Opinion polls were nearly neck-and-neck in Sunday’s race. Almost 19 million Romanians had the right to choose between Calin Giorgescu and the liberal mayor and former TV journalist Elena Lasconi.
The latest polls even gave Lasconi an advantage in the second round.
But then on Wednesday, the outgoing president of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, declassified the intelligence data documents of the Supreme Council of National Defense, external suggesting that nearly 800 Tiktok accounts created by a “foreign state” in 2016 were suddenly activated last month at full capacity, supporting Georgescu.
Another 25,000 TikTok accounts became active just two weeks before the first round.
Romanian foreign intelligence said Russia was a “hostile state” involved in hybrid attacks, including tens of thousands of cyberattacks and other sabotage.
Internal intelligence has linked Georgescu’s sudden surge in popularity to a “highly organized” and “guerrilla” social media campaign involving identical messages and social media influencers.
TikToks promoting it were not flagged as electoral content, which violates Romanian law, the report said, while one account paid $381,000 (£300,000) over the course of a month to users pushing for Georgescu’s candidacy, in while he said that nothing was paid for by his company.
That decision to declassify intelligence documents changed everything.
Constitutional Court judges met on Friday to consider a large number of requests to cancel the first round.
It was a complete reversal from the decision made four days earlier, which approved the initial vote on November 24 after a full count of 9.4 million votes.
