România’s highest court orders a recount of the presidential election

Thursday, Romania’s highest court ordered a review of votes in the first round of the presidential election. The country’s highest security body also said that Russia could take action against Romania because of the shocking results of the election.

Far-right lawmaker Calin Georgescu, 62, surprised everyone by winning big on Sunday, even though he had been polling in the single digits before the vote. This made people wonder how such an upset could happen in a country that is a part of both the European Union and NATO.

“Unanimously ordered the re-verification and recounting of the voting ballots for the Nov. 24 presidential election,” the Constitutional Court said in a statement.

The decision makes things even more complicated for the elections in Romania, which are set to happen three times in as many weeks. These are very important elections that will determine the future of a country that has been pro-Western and a strong friend of Ukraine.

Georgescu has said that Romanian Nazi leaders from the 1930s were national heroes and martyrs. He has also said that Romania should work with Russia instead of going up against it.

He will face Elena Lasconi, a candidate from the center, in a runoff on December 8. At the same time, a poll for the government is set for Sunday.

A lot of people think that Georgescu’s win in the first round of the presidential election will help the far-right in the election for parliament.

The HotNews website got an AtlasIntel poll on Thursday that put the Alliance for Uniting Romanians (AUR), a far-right party, in first place with 22.4% of the vote. The Social Democrats (PSD) came in second with 21.4%.

“ATTEMPTS TO HOSTILE”

The president, prime minister, and defense agencies that make up Romania’s Supreme Defense Council, the country’s highest security body, said on Thursday that it had proof of cyberattacks that were meant to change the results of the election.

“A presidential candidate benefited from massive exposure through preferential treatment given to him by the TikTok platform by not labelling him as a political candidate and not asking him to label electoral content,” a statement from the council said.

There were “hostile actions by state and non-state actors, especially the Russian Federation” against Romania, it said.

The Russian government didn’t say anything right away, but Moscow has denied meddling in other countries’ votes in the past.

A TikTok representative said, “It is categorically false to say that his (Georgescu’s) account was treated differently than any other candidate.” They also said that the company had taken down videos within 24 hours of being asked to by the Romanian government.

Young people and Romanians living abroad gave Georgescu a lot of votes, and his campaign relied a lot on TikTok.

A top official at Romania’s telecoms regulator asked for TikTok to be shut down on Wednesday so that the platform’s role in the election could be looked into.

“BACKGROUND GAMES”

In a social media post, Lasconi said she didn’t agree with the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

“For the second time, the Constitutional Court is meddling in the democratic process,” she wrote, referring to the time the court stopped a far-right politician from running for president.

“One combats extremism through votes, not backstage games.”
Georgescu said in a statement that the government was trying to keep people from voting on Sunday.

On Sunday, right presidential candidate Cristian Terhes, who got only 1% of the votes, questioned the outcome of the election. This led to the decision to call for a redo.

Terhes claims that Lasconi got votes from a candidate who dropped out of the race but was still on the ballots, so she wants the Court to throw out the election results. The court put off making a decision until November 29 and asked for a repeat. The court will only say why it made its ruling in a statement that will be released later.

The top court has to confirm the results of the first round by November 29 for the runoff vote to happen on December 8 as planned. But the head of the country’s election authority said it would take days to count the 9.46 million votes that are currently stored in judge records across Romania.

Lasconi came in second place with 2,740 votes, while Marcel Ciolacu, the prime minister of the Social Democrats, came in third. Its nine members were mostly chosen by the Social Democrat Party.