling news and information to Trump, including with the help of a portable printer, and has reportedly taken dictation for some of his Truth Social posts—will now follow him to the White House. And CNN’s Brian Stelter assessed whether the Trump ally Elon Musk’s threats to buy MSNBC are worth taking seriously. (Verdict: unlikely to happen.)

• Recently, the satirical site The Onion made a big splash when it said that it had acquired Alex Jones’s conspiracy empire InfoWars, which was put up for sale by a court as a result of legal action brought by the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones claimed was a hoax. The Onion said that the families had supported its bid and that it planned to relaunch InfoWars as a parody of itself—but a judge then paused the sale, expressing transparency concerns about the bidding process. Yesterday, the judge delayed a scheduled hearing in the case; he is now set to consider whether the sale can go ahead at some point next month.

• In the UK, 5Pillars, a Muslim news site, recently dropped out of a voluntary press regulation scheme to which it had submitted itself after the regulator upheld a pair of complaints that its content discriminated against Jewish people and members of the LGBTQ community. 5Pillars said that the regulator—which was established in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal in the UK newspaper industry, but mostly holds sway over smaller titles—is “run by what we perceive to be liberals whose values are not compatible with Islamic norms.” Press Gazette’s Bron Maher has more details.

• And, after Who? Weekly reported that the journalist Ronan Farrow has been making music under the pseudonym “Villiers,” The Cut’s Cat Zhang dug into the claim. “The full name of Ronan’s mom, Mia Farrow, is Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow,” Zhang writes. “As for his music, Villiers’s debut single, ‘Cry,’ is a duet with Leigh Nash, the lead singer of… Sixpence None the Richer? (Nash’s team has confirmed that Villiers is indeed Farrow, but Farrow himself has not yet responded for comment.)”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.