Romanian far-right candidate prematurely and falsely declares himself the winner of the election, proceeds to confuse the flags of Romania and Chad

Talk about one orange braincell.

Yay he lost fuck him with a baseball bat

Little of both

They are idiots who once read a book on how to become a dictator and now think they are hot shit.

All these extremists right wingers read the same book, since they all use the same tactics.

• Spew lies as long as it confirms peoples biases

• Vilify your opponent and all their policies, using more lies

• Get elected on broken promises they can never achieve

• Call out a crisis in order to bypass the other branches of government

• Do whatever they want, blame all the problems on previous administrations or "the others"

• Make sure the population is infighting so they don't blame you

That makes them organized and dangerous idiots to me.

They're no idiots. They're calculated authoritarians trying to seize public narrative to usurp power illegally

see also the flag of Liberia

You are referring to the flag of the Republic of Moldova, the Romanian flag doesn't have a symbol.

One has the symbol and the other one dont. So its similar in colors but not similar enough, especially for a local politician, to confuse them

For the flag untrained me: i would still see enough difference to check which flag is the correct one

I mean I assumed that they had elections. Most places do.

And their slogan is literally "we didn't vote for this" when they voted *exactly* for this. Not a smart bunch, those.

>How can you, a Romanian living in let’s say Germany, vote for someone who has an isolationist policy

UK foreign expats living in Spain voted in favour of Brexit, and are now all upset that they have to leave and come back to the UK. They literally voted for this.

The basic problem is that most people don't actually bother to investigate the policies of the people they vote for, they treat it like a popularity contest and just vote for whoever they personally like. I'm of the opinion that people should be required to prove an understanding of proposed policies before they're actually allowed to vote, if only to the extent of a quick Google search while standing in the queue to vote.

I think he's taking a page out of trump's book and is gonna claim stolen election and stuff.

It’s sad to see so many people voted for him. He’s riding off the backs of desperate people, who left families behind because doing, say, construction in Romania barely makes you a living wage.

Is there a party willing to change these things?

Appreciate the insight 👍

One of those rare cases when I very much approve of A-not-so-I

Yeah, it seems to have been deleted.

Portugal did not and PiS is anti Russian, but also anti democracy. Not exactly a new idea that two nationalist groups hate each other.

If Bouvet Island ever changes their flag and all the fonts update to reflect that, there is going to be a lot of suddenly-confusing text out there!

My takeaway here is that vexillologists really like Pokeballs and/or Voltorb.

I don't understand, I just see a bunch of red lines. Where is the white?

While we're talking about Austria, if we're going to a subnational level, check out the Austrian state flags. Over half of them are just a red-and-white horizontal stripe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_and_coats_of_arms_of_the_Austrian_states

Salsburg, Austria:


Tyrol, Austria:


Upper Austria, Austria:


Vienna, Austria:


Voralberg, Austria:


Not to mention the state of Hesse in Germany:


And then Poland:


Monaco:


and Indonesia:


I zoomed lol

In 1959, after successful lobbying by the Gorsedd of Bards and others, Queen Elizabeth II made the red dragon on a green and white background the official flag for Wales.

https://www.bbc.com/wales/history/sites/themes/society/flag_officialemblem.shtml

It's not the official flag, it's just the flag that everyone associates with Wales but there is no official Welsh flag. That's just the one everyone's ended up using but if you look it up there is no standard definition for what the Welsh flag looks like.

What are you talking about? That is the official flag of the country of Wales. Just because it's part of the United kingdom doesn't make this flag any less official.

Yes but that's not the official flag which rather my point. They would rather have a giant and pointless arguement than an identity.

Well we can do you the dragon at least: 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

That’s awesome!

windows 10.

its the same on linux, because I'm running a half broken arch install.

Hmm. That's a good thought. IIRC fontconfig on Linux can merge different fonts with different priorities, so I think that someone could make a "flag override" font that has extra-wide emojis and has both the ISO code and the flag, even without changing the original font.

Good thing the codes are an international standard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#IQ.

Einstan

I get what you are saying, but how many country names start with I and has a Q in the name? I might be wrong I think it is only Iraq?

That doesn't really solve the problem either. After all which country is IQ?

Are you running something special?

It would be interesting to display the flag followed by the country code in a parenthetical.

And, if it’s been out in the sun for a while, 🇮🇹 can start to look like 🇮🇪

Only country flag without red, blue and white!

I like St Lucia's flag, quite unique but stays simple enough. 🇱🇨

Don't forget 🇮🇪 🇨🇮


they look fine to me :P

I have another one for you:

🇦🇹 🇱🇻

On TV I often have to take a second look myself.

Jamaica's flag is pretty unique... Let's all copy theirs..

🇧🇪🇩🇪

Also

🇧🇻 🇳🇴 🇸🇯

"These are all the flag of Norway" you might say, and that is correct. But one is for Bouvet Island, one is for Norway, and one is for Svalbard and Jan Mayen (in that order, here). Norway's national day was recently and it is fun every year to see so many people celebrating Bouvet Island (it shows up first in alphabetical lists).

The problem is no one has any imagination.

Put a dragon setting fire to a castle on your flag or something, don't just have three stripes.

When you are among the first: 🇸🇪 (first but we're at bro-war with them: 🇩🇰)

🇹🇼🇼🇸

🇱🇹🇲🇲 Myanmar why did you steal our flag and de saturate it?

🇺🇸🇺🇲

I always get India and Ireland confused.

I guess the solution is to send him to Chad to go claim his presidency.

The low hanging fruit is the guy 1. Didn't actually win the election 2. And he declared himself president of the wrong country

The right wing are such liars that grammatical mistakes are the least of their problems

If there is a single common thread that ties together the modern hard right upsurge is that it is absolutely fueled by the most transparent of idiocies that by convention we are expected to accept as everyday business

Notice how it's in English as well. That wasn't meant for the people of Romania, that was aimed at the rest of the EU, presumably as a sort of vague threat.

Well he's a Chad!

Seriously, I totally agree. It's dumb, and would have caused more legal problems had he won.

These people are like little belligerent kids that just can't help themselves not to do _exactly_ the thing adults just said is not OK to do.

I would have said the same thing about Israel but look how that turned out.

Just doing a Big Lie. These dorks are still working from a century old playbook, they're just doing it on Xitter and propaganda rags.

😮‍💨 also this makes the other guy look like even more of a doofus

Sure, but surely it knows that that unicode is the flag of Chad, and surely it's read articles about the similarities between the two flags?

🇺🇸🇺🇲

There are a few emoji like that. Those two above are different flags although I couldn't tell you which is which.

I don't think chad's has specifically described the shade of its flag anywhere, specifically. Romania has but Romania also used to have a seal on its flag when it was part of the ussr and removed it when it left (making it somilar to chad's flag)

Ackshually, the blue in Chad's flag is a shade darker.

That is the military flag with the emblem, the regular flag is the three colors and chad has the same three colors. The flag of chad and the flag of romania have seperate emojis thougn

Tried deepseek-r1, with internet search. It was clueless, and the I specifically asked why he might have mixed the flags up.

Given that Romania's flag (a double-headed eagle with two golden wings, red tails, and alternating horizontal stripes) is distinctly different from Chad's flag (which features an olive branch, sun, and crescent moon within a blue background), it is plausible that the mix-up occurred due to a simple error or oversight in copying text

Nuff said.

That's because AI models probably don't see emoji they probably just see the Unicode character but they don't actually know what it looks like.

Grok didn't seem to get why he wrote the flag of Chad though. I wonder if any other LLMs know the answer to that.

He wasn’t be serious, unless he decides he was (remind you of someone?)

They are. Romania has a narrower definition of the flag colors though.

Not even a little bit. And posting "I am the new president of Chad" is absolutely fricking hilarious and extremely on brand.

It is also horrifying and chilling in light of the actual results, because you *know* he's following the MAGA playbook and depending on how close the diaspora made him look in the end he was hoping for a version of the US capitol raid.

But if I'm going to have an opinion about this tweet it's going to be about that, not the flag thing, for obvious reasons.

You're not running for president though, are you?

Honestly, they look identical on my phone.

These are nearly identical on my display!

I cannot see any difference. (Firefox on Windows.)

Would have confused it with Moldova instead, I suppose.

But yeah, of the MANY things I can throw at this guy, confusing 🇷🇴 with 🇹🇩 when tapping it on your phone is not it.

Mostly because I'm pretty sure I've done it myself more than once.

At a glance, when small, or on a bad monitor, they can also be confused with Belgium, which has black yellow red.

Maybe they can pull a Canada and actually come up with a flag design that works so well for them that almost rewrites history.

For me chad seems like a bit deeper red(on the emoji at least)

That's just part of the MEGA right-wing playbook. They never actually care about the country they just care about the power.

I hear he wants to build a presidential vacation home on the virgin Islands.

🇮🇩 🇲🇨

🇸🇳 🇲🇱

🇳🇿 🇦🇺

🇻🇪 🇪🇨 🇨🇴

🇸🇮 🇸🇰 🇷🇺

🇱🇺 🇳🇱 🇭🇷 🇵🇾

🇱🇷 🇺🇸 🇲🇾

🇲🇽 🇮🇹

🇷🇴 🇹🇩

🇧🇭 🇶🇦

🇱🇮 🇭🇹

🇮🇳 🇳🇪

🇧🇴 🇬🇭

🇭🇺 🇹🇯

🇦🇷 🇳🇮 🇸🇻 🇭🇳

🇪🇬 🇮🇶 🇾🇪 🇸🇩 🇸🇾

The whole flag situation isn't really ideal.

The funniest part about all of this was that the exit polls were heavily biased against him. Like (last night was hectic so pardon my rounding errors) Nicusor Dan had 55% while this clown had 45% coming out of the exit polls, and yet he STILL claimed he’d won :facepalm:

Then he tried to pull a MAGA stunt and tweeted “I am the president of the romanian people, count the votes correctly!” Before finally conceding victory, all within the span of 3 hours. Needless to say, last night was a bit of a rollercoaster.

For more context, at least how I saw this crapshot of an election, this far-right candidate, Simion, capitalized on the fact that there’s almost 6 million Romanians who’ve left their home country bound for the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany etc. He promised to bring them home, offered 2-room appartments at 35000€ (the Simion Plan he called it), bogus claims, promised to bring back industry into the country etc etc.

Thing is , here in Romania the president has less powers than you might expect. He’s basically responsible for foreign affairs and representation, chief of the millitary and armed forces, and has the power to dissolve Parliment, but that’s about it. So even if he wanted to do the things he claimed he’d do, he couldn’t.

It’s sad to see so many people voted for him. He’s riding off the backs of desperate people, who left families behind because doing, say, construction in Romania barely makes you a living wage. But the cognitive dissonance is what gets me: Simion was mostly voted by Diaspora, or the Romanians living in other countries. How can you, a Romanian living in let’s say Germany, vote for someone who has an isolationist policy, who says “hurr durr EU bad”, while benefitting from all the EU has to offer? It’s simply insane.

…oh , man, that was a wall of text and a half…

Not much of a Chad, is he?

No matter what the country is, these far righters are always idiots.

Apparently Nicusor Dan won. Disaster avoided, I guess.

Can we talk about how "I am the new president of Romania" in itself is an absolutely stupid phrasing to use when prematurely declaring yourself the winner of an election?

@Hubi Grok knows all too well.

This kind of dishonesty should be taken out early. Criminalize it.

They’re extremely similar, Romania has a slightly lighter blue, but they’re both blue, yellow, and red vertical tricolors. Romania used to be more distinct, with a coat of arms in the middle, but that was removed after the fall of communism. Chad has complained, as they had the flag first, but Romania hasn’t done anything. Maybe this will prompt the new president to do something.

The all seem to share the same level of intelligence

!simion putin

One tiny victory at a time. Lets hope Poland and Portugal step up to rhe russians, too

If I were a person wanting to be a far right leader of a country. Romania is one of the last places I would pick. At least when looking back at how the last dictatorial leader of the country left office.

Easy bait

https://xcancel.com/georgesimion/status/1924166718122783128#m

>

Tweet not found

Does xcancel *(nice hostname)* not show the tweet anymore when it has been deleted on xitter? I assume it has been deleted?

Romania is not the priority, just like the US is not the priority for Trump and France is not the priority for Le Pen.

!"FALSE" in impact outline, above chad from the virgin-vs-chad meme template

No, ***I*** am the real presidente of Cha- Romania.

Didnt even know romania had elections. But i gladly woke up to those news

They look really similar though

TBF those flags are waaaaay too similar, and leaving the little logo off someone might just think the artist is being a little lazy or the design was simplified for emoji form. its happened before.

edit: lol, its hilarious to me that people are downvoting this. are they not similar? Or are your feelings just hurt?