theSinisterMushroom
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User ID: 3332
An interesting tidbit is that voting had already started when this decision by the Supreme/Constitutional Court (CCR) came out.
Unfortunately, this is just the culmination of a series of events, which could maybe be traced as far back as the December 1989 revolution in Romania if I had the motivation for an effortpost. The joke being, Romanians haven't met a thing they couldn't steal, and these elections aren't even close to being the first.
For context, Romania's presidential election goes into a runoff second round with the top two candidates if no one has the majority of votes in the first.
After the first round results came out in favor of the far-right independent Georgescu and the opposition USR candidate Lasconi, I remember writing to a friend "no worries boss, this is Romania. Who do you want to win? We'll fix it, 'se rezolva.'" I wish my cynicism would have been slapped down just this one time, but you'll never be wrong being a cynic about Romanian politics.
The accusations against Georgescu are paper thin; the intelligence report declassified by the sitting president Klaus Iohannis (of the center-left PNL currently ruling in a coalition with center-right PSD) mentions such ominous things as old accounts reactivating, some VPN usage, and no IP address sharing between the pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts -- which just proves how sophisticated and malicious those darn Russians are. Also, Georgescu maintains that he hasn't spent any funds on his campaign, but someone has been paying TikTokers for posting/reposting his videos. And that's it. That's all it takes to redo the elections. Yes, there's Democracy, but within limits.
This charade follows a recount of the first round of voting based on another weak claim of miscounting some votes (no such claims were accepted by the court for the parliamentary elections where much more solid proof of fraud was provided -- but then again PSD-PNL won those elections so no biggie). Unfortunately the recount did not provide satisfactory results, so we have come to this.
As you'd expect, the current Supreme court is composed of all PSD appointees, since they have in one form or another been in power for 95% of the time since the 1989 revolution. Now, of course Georgescu is very pro-Russian, and may even have been supported by them. But I doubt any future elections will be restarted if evidence came out that Russians paid off some influencers to post videos of the PSD-PNL candidates.
All this makes me glad to have left that place. "Romania is a beautiful country; it's just too bad it's inhabited."
Edit TL;DR: the incumbent coalition didn't make it to the second round, so to save democracy from the Russians they had to restart elections. Next time make sure to vote better
An earnest love letter about what Donald Trump could become. What America could be. Will he live up to the expectation?
the bullet was actually divine intervention and God is winking at us
The point is that Trump is history, he is the main character of the world, he's the Avatar of America.
is everyone enjoying their run through the simulation?
Why not indeed. Cynically, because they expect they'll get away with it. Legally because they declared the elections to have been vitiated/corrupted, and there's no other real recourse. I also saw some posts about how the court had secret information that Georgescu might have won if the election continued, so they just had to act to save Romania (and give their buddies another go at it, but that's just incidental :)
Unfortunately for her, Lasconi may have walked into a trap. After the first round of results was validated (by the same supreme court which now decided there was fraud lol) she aligned with PSD-PNL in a pro-European coalition. Now that Georgescu will probably be barred from running again, all the anti-system people might vote for Simion (from the far-right AUR) who backed Georgescu. Simion may or may not be controlled opposition, but is the preferred candidate for PSD's Ciulacu to go against in the second round. It seems quite possible that Lasconi will not make it to the second round again, especially if one believes the reports of PSD funneling some of their votes towards Simion previously.
The law on the President's term is quite self-contradictory. It could be argued that the current president's term ends when the new president is appointed.
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