When the will of the public starts to work against the designs of the progressive establishment, they lie and they cheat, and they believe they are justified in this behavior because to cheat is a “lesser evil” compared to the rise of right wing movements. Conservatives, in their minds, are the ultimate evil.
This is how we get fabricated scandals like Russiagate and the Steele Dossier; an accusation driven circus designed to prove Russian interference led to the surprise win by Donald Trump in the 2016 elections.
It’s perhaps not surprising that the same cabal would use similar tactics in other key elections around the world as a means to thwart any voting majority that goes against them. This seems to be the case in Romania where Calin Georgescu recently scored a surprise win in the first round of the presidential elections.
The 62-year-old, referred to as an ‘obscure far-right populist’ by the establishment media, shook the country’s political landscape by clinching the most votes and advancing to the second round to face off against reformist Elena Lasconi of the progressive Save Romania Union party. He also beat the incumbent Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu of the Social Democratic Party, leaving the ruling party for the first time in Romania’s 35-year post-communist history without a candidate in the runoff, set for Dec. 8.
However, according to a report by Expert Forum, a Bucharest-based think tank, Georgescu’s TikTok account before last week’s vote saw an explosion of engagement, which it said appeared “sudden and artificial, similar to his polling results”. Expert Forum is a leftist organization which works in collaboration with the European Commission, Council of Europe, World Bank and United Nations Development Programme, along with a multitude of NGOs.
Romanian officials have seized on the Expert Forum report, arguing that Georgescu “benefited from massive exposure due to preferential treatment” granted by TikTok. They say Russian interference is behind Georgescu’s win. In other words, they want the public to believe that an artificial TikTok following devised by the Kremlin somehow translated into a massive shift in votes against the political left in Romania.
Georgescu is a NATO critic and has defended Vladimir Putin as “a man that loves his country”, though he holds that he is not pro-Russia. A primary message of his campaign has been a push for peace in Ukraine and keeping Romania out of the war.
His positions include supporting Romanian farmers, reducing import dependence, and ramping up local energy and food production. He also wants to establish a “sovereign” distribution model based on participatory democracy in which “Truth, Freedom and Sovereignty are the axes of values” in Romania’s development.
Romania’s constitutional court will decide on Monday whether to annul the now controversial first round of the presidential election, held on Nov. 24. If it does, the court will almost certainly whip up public fears that the country’s widely distrusted establishment parties are trying to manipulate the electoral contest in their favor.
The decision could plunge Romania into one of its most intense crises since the fall of Communism
The prevailing narrative implicit in the interference accusations is that voters are stupid and easily influenced by social media trends that foreign governments can control. Just as Democrats in the US wanted the public to believe that online “Russian disinformation” tricked voters into supporting Donald Trump, Romanian elites want to inject doubt into the Georgescu win.
It’s not that the people are fed up with the corruption of the progressive status quo – Rather, the establishment argues that the populace doesn’t make their own decisions and they need protection from themselves.
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