How bad you or I think he is is irrelevant. If the people's decision is overturned when the elite do not like it then the country isn't any kind of democracy.
What if it's so bad it would likely lead to lack of democracy? What then? How can democracy defend itself from democratically electing not to be a democracy anymore? Because make no mistake, this was what this election was about.
You elect this guy, you kill democracy. Essentially, this guy's platform was "let's try dictatorship for a change".
Ok, then the answer is simple for me. We kill it with something that is not fascism. And we try to kill it with something that does not end with the suffering of millions of people.
And we try to keep the best option that could lead to having a working democracy again in the shortest possible time.
So let the will of the people stand and then it will just be a democracy with a leader you don't like. Overturning the election is the fascist thing to do.
It doesn't, but if you're in a democracy and the majority well and truly does not want it to be a democracy, I don't think you can stop the transition. Attempting to "save" democracy by imposing a minority will on the majority merely guarantees the end of democracy.
Dude, you so much reveal what a brainwashing does to the people it is just unreal. We've seen that behavior few weeks ago after the US elections. How the evil has come now what we'll do etc. It is really a sad there're people who decide theirs truth is the only valid one.
Not much worth arguing about in this thread. Multiple sleeper accounts and coopted accounts with the same talking points about how someone who used illegal means to sway votes should just be allowed to take the reins of power with a fine. It's not logical and isn't real discussion just the same nefarious actors using social media to try to sway opinion. Get that good nights sleep and I'm glad your country didn't succumb to this new method of warfare like mine did.
You automatically jump to “anything but fascism” as a solution but that’s not a solution at all. That was Harris & Walz do-nothing strategy advertised as a “just don’t vote for Trump.” This type of anti-campaign is fundamentally rooted at brainwashing us to discount any and all fundamental problems to be solved. Instead, it relies on their constituents to rely on opinions, rather than facts. Relying on opinions and beliefs aren’t inherently bad, but when an entire campaign doesn’t present any other reason to vote for them other than “you’re an idiot if you advocate for a party that claims their election was hacked” or “Think about your daughters future,” that campaign is gaslighting the electorate to believe detractors to those views must be anti-democracy. Lo and behold, 2024 results come in and now the losing party cries “There’s no way the majority of Americans like this guy, early votes must’ve been thrown out.” Congrats, you’ve been brainwashed to only see flaws when your ideas and beliefs aren’t validated and reach for any explanation that preserves your worldview- even explanations that you’ve laughed at when presented by the other side)
It was not a democratic election specifically because of massive foreign interference. Democracy doesn't work with an adversary propaganda channel in your society. This is why RT and Sputnik news were banned just about everywhere in the West. This is why the US has given Tiktok a year to sell their operations to a US company or gtfo. After this I hope the EU follows suit, kicks them out or at least massively fines them into compliance.
> Democracy doesn't work with an adversary propaganda channel in your society.
So the insinuation is that people stop having free agency when they’re allowed to view certain kinds of “wrong” speech? Therefore they aren’t entitled to a vote in an election? That’s not democracy, that’s textbook tyranny.
The correct course of action is to stop the interference before the people vote. Once they vote, the will of the people has been revealed, the ruling party is a sore loser, and you've lost your chance.
Although in the abstract, we are on the same page, I think it _was_ a democratic election. With interference, a lot of it, but the will of the voters was CG. It's just that CG would have most likely destroyed democracy and destroyed our country.
If the end result of democracy is fascism, one can simply not allow this transition to happen in good conscience. I fetishise democracy less than I value the truth and in turn that less than I value not having people suffer.
We might have dug our own grave here, and the situation is pretty serious. I for one am not a big fan of the CCR decision and am thankful I was not the one to make it. But I understand how they might come to this decision.
He seems like a bad guy. If you thought he would manage to kill democracy you're wrong. Especially with the EU support for civil society and the possibility of sanctions if he did something really undemocratic, like demanding a rerun of an election he lost for example.
Orban has been doing his "illiberal democracy" (i.e. not a democracy) thing for 15+ years now. The EU is about as laughably powerless to stop him as I am to stop a punch by Floyd Mayweather. So it's kinda funny you say that.
He does some bad things but he would not get away with anything as extreme overturning an election based on a pretext like this, nor with widespread voter fraud. Eventually he will lose an election, just like Law and Justice in Poland. Judging by the polling trends that could be as soon as 2026:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_H...
The most fucked up part to me is (I’m guessing) the majority of the votes this guy receives were from people that lived under Ceaușescu‘s rule and thought “Yes, let’s bring that era back”. Similar to how domestic abuse victims protect the person abusing them.
You seem to be discussing the Romanian election in a vacuum divorced from the reality that Putin is doing everything in his power to sow chaos in Europe because the calculus just works for him.
Democracy works because it leads to reasonable outcomes for the vas majority of the population. If the election itself leads to unreasonable ones, it ceases to be a good political system.
You know about the old dilemma used for justifying the electoral college "the tyranny of the" majority". Well, me and my countrymen mostly judge that we were about to vote for tyranny in our country. An EC like approach wouldn't have stopped it because of the vote repartition, but only because of electors refusal to vote for a particular candidate. Well, actually, it kind of DID stop it because we had the CCR step in and declare the election null.
This fetishizing of democracy need to take into account the safely valves baked into the law for situations like this and a safety valve just triggered.
What "elite" are you talking about? He broke multiple laws that would made him ineligible to run, and therefore he is ineligible to run. Can you explain what's wrong with this reasoning?
It frankly speaks to your democratic culture, that you can only conceive of a candidate being prevented to run by a shady cabal of elites blocking the candidate they don't like.
Yes how bad he is is irrelevant. I read GP's comment more about how utterly impossible it is for a single person to keep up, let alone fight, the torrent of hyper-optimised propaganda that a few tens of millions can buy on tiktok. Maybe this illustrates why mass social media manipulation skews democracy towards the highest bidder.
He broke multiple laws that would made him ineligible to run, and therefore he is ineligible to run.
Do you have a link to his trial, conviction, and appeals? Was he given an opportunity to respond to the charges, provide his own witnesses and offer his own evidence?
Does the constitution really say, “if foreigners on tik-tok give you too many likes, you may be disqualified”?
You elect this guy, you kill democracy. Essentially, this guy's platform was "let's try dictatorship for a change".