No fraud committed during the first round of the presidential elections in Romania. The Romanian Constitutional Court confirmed this after recounting the ballots. The recount was decided due to accusations launched by Christian Terhes, a candidate who withdrew early from the elections, who claimed that his votes had been illicitly transferred to the pro-Russian Calin Georgescu, who then came to the top in the first round with 22.9 percent of the votes. votes.
For this reason the Court had ordered the recalculation of the first round votes, also due to the other accusations on the dominant role assumed by TikTok in Georgescu’s electoral campaign, in addition to the alleged foreign interference in the electoral process, in particular attributed to Russia.
In the end, the President of the Constitutional Court Marian Enache declared that all nine judges of the Court agreed on the unfoundedness of the accusations, thus validating the results. If the court had annulled the election, it would likely have inflamed an already tense political situation, with many Romanians suspecting that the country’s traditional parties without a candidate on the ballot tried to manipulate the result.
With its decision, the Court gave the green light to the opening of the electoral campaign for the run-off elections to be held on 8 December. The second round will see the independent Georgescu, a sovereignist and pro-Russian, clash with the centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi of the Union Save Romania (USR) party who stopped at 19.1 percent of the preferences in the first round . Lasconi is a journalist and currently also mayor of the municipality of Campulung, a town just over 150 kilometers north of Bucharest.
In the few days remaining of the electoral campaign, the two challengers will have to give their all to bring the still undecided voters to their side. The ultra-right bloc, as emerged from yesterday’s parliamentary elections, can count on three parties that entered parliament and which together exceed 31 percent (Aur with 17.9, SOS Romania which obtained 7.3 and the youth group Pot with 6.4). Lasconi for his part could count on a broad alliance between democratic and moderate forces to form a common front against the extreme right: in addition to his USR (12.3 percent), the Social Democratic Party (PSD) which won the legislative elections with 22.1 percent, the PNL liberals who yesterday obtained 13.2 percent, and the Udmr, the party of the Hungarian minority, which has 6.4 percent. On paper there would be the numbers to beat the right-wing extremist Georgescu, but we will then have to see in concrete terms how the various political forces will behave.
The surprising result of the first round had seen the sensational exit of the two favorites from the polls – the social democratic prime minister Marcel Ciolacu and the other candidate of the far right sovereignist George Simion, who came third and fourth respectively.
