Seven big lessons for Romania after hurricane Călin swept the presidential election

Extremist outsider Călin Georgescu won the first round of the Romanian presidential election with almost 23% and over 2.12 million votes. Many of us find ourselves in a moment of bewilderment against which the “AUR surprise” of the 2020 elections, when we wondered how it was possible for a quasi-nonexistent “extremist party” to enter Parliament, pales by comparison.

A candidate without a party behind him, without access to mainstream media, credited with chances within the margin of error of all opinion polls until two or three days before the elections, managed overnight to take the extremist-nationalist discourse to the top of the Romanian voters’ preferences and to push PSD out of the presidential finals for the first time in the history of post-communist Romania.

How was this possible? We don’t have all the answers yet, but there are a few things we should be aware of at this seismic moment. In Panorama, we looked at seven:

1. how TikTok has become a sounding board for extremist discourse that can overturn elections
2. who are the big losers in this election and how extremist candidates ended up with almost 40% of the vote
3. how the neo-legionaries and the Church helped Călin Georgescu’s success
4. how Romania has become so polarized and why we must beware
5. why opinion polls have become so irrelevant
6. how much to blame is the press, which is torn between captivity of its own bubble and anesthesia with money from the parties
7. what role did the catalyst “Șoșoacă banned by the CCR” play in inflaming extremists

TikTok is a sounding board that can overturn elections. How did Georgescu do it?

There’s no secret that the winner of the first round of the presidential election did so thanks to TikTok. Absent in the polls and from TV, Călin Georgescu hold an election campaign that relied almost exclusively on content posted on TikTok, often recycled from the candidate’s old TV appearances. How decisive this was in propelling the far-right candidate into the second round is not yet completely clear.

His voters, however, were mostly young people, INSCOP data, presented by director Remus Ștefureac, show: 31% of 18-24 year olds went for Călin Georgescu, so did between 26 and 28 percent of 25-44 year olds.

Georgescu’s strategy consisted of a coordinated network of direct endorsement accounts and a group of influencers who indirectly supported the politician, without marking in any way the paid publicity, according to Expert Forum.

“The campaign is a promotion of Călin Georgescu under the label #equilibriumandverticality and it supports the idea of a president who believes in neutrality, vertical, basically recycling Georgescu’s messages from the TikTok campaign,” they write.

Journalist Teodora Munteanu also identified Georgescu as the mysterious beneficiary of the influencer campaign on TikTok. You can find the results of her documentation here.

The bulk of the clips of Georgescu on TikTok are not necessarily on his account, but in a network of accounts that only amplify the messages: they repost and redistribute the same clips, perhaps with minor editing changes.

This network of accounts was also perfectly combined with the masked influencer campaign. Dozens of comments immediately appeared on all the promotional videos they made, in which people identified Călin Georgescu as the one they were talking about.

“These profiles were real. They were people with normal posts. But there were people who were reposting videos from Călin Georgescu’s campaign on and on. They were reposting dozens of videos a day. You’d think this was their part-time job,” says Teodora Munteanu.

What remains more difficult to explain, however, is how Călin Georgescu managed to win so many voters through his campaign, when he is not even the most watched Romanian politician on TikTok. George Simion, the leader of AUR, is much more active on TikTok, has more followers, is constantly “live” and talks to people.

Many people on TikTok have seen videos of Călin Georgescu in passing, they liked what they heard and didn’t bother to look further to find out who he really is.

Incidentally, Georgescu has no explicitly fascist messages on TikTok: “He focuses on the call for peace and people’s fear that Lasconi is going to get us into war. He also goes on grassroots issues, like people with toilets in their yards, low wages, real problems that everyone understands,” Teodora Munteanu observed.

The big losers of this election and the winners we should be scared of

Clearly, the two big parties, PSD and PNL, were the biggest losers and their leaders have already announced their resignations. But PSD is the big surprise in the losing camp. This is the first time in history that the Social Democrats do not have a candidate in the second round of the presidential election.

Marcel Ciolacu, who started the race as the favorite, got the lowest score of a Social Democrat candidate since the Romanian Revolution în 1989. He was defeated by USR candidate Elena Lasconi by less than 3,000 votes and missed out on the second round. He resigned as party leader and was replaced on an interim basis by MEP Victor Negrescu.

In the previous presidential elections, PSD’s Viorica Dăncilă won 22.26% of the votes in the first round of the elections, which she then lost to Klaus Iohannis.

The Social Democrats, much better organized on the ground than other parties, have lost traditional strongholds, such as Tulcea county, which this time chose Călin Georgescu. Moreover, Buzău is the only county where Marcel Ciolacu scored over 40%, and in two others – Olt and Teleorman, over 38%. For the rest of the country, most of his support was below 30%, with Călin Georgescu within touching distance or even above the PSD leader.

The Liberals are no better either. The electoral engine of the second largest political force in the country was also stuck. Nicolae Ciucă, the presidential candidate and PNL’s leader, failed to get above 10% in the polls, one of the lowest scores obtained by the liberal party in the last 35 years.

Moreover, PNL only managed to win Giurgiu county and came fifth in the first round of the presidential elections. Ciucă also submitted his resignation. Behind the scenes, voices are pointing the reasons for this disaster: the alliance with PSD cost them dearly and Klaus Iohannis’ second term of office has buried them forever.

The shock is all the greater as PSD and PNL have benefited from the largest amounts of state subsidies for parties. In the last two months alone, i.e. October and November, almost 50 million lei came from the state budget into the PSD’s accounts, while the PNL received more than 37 million lei, HotNews reports.

George Simion, seen as a favorite to get into the second round, was defeated on his own turf, the “sovereignist” discourse, by a more “extremist” competitor – Călin Georgescu.

The fact that AUR leader’s discourse became much more moderate in the last weeks of the campaign, in an attempt to attract voters from other electoral pools, proved a failure, with the effect that he lost voters from his hard core backers.

Beyond the political failures of the parties, the big loser of the elections are the Romanians themselves, according to sociologist Ovidiu Voicu. 48% of them chose not to vote this time around.

The figures show that together, Georgescu and Simion, the candidates with an extremist, anti-Western discourse, won around 37% of the Romanian vote in this round. In the summer’s European parliamentary elections, AUR and SOS combined for only 20% of the vote, even though they won around 30% in the diaspora. It is perhaps the snapshot of the moment that matters most and should give us most food for thought.

It is, however, also the result of a lineup of presidential candidates who failed to make much of an impression even with their own supporters, even though Elena Lasconi managed the best score in the party’s presidential history for the USR (since Dan Barna’s 15% in 2019).

The legionary discourse has a grass-roots following, and the Church amplifies it

It is hard to accept, as a moderate voter, that a candidate with the characteristics of Călin Georgescu has jumped to the lead. And it’s hard to accept that he did so without the support of a party apparatus. But that support is only apparently lacking.

Beyond the circulated theories that a big party – PSD or PNL – would have pumped votes for Călin Georgescu with the help of its own party apparatus, one only needs to look a bit into Georgescu’s history to realize that the networks in the territory were long established.

In 2021, Georgescu launched the Homeland Movement (Pământul Strămoșesc), a platform that on Facebook lists as its aim “the promotion and support of small producers, peasant farming, arts, crafts, family, faith”.

Those who have studied the phenomenon and are familiar with its resorts, such as Adina Marincea, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania “Elie Wiesel” (INSHR), say that Călin Georgescu’s movement has built offline networks in the countryside, in different communities, by associating with grassroots organizations, which are known for their neo-legionary profile.

Călin Georgescu appears in various photos, in the presence of figures associated with the legionary movement, and his speech borrows key words that resonate with the those nostalgic for Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder of the legionary movement in Romania.

“He came with a kind of promise,” the researcher adds, “that he is fair and honest, that he doesn’t compromise, like George Simion does,” and this promise has spread among those disillusioned with any form of mainstream politics.

Nor can priests be excluded from this network. Even though the Romanian Orthodox Church forbids its clergy from politics and has published a guideline for this election year, there are several factions that pay little heed to what is being relayed from the center.

Archbishop Teodosie, the most prominent Orthodox cleric to do so, has long-standing connections to neo-legionary movements. Since 2016, Teodosie has been attending legionary commemorations, the INSHR expert points out. Călin Georgescu himself was allowed to give political speeches in church during the pandemic.

When it comes to this topic, the position of the Orthodox Church seems duplicitous. It canonized 16 monks and hierarchs this year, three of whom were known to have links to the legionary movement. “Even at the central level,” adds Adina Marincea, “the BOR is contributing to the rehabilitation of legionaries and fascists.”

The fissures of polarization between Romanians living in parallel worlds are deepening

Is 2024 the year in which Romania has also been infected by the global disease of disunity, of countries with deepening gaps between citizens, over which no one builds bridges? We look behind the BEC figures at the coagulation of two Romanias: the one that voted for Călin Georgescu and George Simion and the “other”/”others”.

“We have a diverse Romania, I don’t know if we have two Romanias,” says Ovidiu Voicu, executive director of the Center for Public Innovation.

We should understand that, in fact, Romania is a country with “many faces”, which we must learn to read, says the sociologist. And that “we have quite a high degree of fragmentation “.

At the same time, the dialog has clearly broken down. Between the press and the public, between citizens and politicians, but more importantly between us, the citizens.

This year, the Independent Journalism Centre (CJI), one of the few organizations doing civic education and media literacy in Romania, ran a project in seven small towns in the country, targeting young people who are voting for the first time this election season. Almost 450 students took part. At one point, they were given an exercise: to write on an A4 sheet of paper, in four quadrants, what interests them, their mom, dad and grandparents.

“They want money, money and a well-paid job – so still money. Their moms want them to be healthy, to get good grades in school and they want to have money so they can buy food for their children. Their fathers want money, better roads and are concerned about the price of gasoline, and their grandparents want pensions and to be healthy,” Cristina Lupu, executive director of the CJI, told Panorama.

It’s something we can all understand, things that affect us all. “The rise in prices in recent years, the life that has become harder and harder have been felt in people’s everyday reality, even if it wasn’t felt on TV,” she says.

The most dangerous trap we can fall into is one in which one group of voters disregards the others, in which we draw imaginary lines that we imagine we can’t cross.

Opinion polls missed, again, the elephant in the room

As in 2020, when AUR seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and entered Parliament with 9%, in 2024 the Călin Georgescu phenomenon also went under the radar of the mainstream media and public opinion pollsters. He was rated at “and others”, somewhere within the polls’ margin of error, until the last two or three days before the elections. For its part, the press had no reason to focus on an extremist candidate who was rated as having no presidential stake.

The last poll, published just a few days before the first round of the presidential elections, credited Călin Georgescu with 10,6% of the votes, but it was not even half of the result he would eventually obtain. The Verifield poll, commissioned by USR, had given the PSD candidate Marcel Ciolacu as the clear winner. Elena Lasconi and George Simion were neck and neck for second and third place.

Representatives of AtlasIntel, another polling house that managed to capture a small part of Georgescu’s vertiginous trend, indicating a 6.2% support for him three days before the polls, explained for HotNews that there could be several reasons for this big pollster’s failure.

One of them would be the “mobilization of a hidden voter base”, i.e. those who usually do not participate in the vote and who decided at the last minute to go and elect Călin Georgescu. The opinion polls also did not collect data from TikTok, where the independent’s campaign was conducted.

Sociologist Ovidiu Voicu recalls for Panorama that the same problems have arisen even in America, where “the school of social statistics is among the best in the world”. Even so, changes are needed in future methodology, precisely so that it reflects the reality on the ground.

He recalls that the opinion polls underestimated another independent this year, Nicu Ștefănuță, re-elected to the European Parliament on a progressive platform, completely different from that of Călin Georgescu.

“They have in common that they came up with some very good online campaigns, in particular on TikTok, which is not regulated in Romania. This gives us an indication that we should probably look more carefully when measuring public opinion, that we don’t measure well enough how opinions coagulate online,” says Voicu.

While statistical errors can occur in pre-election polls, perhaps due to a “spiral of silence” (people do not recognize who they will vote for), these errors should not have occurred in exit polls, says Voicu.

Between the exit-poll results and the official results, there was a difference of about six percent regarding Călin Georgescu.

The press didn’t know where to look and remained trapped in its own bubble

As for the press, this election proves once again one of its greatest shortcomings: journalists should “be where the public is”, as Cristina Lupu, director of the Independent Journalism Center (CJI), explains to Panorama.

Călin Georgescu has managed to impose his agenda separate from the one that has monopolized the public debate. But perhaps journalists who are still doing their job honestly, in newsrooms unamortized by party funding, have the excuse of limited resources, which they have to divide among the “targets” that seem at the moment to be the most relevant.

“I think we’ve been living in parallel pieces, that is, the public opinion polling agencies have totally failed, and the journalists, those who tried to do media coverage of the election campaign, didn’t look at it closely enough, because it wasn’t among the top. If the polls consistently put him in the 11th place and you, as a journalist, have limited resources of time, money and energy, you look at the candidates who are there in the top 5, which you can document,” says the CJI director.

Cristina Lupu points out that a large part of the investigations and materials targeting the presidential candidates came from the alternative press, independent journalism, i.e. the part of the press “with the least resources”.

But a lesson for the Romanian press must remain.

The elimination of Diana Șoșoacă from the electoral race has poured gas on fire

A good catalyst of extremist, anti-Western, nationalist votes was Diana Șoșoacă. She was already in a permanent battle on this electoral slice with George Simion (AUR). Her removal from the race by the Constitutional Court, in a highly controversial and legally groundless decision, we can intuitively guess that it created space for votes for Călin Georgescu, and even aroused the anger of people who would have voted in that direction.

Ovidiu Voicu says, however, that he does not see much influence of this decision in the outcome of this election.

“Her exclusion from the race made a difference in the sense that it less fractured the sovereignist zone. Probably, if there had been Diana Șoșoacă, who, in her turn, was quite successful in the TikTok area, which is unknown at the moment, with 5-6% of the votes that Mr. Georgescu did not receive, it is very possible that we would have seen a different result, precisely because of the low score,” says Ovidiu Voicu.

On the other hand, AUR vice-president Marius Lulea believes that the elimination of Diana Șoșoacă from the race made a big difference: “In politics it’s like in physics, the principle of communicating vessels. When a party is eliminated from the race, some of its supporters choose an independent. We’re talking about SOS and the elimination of Diana Șoșoacă. Her supporters went to Călin Georgescu“.

How did we get here, though? We can see that it isn’t the usual culprit, but an accumulation of factors that a candidate has been able to exploit very effectively.

“It’s the fact that someone didn’t follow its mandate. It’s also about them, the voters, not checking the information. It’s also the journalists, that they didn’t inform and maybe the teachers who didn’t talk more about the legionary movement and fascism. It also has to do with the fact that the politicians, for 4-5 years, have made a mockery of what good governance and transparency mean, the fact that people feel that things could not work,” says Cristina Lupu, director of the CJI.