Assignment: Dicing with democracy? Romania’s cancelled election

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A cancelled election, a cancelled candidate and a divided country – is Romania’s democracy under threat?

Last December the country’s Constitutional Court cancelled the presidential election two days before the final vote, citing outside interference, with the nationalist pro-Putin candidate, Calin Georgescu, riding high in the polls. TikTok sensation and portraying himself as an outsider, Georgescu’s anti-EU and anti-NATO message resonated with an unhappy electorate. His sudden success was unprecedented, as was the cancelation of a European democratic election.

The political establishment claim that cyberwarfare and Russian interference gave them no choice. Georgescu has now been eliminated from May’s Presidential re-run.

Historian Tessa Dunlop asks how this happened, why it matters and what next for this strategically important country on the eastern edge of the EU and NATO?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this edition of the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:05.0	I'm Tessa Dunlop and this is assignment from Romania.
0:09.0	The countries changed massively since I first went there in the early 1990s.
0:13.6	Nowadays it's a member of the European Union and of NATO.
0:17.3	Like many others, I was shocked when the presidential election was suddenly cancelled in December
0:22.1	after the first round of voting.
0:24.6	So I travelled to Bucharest to find out what was going on.
0:31.7	Following hashtags, following accounts, following specific viral videos
0:37.4	in order to create a network of how this
0:40.5	narrative is being pushed online.
0:43.1	Madeline Voina in her 20s plays a crucial role in this story.
0:46.8	She's the lead researcher at an independent think tank, expert forum, based in Romania's capital,
0:52.7	Bucharest.
0:53.6	My focus is researching the information space in the Black Sea region, with the focus on Romania
0:59.9	and the Republic of Moldova.
1:02.1	What we do and what we did in the last presidential elections is that we are looking at all
1:07.6	the political candidates and what is their performance online, what are the narratives
1:12.2	and what are the tactics, techniques used by them to promote themselves.
1:16.6	Things took a sinister turn when last September Madalina started looking at what was happening
1:21.5	ahead of elections in the neighbouring Republic of Moldova.
1:25.1	But we ended up in a rabbit hole in Romania looking at anti-Semitic content
1:30.2	and also nostalgia content about communism and the Yuan Antonisco regime in Romania.
	...

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