| The law is pretty straight-forward in Romania about this and the court acted well within the law, which is pretty clear and not open to interpretation. The Romanian constitution grants this court the assignment to "ensure compliance with the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and confirms the voting results" https://www.constitutiaromaniei.ro/art-146-atributii/ section F). It is actually the only court able to do this. This court (https://www.ccr.ro/curtea-constitutionala-a-romaniei-unica-a...) is different than the Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Court_of_Cassation_and_Ju...). Here is the court's decision https://www.ccr.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HCC-32-2024.pd..., you can use Google translate on it, look for section 14, where it specifies exactly what was violated. TLDR, one candidate had preferential treatment on social media platforms by violating this piece of legislation: https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/55481. Basically, all electoral ads or endorsements must be marked as such. People endorsing candidates on their own is one thing, but influencers were bought off with dark campaign money (the candidate declared a campaign budget of 0 RON - absolutely ludicrous) and alongside a huge bot farm on tiktok (confirmed by tiktok here https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-eu/continuing-to-protect-the-...) managed to give this candidate a very large lead in the race. At this point in the race, there were 3 options, none of them comfortable: - cancel the election and try again later (what actually happens). Meanwhile law enforcement started investigating the money trail and now they also found a bunch of instigators who were ready to start a 'protest' with guns (which are super illegal in Romania) and flashbangs - allow the election to happen and open the country to the risk of other candidates attacking the result in court (because of the aforementioned laws) - longer headache - allow the election to happen and pretend everything is fine (which happened in the US and the UK in 2016) Don't listen to the noise on hackernews, aside from the extremists and the constant contrarians, this decision was fairly well received by the general population. Keep in mind that Romania is currently fighting a hybrid war with Russia and the propaganda attacks are everywhere on the internet. The court did the right thing, democracy didn't 'die' in Romania, this is actually the type of event when the 'checks and balances' within a state need to work and work they did. This is an unprecedented decision, but unprecedented in the country's context is not such a big deal, as we're only in the 34th year of our current democratic stint, literally the 8th time in Romania's history when we get to vote in a presidential election (the first 'election' doesn't count as it was provisional right when Ceausescu fell). So it's unprecedented but it's not based on some open interpretation of the law, it's pretty straightforward. ISW also has something about what happened during these elections: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/likely-kremlin-bac.... |