Romania to recount votes as TikTok slammed for election role

Romania’s top court ordered a recount after a little-known ultranationalist candidate scored a surprise victory in Sunday’s presidential election, as a security panel said the contest was affected by a cyber operation aimed at influencing the outcome.

Romania’s Constitutional Court acted Thursday on a complaint by one of the losing candidates who cited irregularities in some precincts. Later, the nation’s Supreme Defense Council said an analysis showed that one candidate benefited from “massive exposure and preferential treatment” on social media platform TikTok. That breached Romanian electoral law, the panel said.

Calin Georgescu, a fringe independent who has questioned Romania’s membership in NATO and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, emerged from obscurity to win Sunday’s contest. The victory stunned the country’s political class, with top officials pointing the finger at the Kremlin.

Georgescu’s campaign was buoyed by an outsize following on TikTok, propelling him to first place after he’d been trailing in single digits only a week before the Nov. 24 contest. The result upended Romanian politics as voters prepare for a parliamentary election on Sunday. They’ll vote again in a presidential runoff on Dec. 8.

TikTok said on Thursday that it was “categorically false to claim” that it treated Georgescu’s account differently from other candidates. “When Romanian authorities contacted us to flag a number of videos that lacked identifiers that the candidates themselves were legally required to add, which was also the case across multiple other platforms, we took action on those videos within 24 hours,” the spokesperson said.

The court decision threw more uncertainty into the mix. Although Georgescu’s lead appeared irreversible, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu was eliminated from the race after he lost to opposition leader Elena Lasconi by fewer than 3,000 votes, raising the possibility that the margin could close.

The court said it expects the recount to be finished by Friday at 2 p.m. in Bucharest, a timetable challenged by Romania’s electoral authority. In a statement issued later on Thursday, it said it expects the vote recount to be done by 10 p.m. local time on Sunday, after voting ends in the parliamentary election.

While Ciolacu said he won’t comment on any court decision, Lasconi initially warned the court is playing with national security and asked the electoral commission to handle the vote recount with care.

In a statement late on Thursday, Lasconi said her party will challenge “the abusive decision” to recount the votes in the Court of Appeals and to the Venice Commission, a panel of constitutional experts that advises the Council of Europe, which is the continent’s leading human rights body.

The defense council, which consists of senior government and intelligence officials, explicitly pointed the finger at Russia, saying Romanian authorities registered increased interest from Moscow to influence public opinions and social cohesion. It accused TikTok of failing to label the candidate’s videos as election material as required by Romanian law.

“This preferential treatment was amplified by TikTok’s failure to respect the electoral bureau’s rules, and contrary to what they communicated, the Chinese company didn’t respect the electoral law and impacted the electoral process,” the council said in the statement.

It urged prosecutors and the other institutions to “urgently” take the necessary measures to clarify all these aspects.

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With assistance from Gian Volpicelli.