On Europe day, Romanians showed their support in the street for EU, for democracy and against fascism

@EuroMod Oh, right, I now see the reasoning. I only posted this as a news myself too, haha. Thank you as well!

Thanks! For the record, I don't doubt it and it was on German news as well. The rule exists to protect us against people posting old/miscontextualized pictures -- again, to be clear: I don't think you were doing that at all.

/f

@EuroMod I'm sorry I did not provide adequate context. There was a march in support of the EU membership, given the current situation where the most voted candidate was a pro-Russian who more or less wants to sabotage it and sabotage the EU itself. This one was in Bucharest, but others were held in lots of other big cities across the country.

There were technically two such rallies this weekend, but one of them was in support of the pro-European candidate (organized by him as well)

Can't be external interference in all of these cases

I think you severely underestimate the incentives for foreign interference, and how easy that is in the days of social media and bots.

@kek the only external influence that has been going on was the Russian one, and it's been happening in basically all the European countries - if not in many of them: Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, probably the Baltics too, etc.

Yes, we voted against the establishment, and we now have two candidates that positioned themselves as such. However, one of these candidates has a strong nationalistic rhetoric, wants us to stop helping Ukraine, the country that literally acts as a shield against Russia to us, to not help Moldova and its people despite being a strong *unionist* in the past (it's how he gained the popularity of today) and despite moldovans and us being pretty much the same people (today's Moldova is the result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which pretty much drew the border of nowaday's Eastern Europe). He literally wants to leave two of our neighbors at the whim of Russia, and isolate us from the rest of the world, bringing that Georgescu guy as a president or as a prime minister (depending on what fits best) - a guy that said he literally wants to do away with all the political parties altogether (not just with the existing ones, but in general) - imo this is clearly extremely undemocratic.

The other guy that's running for president literally fought in court with the authorities for giving illegal building permits, created the first actually new party since around the '90s upon its creation (most of the others were just creations of older politicians becoming unhappy with their mothership and creating another party and another party, but not bringing any new face in the game) and won the city hall of Bucharest twice, despite facing an ugly disinformation campaign from the established parties. Once in office, he managed to get the finances of the city straight (the previous mayor literally bankrupted the city, but he hid this fact from the public out of fear that the creditors would start asking for money straight away, stranding the local budget even more), he contracted EU funds for repairing the city's heating pipes (we have pretty much the biggest central heating system in the country), bought new trams, new buses, new trolleybuses, stopped the lawsuits against the journalists (that, again, the previous mayor started because they were too uncomfortable), gradually closed most of the public companies the previous mayor started as a way to siphon public funds etc. Yes, he's not perfect, he hasn't really done any wonders while in office so far, there's still a lot to do for this city, but the intention of him is very clear and because of this he's a better fit for many as a candidate, even to the post-1989 establishment.

There's much more to say about both, but this is largely the political landscape we're faced with the next Sunday. Hope this also clears things up for you too to a certain degree. :)

I think our democracies have trouble adapting to new times. They're like an old OS where all the exploits have been figured out and are freely shared among attackers, yet we refuse to slap on an antivirus.

Case in point: anti-democracy candidates should be banned from the democratic process. They're using democracy against itself. Călin Georgescu was banned for this reason as well as the 0 funds thing, because really his biggest issue was that he had direct ties to the modern day legionary movement (the Legion were the Romanian nazis back in the day, even collaborated with Hitler and did a bunch of pogroms under the military dictatorship of Ion Antonescu). So now this new guy George Simion, leader of our far right party (of which CG was a member a few years ago but then kicked out for being too on the nose about his sympathies for the Legion and Ion Antonescu), he's literally running as his proxy and said he'll install him as PM. So, I ask you: why is this possible? Why ban CG from running but not ban his BFF who literally everyone agrees is only running as a proxy for CG? It's just bad law enforcement. Democracy OS needs an antivirus update.

EDIT: Forgot to tie the idea to what you said.

So, in this context, the exploits are basically the same. Information is also global, so all you need is some guys in a central place (like, say, USA) being heavily financed, and foreign influence can spread easily to local influencers looking to make a quick buck by just copying the talking points. A foreign government which wants the EU dismantled, such as Russia or USA (yes, USA: the authors of Project 2025 are gearing up for this next, and all the Trump-like leaders that popped up in Europe in the last decades were part of Steve Bannon's efforts to create a fascist internationale), can additionally just directly fund local influencers throughout Europe as they did during CG's campaign in Romania, or as they did with USA influencers at TENET Media who they gave $10m (which in the context of a foreign government's budget is peanuts — it's obvious there's a lot more money being spent on such operations, and they admit it).

To get an idea for the kind of money conservative influencers are paid, we can look at an example of USA money funding USA influencers: Steven Crowder was offered a contract by The Daily Wire which he performatively turned down in public, calling it a "slave contract", because really he wanted to make his own media conglomerate to complete with them. TDW in response revealed that they did this because Crowder (who pretends he's independent, like all conservative pundits do) had a previous contract with The Blaze that was just expiring, and then showed the unredacted contract they offered him: it was for $50m.

Put together all the dark money with the opportunists who think that by emulating these influencers/politicians they can get rich or powerful quickly, not to mention the real extremists who seize this opportunity to revive their sick ideologies, and you have a thriving ecosystem all pulled in the same direction by greed and lack of morals. It's really just scams all the way down.

Fair points. Not too familiar with the situation in Romania but it seems the people voted against "the establishment", as we've seen in other European countries over the last number of years. Can't be external interference in all of these cases although I'm not discounting that it might be in some.

My view is that in a healthy democracy any external influence wouldn't achieve such results but maybe I'm too optimistic.

@kek no, democracy is not when you ban your opponents. Democracy is when you sanction contenders if they don't respect the rules of the game. When they declare 0 spending in online campaigns, when they don't properly label their political propaganda material as such (even when the law requests it), when they do not disclose their spending but they spend huge amounts of cash coming from far-right affiliates and other sketchy sources, when they threaten with riots or outright coups involving mercenaries that fought in Congo alongside Wagner, this is when the rules of the game are not respected.

I would be more concerned for democracy if we would have only two political forces and barring one from running would make the other one the only choice, than barring a sketchy guy from entering the race.

Just fyi, we had 11 candidates this election and we had 3 debates last week, where all of them were invited.

@Kennystillalive we sadly did. Many people voted for that guy and we, the others that are deeply attached to the EU and it's values are quite afraid of the possible outcome. Fortunately there is hope.

@witty\_username yesterday. There was a huge gathering in Bucharest and we marched from the University Square (the place of the bloodiest clashes in the 1989 revolution) all the way to the Victoria Square, where the largest protests hapened almost 10 years ago, when corrupt politicians like Dragnea were seizing the state institutions.

There were also gatherings in Iași, Timișoara, Cluj and other cities.

This is very late and I am letting it stand, but please note [rule] 10 we have here on the Lemmy community:

Always provide context with posts: Don't post uncontextualized images or videos, and don't start discussions without giving some context first.

@petrescatraian@mstdn.ro

Yet in the voting booth a majority will likely decide to put one of Moscow's sockpuppets in a position of power.

Didn't they just recently vote anti european?

✊

When was this?

Democracy is when you ban your political opponents?