TikTok and Soil
Paula Erizanu
Romania’s Constitutional Court has annulled the first round of the presidential election on 24 November, won by the far-right nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu, with 23 per cent of the vote. The court decision follows the declassification of secret documents showing unprecedented Russian interference involving large-scale TikTok manipulation, vote buying, cyber-attacks and illegal financing, all in favour of Georgescu.
Analysis by think tanks and the media also suggests that Georgescu’s campaign, which reported zero spending, involved co-ordinated Telegram groups, troll farms, fake accounts and payments to influencers. The investigative journalist Victor Ilie has reported that AdNow, a digital marketing company based in London with alleged ties to the Kremlin, invested two million euros over eight years in Romanian-language content with a conspiracy theorist, anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right emphasis. Both TikTok, which has nine million Romanian users (out of a population of nineteen million), and Russia have denied any wrongdoing.
Georgescu insists he is not pro-Russian, but pro-Romanian. All the same, his views coincide with Russian propaganda. When the first-round results were announced on 25 November, Russian state media celebrated Georgescu as a ‘Russia-aligned candidate’. He admires Vladimir Putin as a ‘true patriot’, and has posted images of himself emulating the Russian dictator: immersed in freezing water, riding a horse or wearing a kimono and black belt on a judo mat. He has also praised the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and Slovakian president, Peter Pellegrini, as the only true leaders in Europe.
Some of Georgescu's most popular content on TikTok expresses outrage with the subsidies given to Ukrainian refugees, or with Romania’s military support for Ukraine, when the country has not put an end to its own endemic poverty. His anti-Ukraine and ‘pro-peace’ message resonates with voters who fear being dragged into a war that they don’t see as theirs.
Beyond the war in Ukraine, Romanian voters fell for Georgescu out of disenchantment with their own political class. While Georgescu himself has been part of the establishment, working in senior government positions as well as at UN agencies, he portrays himself as an anti-system candidate, giving a voice to people’s frustrations with the parties that have ruled the country since the 1989 revolution. ‘I think the Romanian people want something different from what the political class has been doing for 35 years,’ he says in one of his TikTok videos.
‘How can 90 per cent of our food be imported?’ he asks in a different TikTok clip, a sticker of a Chinese flag popping up. ‘This is a crime against the Romanian people,’ he says as a knife covers the national flag. The speech is given against a background of energising music, with disruptive, attention-grabbing flashes and changing colour filters. ‘The time has come for the destiny and rights of the Romanian nation to be respected,’ he says elsewhere, mixing providential discourse with political propaganda. His messages worked.
Polls suggested that the planned run-off on 8 December between Georgescu and Elena Lasconi, the pro-democracy, pro-European leader of USR, a reformist centre-right party, would have been tight. The current prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu of the centre-left PSD, came a close third. While Ciolacu praised the Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the result and rerun the ballot, Lasconi criticised it as a ‘blow against democracy’.
The two have already signed an agreement to form a coalition government together with the centre-right PNL and the Hungarian minority party UDMR, in order to keep out the far-right, nationalist, anti-European parties that between them took a third of the vote. Romania has been governed by a grand coalition of the PSD and the PNL since 2021. Apart from UDMR, all the centrist parties lost seats in the parliamentary elections on 1 December.
The centre can only hold ahead of the presidential elections, likely to be organised in the spring, if Romania resets its fight against Russia’s hybrid war. The institutions in charge of state security will have to become more transparent. Prosecutors will have to carry out quick and thorough investigations into election meddling and illegal financing. Institutions, as well as politicians, will need to communicate better if they are to appease Georgescu’s voters.
In the last few weeks he has garnered the support of a cult leader. Among his wilder beliefs, Georgescu opposes C-section birth because it ‘cuts the divine thread’. He says he has seen aliens, that Pepsi has nanochips in it and that water is not H2O but ‘information’. On one TV show, he shared ‘things that have been hidden from us about life and the universe’:
We will soon function not on phones but via telepathy, just like plants, birds and animals. This is natural, just as life was like during the reign of Stephen the Great. We must go back to the roots.
This ‘return to the roots of the Romanian people’ was the basis of Georgescu’s national programme, entitled ‘Food, Water, Energy’ (which he’s annoyed that the Moldovan fugitive Ilan Shor, now a Russian citizen, ‘stole’ from him). Georgescu’s website presents his plan as a mix of ‘participatory democracy’ (via referendums) and a ‘sovereign-distributist state’ that would ‘define’ the Romanian nation in the world.
While the details of his vision for organising peasants (distinct from farmers) into eco-communes with free wifi that will lead to a spiritual ‘Western rebirth’ are unclear (his PhD in soil science may or not help), there’s no mistaking his insistence on the importance of national pride. In a televised interview, he said ‘the Romanian political class’ has an ‘inferiority complex’ towards the West, whereas he is able to come to the table ‘as an equal’.
He celebrates figures from Romania’s fascist past such as Corneliu Codreanu, who founded the Iron Guard or Legionary Movement, and Ion Antonescu, who led the country during the Second World War and oversaw the Holocaust in Romania. In January 2022, Georgescu’s honouring of the two men as ‘martyrs’, as well as his opposition to the EU and Nato, saw him part company with the nationalist party AUR, which came second in this week’s parliamentary elections with 18 per cent of the vote. (AUR’s declared model now is the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.)
Although Georgescu denies any Russian or extremist allegiances, he was spotted this week with Eugen Sechila, a neo-Legionary leader. The problem is that his supporters don’t seem to mind.
Comments
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7 December 2024
at
9:30am
shewie
says:
"The court decision follows the declassification of secret documents showing unprecedented Russian interference involving large-scale TikTok manipulation, vote buying, cyber-attacks and illegal financing, all in favour of Georgescu". Paula Erizanu.
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7 December 2024
at
7:21pm
nicklyne
says:
@
shewie
Liberals throughout Europe still refuse to see just how unpopular project Ukraine is. It has allowed the US to effectively deindustrialize Germany, while UK prime minister Starmer wants a war with Russia. And never mind the utter destruction that this senseless provocation of Russia and demonization of Putin has caused in Ukraine itself
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7 December 2024
at
12:22pm
Graucho
says:
Putin's agenda is to recreate the Soviet empire through a combination of invasion and the installation of his stooges in government. He already has the latter in Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia and the U.S.
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7 December 2024
at
12:44pm
shewie
says:
@
Graucho
Great!
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7 December 2024
at
1:22pm
KEVIN COX
says:
Georgescu may be undesirable, but to think that the U.S. was not also involved in the election and the subsequent annulment beggars belief.
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7 December 2024
at
8:58pm
Howard Medwell
says:
The insane enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine that has possessed the political class in so many "Western" nations has inevitably handed the political initiative to right-wing cuckoos. Most ordinary people, even if they are stupid, uneducated, racist, etc., have a strange disinclination to blow people up, and to get blown up themselves. Here in Britain, for instance, this is probably a factor in the rise of Reform. I saw a very succinct piece of evidence in Germany earlier this year, on a sticker planted by the neo-Nazi AfD: "Stalingrad? Diesmal ohne uns!" - which is, for a translation, this time, count us out. Difficult to imagine how Germans, especially older people whose Dads had spent time on the Eastern front, could fail to agree.
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8 December 2024
at
10:42am
Camus
says:
@
Howard Medwell
The Ukrainian people rose up against the regime that relied on Putin for support, which upset his plans for a Russian domination of Eastern Europe and was followed by the seizure of the Crimea and the infiltration of the eastern provinces. The Ukraine had every reason to defend itself - read Snyder's "Bloodland" for the evidence - and will probably be handed over to the Russians as a source of grain to be exploited as another Russian colony.
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8 December 2024
at
11:26am
shewie
says:
@
Camus
Your reputation proceeds you Camus, as does Graucho's.
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8 December 2024
at
12:13pm
Delaide
says:
No matter how loud the voices of Putin’s trolls declaim, we all recognise them.
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9 December 2024
at
1:59pm
shewie
says:
@
Delaide
Even the Romanian centrist pro-EU candidate who lost to “populist” Georgescu describes the Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the elections as “illegal, amoral and crushes the very essence of democracy, voting”. Respect.
Read moreThere again "The idea you can cancel an election because the winner benefited from a *TikTok campaign* that intel agencies *allege* was "similar" to Kremlin influence operations doesn't even rise to tin pot dictator level. Abrogation of democracy that's almost being rubbed in people's faces". Branko Marcetic.
Who do you believe?
I think LRB should do better, cf Ukraine, James Meek.
Utter fact free drivel. Hope they are paying you enough for such public humiliation.
Over to you Paula Erizanu.