Romania’s Ambassador to the US said far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu was supported Russia, a state that NATO describes as the most significant threat to the alliance and Romanian security.
Speaking a day after Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the presidential elections over Russian interference, two days before the runoff, Andrei Muraru said Mr.Georgescu would have been “a disaster” on many levels for the European Union and NATO member.
“There are many things that could be shaken if this guy would have become president, a puppet in the Russia’s hands, which would be a disaster for our security, for our economy, for our alliances, and for our future,” Muraru told American public radio, PBS.
Declassified Romanian intelligence reports this week described a network of TikTok supporters, some paid by a shell company that soon disappeared,” all instructed to post unified messages about what they want out of a leader, a family man, who’s honest and patriotic,” PBS reported.
The messages omitted Georgescu’s name, skirting TikTok’s own policies against political content. Instead, they relied on hashtags and an army of bots to leave pro-Georgescu comments, playing into TikTok’s algorithm which was spread throughout Romania.
At least one TikTok account used by Romanian citizens to promote candidate Georgescu on social media was financed with over one million euro, Mr. Muraru said.
Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State on Thursday said: ” And now Romanian authorities are uncovering a Russian effort, large in scale and well-funded, to influence the recent presidential election.”
Georgescu described the decision to annul the first round and delay the second round as a state coup. Rival in the runoff Elena Lasconi also condemned the annulment and called it “an attack on democracy.”
The largely unknown Georgescu was one of 14 candidates running in Romania’s presidential election. On November 5, Georgescu polled under 1 percent, yet three weeks later, he won the first round with 23 percent.
Romania’s government said his victory was thanks to foreign influence and, for the first time in the country’s history, declassified intelligence documents that describe a “campaign to circumvent Romanian law” to boost Calin Georgescu’s popularity.
And the government says that campaign relied heavily on a well-coordinated, popularity-boosting campaign on TikTok. Romanian intelligence says tens of thousands of TikTok accounts suddenly activated right before the election, some after laying dormant for eight years, and “The activity of the accounts would have been coordinated by a state actor
