Romania's Presidential Election: A Carnival of Meddling
Călin Georgescu is now demanding the declassification of all documents that underpinned the Constitutional Court's dramatic annulment on December 6, 2024—and his subsequent disqualification.
The question of whether Romania’s presidential elections will be rerun has resurfaced with force.
In a public statement widely shared on social media, Călin Georgescu—the nationalist candidate who dominated the first round in late 2024 before being disqualified over unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference—demands the immediate declassification of all meetings minutes, documents, and evidence used to justify annulling the first round of the presidential election and barring him from running in the re-run.
US Report Blasts EU Elections Interference
Censorship on social media—where public discourse is voiced and, increasingly, where political debates take place—has long lacked concrete, indisputable proof in Europe. We know that platform moderation— a form of censorship carried out for reasons ranging from protecting minors and combating “hate” to thwarting foreign influence—is often shaped by pressure from Brussels and its regulatory agenda, culminating in the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The core justification for the European Commission’s aggressive push into Romania’s electoral process boiled down to one claim: a massive, Kremlin-orchestrated TikTok campaign that artificially propelled Călin Georgescu to his stunning first-round win in November 2024.
Brussels leaned hard on this narrative —citing Romanian intelligence about 25,000 suddenly activated pro-Georgescu accounts, suspiciously mirroring Russian alleged hybrid tactics in Ukraine and Moldova— to pressure TikTok under the Digital Services Act. The Commission opened formal proceedings against the platform for failing to curb election risks, demanded swift content takedowns, and amplified calls to protect democracy from foreign meddling.
The outcome? In May 2025, the solidly pro-European, centrist Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan—aligned with the same Atlanticist, progressist line as outgoing President Klaus Iohannis—emerged victorious with around 54% in the decisive runoff, defeating the hard-right nationalist George Simion.
Yet the foundation of that intervention is cracking under fresh scrutiny. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s February 2026 report, drawing directly from subpoenaed TikTok documents submitted to the European Commission itself, delivers a damning blow: TikTok explicitly stated it had not found, nor been presented with, any evidence of the alleged coordinated network of 25,000 accounts tied to Georgescu’s campaign—the precise allegation Romanian authorities used to trigger the annulment.
Later revelations from Romania’s own tax authority pointed to domestic funding behind much of the suspicious TikTok activity, not Moscow. Despite this, the original results stayed buried, Georgescu remained barred, and the rerun delivered the establishment-friendly result Brussels clearly preferred.
This sequence raises uncomfortable questions: Was the “Russian interference” pretext overstated—or outright weaponized—to neutralize a populist threat and engineer a pro-EU outcome? The Commission’s role, far from neutral oversight, increasingly looks like political steering dressed as platform regulation.
Georgescu’s renewed transparency demands now carry even greater weight. If full declassification exposes exaggeration, fabrication, or selective intelligence use—coupled with EU pressure on TikTok—the legitimacy of the annulment, the disqualification, and even Nicușor Dan’s presidency hangs by a thread.
