/December 26, 2024)
The weeks running up to the election: a campaign called #BalanceAndIntegrity begins on TikTok. Roughly 130 influencers follow a similar script to make videos describing qualities of a future unnamed president. Some of the influencers do, however, write in the comments of the video: “Călin Georgescu.”
Nov. 24: The presidential election. Georgescu — a relative unknown who runs on a Christian conservative, economic populist and non-interventionist policy towards Project Ukraine — surprisingly comes out on top. Disaffected working class voters back him strongly as he wins more than 2 million votes (23 percent) in the first round. As no candidate achieved an absolute majority, a second round was to be held on Dec. 8.
Nov. 28: Romania’s Supreme Country Defense Council (CSAT) announces that “cyber attacks with the aim of influencing the correctness of the electoral process” took place and, separately, that “a candidate for the presidential elections benefited from a massive exposure due to the preferential treatment that the TikTok platform granted him by not marking him as a political candidate.”