A new poll taken after revelations that Russia had hacked Romania’s presidential election by promoting a far-right candidate, shows his pro-European rival narrowly in the lead.
In the survey carried out by Intel Atlas, Elena Lasconi was ahead for the first time with 48.6%, while Calin Georgescu was preferred by 46.4% of respondents.
Another 3.1% said they would spoil their ballot and 1.9% said they didn’t know who they would vote for.
It’s the first time Mrs. Lasconi has headed a poll since she and Mr. Georgescu qualified for the December 8 runoff.
The development comes after documents declassified in Bucharest showed the country had been aggressively targeted by cyber attacks in favor of EU and NATO skeptic Georgescu.
US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken said starkly on Thursday that “Romanian authorities are uncovering a Russian effort- large in scale and well-funded- to influence the recent presidential election.”
Despite polling in the single digits, the pro-Russia Georgescu soared to victory in the first presidential election round on Nov. 24, stunning people in the European Union and NATO member state.
The declassified files released Wednesday evening that showed Georgescu benefited from a Russia-style booster campaign on the TikTok platform with thousands of accounts including 800 which had been created in 2016. They also showed compromised login data to Romanian election websites and over 85,000 cyber attacks during the election.
The poll conducted after the revelation was carried out on a sample of 5,505 people .
The Intel Atlas survey has a margin of error of +-1.1%, and a 95% confidence level, and was conducted using the digital random recruitment method.
