When US Vice President J.D. Vance in February blasted Europe for abandoning democracy, he singled out Romania over its unprecedented decision to annul a first-round presidential vote that a candidate from the far-right had come from nowhere to win.
Vance owes this country an apology.
I say that despite agreeing at the time with two points Vance made in his blistering address to Germany’s annual Munich Security Conference. These were that declassified intelligence documents used to justify voiding Romania’s Nov. 24 vote fell short of proof beyond reasonable doubt and that Romanian democracy must be weak if it can be so easily swayed.
There is no doubt that many Romanian voters wanted an outsider to vote for — any outsider — so they could protest a political class they saw as corrupt. In a field of 14, Calin Georgescu was among several candidates who fit that bill, but we have a lot more information today on what drove him rather than others to 23 percent of the vote on election day, surging from opinion poll ratings of about 1 percent just a month before.
Mircea Toma, a member of the National Audiovisual Council of Romania, is disarmingly frank about the regulator’s failure to detect what was happening, let alone prevent it.
With desktop computers from 2006, no expertise in the distribution systems of networks such as TikTok and few legal tools to use in a still-unregulated digital realm, Toma could see only the extraordinary increase in social media activity that drove an obscure Romanian politician’s campaign to one of the top-trending TikTok topics in the world.
“We’re at war without the weapons of war to fight one,” he told me, during an annual masterclass for young Romanian journalists that is run by the Ratiu Forum — a nonprofit organization — and the London School of Economics.
TikTok has taken down specimens of thousands of suspect accounts since the vote, doubled the number of content moderators it has for Romania to 200 and set up an election war room for the re-run.
That is real progress, Toma says, although still “like using a teaspoon against a tsunami.”
In fact, the critical takeaway from Romania’s political convulsions should be that TikTok is a lawless paradise for secret services and special interests that can now be more important to deciding elections than TV, not just there, but anywhere. It will take major EU-level regulation of social media platforms to enforce the transparency and campaign finance rules that apply to more traditional media.
So, what do we know?
Investigative journalist Victor Ilie has identified the involvement of an infrastructure of thousands of influencers that a company called AdNow LLP had been building since about 2016. Although registered in the UK, AdNow was a unit of Ad.Ru, a company founded by a former Russian state TV personality who went on to run the ad campaigns for former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential election in 2008 and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s in 2012.
The technique was to target influencers willing to peddle any viral content, very often conspiracy theories, so long as they would attract clicks and therefore income, Ilie told me.
Those same influencers would then be asked to run content for regular payments he tracked through AdNow’s UK tax filings. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that mainly consisted of anti-vax messages targeting COVID-19 vaccines and Romanians proved receptive.
Later, the materials included pro-Kremlin disinformation about Ukraine, Europe and NATO.
Finally, last fall, it was hashtags and videos for Georgescu’s election campaign, including remakes of Putin’s famous lake swimming and horse-riding videos. Other candidates got hundreds of millions of TikTok clicks during the campaign, too, but the sudden acceleration and origins of Georgescu’s support stood out.
In a February report on the Romanian election, France’s Service for Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference, Viginum, called this a “sophisticated campaign of astroturfing,” the term for marketing that is disguised by deliberate deception as unsolicited public comment.
Citing Romanian intelligence, it said that 25,000 largely dormant pro-Georgescu accounts suddenly burst into action on Nov. 11, just two weeks before the election.
In January, Romanian prosecutors sought help from counterparts in Turkey to trace more than 20,000 TikTok accounts with Turkish IP addresses. These had been created using e-mails with Russian domain names just a day before the Romanian election. They pumped out huge quantities of pro-Georgescu items in the final hours of the vote.
Romanian authorities have said, and TikTok has confirmed, that a network of Discord and Telegram channels coordinated this activity, communicating which pro-Georgescu content to post. The channels also fed TikTok’s algorithms in such a way that they would accelerate the spread of pro-Georgescu content, without moderators detecting artificial behavior.
Georgescu has been blocked from competing in the election rerun. He is charged with six crimes, including falsifying his campaign funding declarations, which he gave as zero, acting to undermine the constitutional order and setting up a pro-fascist, antisemitic organization.
He denies them all and says he is the victim of a police state.
So what of the candidate himself? G4Media.ro, a news Web site, has put together excerpts from TV and YouTube channel interviews that were not included in the soothing, almost hypnotic footage of Georgescu talking about spiritualism, health, Romanian sovereignty and God that got selected for TikTok. In one, the candidate holds up a can of Pepsi and says soft drinks are being used to insert nanochips into consumers.
In another, he tells an audience there should be no more political parties in Romania. In a third, he describes as national heroes both Romania’s fascist wartime leader, Marshal Ion Antonescu (a dictator responsible for the deaths of at least 380,000 Jews), and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who led a version of Hitler’s Brownshirts. They murdered prominent Romanian intellectuals and politicians, among others.
In a telephone recording produced in court materials against Ion Motocu, leader of a neo-fascist organization arrested in December last year for inciting hate against Jews, Georgescu tells him to stand by to take part in the “action” of a plan he intends to execute.
The court file says that Motocu called the military attache at the Russian embassy after he got off the phone.
Last month, Romania declared the diplomat, together with his deputy, persona non grata and arrested six Romanians for allegedly plotting with them to overturn the constitutional order.
Romania’s security services are no gold standard for truth, but the nation’s constitutional court had cause to cancel the results of the election in November last year.
It was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t.
If, as Vance seemed to suggest in Munich, the judges were not defending their country, but conspiring with established parties to keep the far right from power, they did a lousy job. George Simion, leader of ultra-nationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians party, is favorite to win the first-round vote. He could well gain the presidency fair and square.
Vance and the US administration should be helping a loyal ally to strengthen its weak institutions, not joining in an attack on them. Whether Georgescu is a Kremlin plant, he won by a covert campaign of manipulation. He is a candidate who spouts praise for genocidal fascists, has contempt for political pluralism and promotes a dystopian fantasy world. This was no martyr for the cause of Romanian democracy, which — make no mistake — is in trouble.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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