The Real Power of The Red Bear
Financial Times, on Russian-backed campaign in Romania (paywalled):
The Russian-backed influence campaign that prompted Romania to scrap its presidential election result echoes operations carried out in Moldova and other countries this year, according to Romanian intelligence reports and Moldovan officials.
The short story is that presidential elections in Romania were annulled when the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) informed the National Security Council (CSAT) that Calin Georgescu’s (one of the most obscure candidates) campaign was sponsored and managed by the Russian government.
Things precipitated a bit for several days, but right before the second round of elections (In Romania there are two rounds, where in the second one only the two candidates best placed in the first round are participating), on December the 6th, the Constitutional Court (CCR, the highest institution that guards the Romanian constitution) stepped in and annulled the elections.
I would rather not discuss Romanian internal politics at all. It is their business how they manage their stuff.
What I want to focus on is a modus operandi so obvious that most good publications don’t discuss it because it is obvious, while others consider it incredible that it cannot be real.
In reality, this is the new hybrid war Russia became expert in, in a matter of a couple of years.
Facts:
- Romania is a small (-ish) country in Eastern Europe, with less than 20 million citizens.
- It is part of the EU and part of NATO.
- Two days before presidential election round 1, 90% of Romanians never heard of Calin Georgescu. He was never seen on TV or in large online publications. He later declared himself as being pro-Putin, anti-EU, anti-NATO, but also a nationalist that supported the far right (some sort of Make Romania Great Again kind of message).
- Somehow, Calin Georgescu managed to win the first round of elections with 2.1 million votes (representing 23% of total expressed votes). In the second place, qualifying for round two, was Elena Lasconi, heavily supported by most intellectuals and pro-EU, pro-NATO voters.
- One week later, an obscure party, Young People’s Party (POT), scored 591,000 votes in the Parliamentary elections. More than 95% of Romanians never heard of POT, which was some sort of ad-hoc party made up to support Calin Georgescu.
- Georgescu claims even today that Romanian state occult powers blocked him from democratically winning the election, that CCR, CSAT, and the Romanian President are all frauds.
All of the above are facts. What follows are allegations, which are now on the table for European Council and Romanian High Court and Intelligence Services:
Allegations:
- In two weeks, Calin Georgescu was somehow boosted from zero to hero with the help of TikTok and Telegram campaigns
- Although he declared he spent zero dollars on his campaign, millions of dollars were found to exchange pockets towards influencers on TikTok and even Facebook (fact). Some of these influencers acknowledged the pays, some fled the country, some were taken into arrest by Romanian police (fact).
FT.com:
Alex Stremiteanu, who has more than 50,000 followers on TikTok, admitted in a post that it was “stupid” to take part in a paid campaign that was presented as an effort to get people out to vote. He said the hashtags he was told to use, including “presidential elections 2024”, were attracting “bots” to the comments section where they would post links redirecting viewers to Georgescu’s content.
- Telegram groups with hundreds of thousands of followers were also involved to promote Georgescu. Many of these groups were exposed by media and state agencies from the entire Europe.
- Moldavian authorities are officially saying this process also happened in Moldova, with the pro-Russian candidate that was beaten by Maia Sandu in their election. The big difference is Moldova is not part of the EU or NATO, so maybe their intelligence resources were scarce.
What is the issue here?
This may sound like a Shakespearean play, where many things appear to be something, while they are the opposite.
The speed:
FT.com:
“There is no isolated solution to digitally enabled electoral interference,” said Stanislav Secrieru, adviser on national security to Moldovan President Maia Sandu. “Interference now moves at lightning speed, circumventing laws before they take effect.”
The reason this digital / social network boost — that Calin Georgescu (CG) benefited from — happened in only two weeks before the election was for the authorities not to have sufficient time to react.
The quickest to create virals is TikTok because this is its DNA. Everywhere in the world, TikTok is envied for its capacity to boost content in matters of hours, through its algorithms and its thousands of bots that spread that content like fire in a dry season. What kind of content? That depends on who is paying, I believe. In the Romanian and Moldavian election cases, it appears to have been Russia.
The amplitude:
For years, nobody knew about CG; all of a sudden, he gets 2 million votes out of total eligible voters of 18.2 million, of which about 6 million went to vote. Considering these numbers, 2 million voters is huge, even for a well — known, fully campaigned candidate. CG was neither.
(The European press has largely overlooked that many mafia clans were part of the CG campaign, some of them showing off on TikTok with guns, threatening the Romanian press and politicians.)
The message:
Many good faith Romanians were angry at the political coalition that the winning parties made 4 years ago, against their opposed political platforms (one party being Social Democrat, the other Liberal). This coalition has been perceived as deceitful, a masquerade to keep the same parties at the power forever. This sentiment persists even today.
On that nationwide sentiment, a very thin idea was grafted, maybe months or years ago, that the solution for this discontent was the far right and no more political parties. It is a very delicate idea, especially in Romania, which has a history of far right (of course, a disastrous one) during WW2.
This far-right suggestion, together with the usual religious gargle, lead to anti-EU and anti-NATO drives.
The irony is that both the EU and NATO are very well perceived in Romania by the majority of population. Nevertheless, together with the other grafts, it managed to gather small minorities (in terms of adherence to an idea or another) and put them together under the same flag, like a Frankenstein monster. It happened to be called CG, could have been anything.
The moral:
- There is no way that normal, legal, and democratic elections can give birth to such an oddity like CG. There is no time, no know-how, no process, no guidance, no laws.
- The speed and power of TikTok and Telegram should never be underestimated. To my knowledge, there is no democratic country where these two channels strive, while the society and politics are doing well. These two unconventional, not transparent, not auditable media channels are Russian weapons, no doubt about it. The quicker the democratic world accepts it, the better.
- If two weeks + several million dollars managed to create 2 million votes for an unknown candidate that won the first round of presidential elections, and said openly he was pro-Putin, anti-EU, anti-NATO, in a country where the large majority of people are anti-Putin, pro-EU, pro-NATO, than this is not a joke. This is a compelling weapon: it is a stealth, mass destruction, mind — poisoning weapon that makes kings out of Russian lackeys.
- The presidential elections were never annulled in a democratic country in the past 20 years. Romania creates a precedent that needs to be learned from, instead of being scorned as an ex-communist, pro-Russian, Eastern European country.
You may underestimate Putin as much as you want when it comes to his hardware, loyalty, intentions, but to say this is not a modus operandi for a crime against democracies, is a mistake you may make only once in a lifetime.
Later edit 1:
Electrica Group, a key player in the Romanian electricity distribution and supply market, is investigating a ransomware attack that was still "in progress" earlier today.
And
The Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) says that on November 19 the IT infrastructure of the country’s Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP) was the target of a cyberattack.
The attacker compromised a server with mapping data (gis.registrulelectoral.ro) that was connected to both the public web and the AEP’s internal network.
Following this incident, account credentials for Romanian election sites, including bec.ro (Central Election Bureau), roaep.ro, and registrulelectoral.ro (voter registration), were leaked on a Russian cybercrime forum.
According to SRI, the attacker obtained the logins by either targeting legitimate users or by exploiting vulnerabilities in the training server for operators at voting sections.
Later edit 2:
For democracies, getting ahead of the game in this area must become an urgent priority. The improbable TikTok-assisted rise of Mr Georgescu is merely the most startling example of the use of social media and messaging platforms to bypass mainstream sources of information. With increasing skill and impact, Russia, and far-right parties across Europe, are using such forums to generate an alternate political reality based on viral misinformation and distortion.
