Serious polarisation is visible among the people of Romania

Maria Cheresheva, Darik Radio, 28 November 2024

Another interview with Vladimir Mitev on Romanian presidential and parliamentary elections. Maria Cheresheva asks him about the two candidates, who reached the second round – Calin Georgescu and Elena Lasconi, about the TikTok influence controversy, about the reasons for the surprising election results at the first round of the presidential elections and about his expectations from the results of the parliamentary elections on 1 December 2024 and the presidential election on 8 December 2024.

The interview can be followed with subtitles in English and its complete transcription is below: 

Maria Cheresheva: Hello again to Darik listeners! In our previous conversation, we made a very natural transition to the elections in Romania – something that definitely came as a surprise. Both observers in our northern neighbour and we are still trying to explain what happened and how it came to the unexpected victory of the far-right populist Calin Georgescu.

My colleague Vladimir Mitev is with me. He is a journalist, observer of Romania and author of the bilingual blog The Friendship Bridge, which monitors relations between Bulgaria and Romania. Hello.

Hello, hello.

Things continue to unfold quite violently in Romania in the context of the victory, albeit not absolute, of Calin Georgescu. Today, the Constitutional Court is expected to rule on two requests to annul the elections. What are the expectations for this?

Not exactly expectations but fears I see. To the extent that if the first round of the elections were to be declared invalid, this would create a great division in society and would raise the level of tension in society very much. On the other hand, there is already quite serious polarisation in Romania at the moment.

We see protests every night by several thousand people in Bucharest and in the major cities of the country. That is to say, Romania is in a situation where there is a contradiction within its elites, who are of different kinds. And it has to be resolved somehow, but it will probably take time.

Somehow, so far, we have taken Romania as an example of stability. There, the two largest parties, which ruled by rotation, had come to an understanding. In one of your analyses, you call this a Romanian assembly. And suddenly this has blown up from a very unexpected candidate, when in fact the polling agencies themselves had not predicted such a result at all. However, there is growing suspicion of interference in the electoral process through his TikTok campaign, including calls for the resignation of the local administration responsible for e-government. Could you explain a bit more about this saga of the TikTok campaign of Georgescu?

Yes, indeed, there is talk that thousands of bots have worked in his favour and have had quite a serious impact, perhaps especially on that part of the population that lives more isolated from the big cities or that is in the diaspora. He himself announced that the campaign he has led has had zero lei costs. At the same time, those ads that were in TikTok probably cost some money.

It needs to be clarified exactly how it was that he got a high visibility on TikTok, which itself is also a network that does not boast much transparency, and there are already calls for the European Commission on the Romanian side to somehow strengthen regulation so that this situation does not happen again in the future. And the vice-president of the Romanian equivalent of the CEM, the National Audiovisual Council, has called for the resignation of the Minister for Digitalisation, who visited TikTok’s headquarters recently, and it is not clear exactly what he was doing there and with what mandate he was acting. And from this question, again, I draw some sort of conclusion that there is a confrontation within the Romanian state, figuratively speaking, one hand does not know, or at least it seems that it does not know, what the other hand is doing.

It seems so. Question from a listener. Is Romania a TikTok country because the comments on there lead?

I think there are a lot more layers to this discontent that has led to this result and you can definitely tell more.

I can also comment along those lines – that it was not just TikTok that influenced the election. Even in Romania it is somehow taken for granted that parties have networks on the ground that can tilt the result one way or the other. There have already been online posts that have been confirmed by the mayors themselves in some regions of Romania that there was an instruction from the Social Democratic Party to vote for Georgescu. This is perhaps surprising, but the logic was to prevent Lasconi from being the opponent of Marcel Ciolacu, who was thought to be certain to go through to the second round. This strategy, if it is indeed the one that some mayors confirm, played a bad joke on Ciolacu as he did not make it to the second round.

Could you tell us more about the mood in Romanian society with regard to the government, because there are parliamentary elections this week. It is also very important what will happen in the run-off but presidential elections. But the parliamentary elections are no less important. Can we expect surprises there too, so that there is a fundamental change in the direction that Romania has chosen?

Indeed, the parliamentary elections are important because any president, whoever he may be, must have a majority in parliament in order to pursue his policies. So we will see more clearly from the results this Sunday where we are heading.

It has to be said that, unexpectedly, Calin Georgescu himself appears to have a party backing him. It is a party of young people that even has the word ‘youth’ in its name. There are several other sovereignist parties.

This election will be a test of how influential sovereignist attitudes are. It

should be borne in mind that the Iohannis government, on the one hand, provided stability, there were fewer revelations of corruption because the two parties were not in competition, the two major parties were cooperating in the absorption of EU funds.

But this government has also created a great deal of discontent precisely in the sovereignist sector, that is to say, people who are connected to tradition, more conservative, more religious. For a long time, I would say for years, while the form with the rotating prime ministers was in power, there were sovereignist podcasts that constantly set people against Iohannis, against the two big parties and in support of this sovereignist trend in Romania…

I have spoken to colleagues, journalists from Romania, progressive-minded people, who said that this format has guaranteed stability and some kind of forward movement for Romania in a complicated period, a period of war and all kinds of crises. At the same time, it has blocked anti-corruption efforts in the country – and Romanian anti-corruption has served as an example to us.

Yes, that is right. Thank you for your remark. I was about to say the same.

In fact, there is a second segment of society that is unhappy. Roughly speaking, it is the NGO sector. And in fact Lasconi, who is the other candidate in the second round, has the support of precisely the broad coalition of people who support the NGO trend in Romania.

We in Bulgaria may know about some successes of this trend, but it is worth saying it more clearly in one place, because it is very influential in Romanian society. We know about the children’s hospital in Romania that was built with donations to an NGO. If I am not mistaken, EUR 53 million was raised to build this building and return it to the Romanian State.

This, to me, is a sign of the trust that the NGO in question has. But it is also a sign of a large community or a periphery around this NGO trend that also believes and supports its people, roughly speaking. There is also an investigative media outlet in Romania which has a budget of over EUR 1 million and the vast majority of this budget is donations from citizens. For me, this is again an example that in Romania, the citizens have some resources, and not only resources, but also some social capital, some trust in their representatives, to whom they direct funds and support their initiatives. As a result, in fact, the Recorder is a media outlet that has very strong material and revelations and therefore is an example of how not everything in the media is in crisis in Romania.

Last but not least, the mayor of Bucharest and the mayor of Timisoara have come from NGO circles. The fact that they have gone on to be mayors of the largest, most influential and most economically powerful cities in Romania is also indicative of the support they enjoy.

I mean, we are talking about something else here, because some of our listeners might think, well, now the NGO sector is pulling the strings here. We are talking rather about a country with a quite developed and influential civil sector, am I right?

Yes, exactly.

Which does have good representation.

Yes. I had the opportunity this year to attend a show that was organised by the young lawyers’ movement in Romania, which is, roughly speaking, a grassroots movement. It is a show in which, for two hours, different people, citizens, professionals, show how they have made a change with their professional activity or with their life choices, a change in the public sphere. I don’t know if our listeners can perform, but it’s a very impressive two hours to hear about stories that are also somewhat known in the media, stories about how change in your country is possible. I think that this attitude and this show also has its effect on Romanians having a fighting spirit, as we are seeing at the moment, where there is polarisation one way and the other. But the Romanians have a feeling that they are on the right track and they are defending their line.

Good. In one of your analyses, you write that in the second round of the presidential elections, teams with the school of socialism, if we are talking about the candidate Georgescu, or those who claim to be the best of the new times, will compete. But both candidates are not from the leading parties. What can we expect from the parliamentary elections in such a case, if what we are really seeing is a shattering of the current model?

We shall have to see. I try to read the international press, and it seems to me that in Germany and in Poland, where Tusk is currently in the lead, particularly among the Tusk trend, there is disappointment with what is happening in Romania at the moment.

It is already apparent that the National Liberal Party, one of the two major parties, will support Lasconi in the next round. I do not know what will happen to these parties. Of course, they are very influential economically, they have a lot of staff on the ground, they have a lot of structures. The local elections also reproduced their power.

So, just as Bulgaria had a state party a few years ago and it remained influential, I assume that they will also remain influential in some form. But their representatives are not going to the second round anyway.

Yes, unexpected candidates go to the second round. Perhaps Lasconi is also being criticized in different ways, including inexperience.

This election was a clash of candidates who were flawed, weak or unconvincing to a fault. It was simply a very difficult choice for a large number of Romanians who are usually used to seeing who is the positive hero and who can inspire hope.

In the case of Lasconi, there are videos of her that have been circulating and they show that she is somewhat unprepared to a large extent for being president. For example, on foreign policy issues, she seems pretty weak. She speaks in general phrases and is not really very clear about what she has to say.

However, the conversations that I have had with people who support her are that they somehow see in her an authenticity, that is to say, that she is not like those schmeckers, as they are called in Romania, who have governed until now. For example, such a label is being attached to Prime Minister Ciolacu. And the fact that she is authentic somehow convinces people that they can support her. From here on it will be important, and of course, that she has to have good advisers, and maybe that is also the hope of the people who support her, that these advisers will be people who are trusted by them.

Yes, we understand that we can rather expect her to be elected. Georgescu served up a surprise, perhaps a sobering one, but perhaps now the status quo parties would get behind the more predictable, safer candidate.

It is hard for me to imagine that Romania could have a president like Georgescu, although anything is possible and Romania is capable of surprises. But Georgescu himself is considered strange as a speaker. He does not express any specific ideas about what exactly he thinks he is doing as a politician. There are some general phrases, of course, which are analysed – whether about Russia or about something else. But he has not given a clear vision. This development strategy of his with his own resources – how it will be implemented, who will implement it… He must have parliamentary support. There must be experts. These things are not clear at the moment, at least as far as I can see. Rather, he was able to attract an anti-systemic vote, which is easy to do at some point – to channel discontent. But if you really have to manage it, that now requires, perhaps, a different type of behavior, and resources.

Still, can we expect anti-system surprises in this weekend’s general election?

We’ll have to see if the sovereignist parties go beyond a sanitary 35% threshold. I understand from conversations with Romanians that this could be some sort of criterion. If their result is above or well above that limit, clearly something in the country is changing in a more permanent way. If they’re up to that limit, somehow the system will just adjust for Trump’s time, but it should be easier to manage than the incumbent elites.

Thank you so much for this thoughtful comment. I can also recommend the analyses that Vladimir posted on his blog and on Mediapool. I’ll even copy his article in our broadcast group – his first analysis of the election results. There is a lot more information there about both Georgescu and Losconi, and about this result in general, which may have come as a slap and a surprise, but there is a backgrounder that shows us that it is not that surprising.

We continue to monitor the situation in Romania. Vladimir Mitev was with us. In a moment, we continue with a conversation about journalism and theater.

Photo: (source: YouTube)

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