Btw, the fact that Euroskeptic, far-right Simion quickly backed down from his initial claim he had won, conceded, and congratulated his opponent is the second sign that Romanian democracy is more robust than the American one right now.
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He expected a narrow margin and had planned for a Capitol attack in case of defeat. Note he was allowed to hold his post-closing poll speech "at his office" (Parliament) instead of at his campaign HQ as normal. That tells a lot about for whom some Romanian state institutions were really rooting for.
it's because we in the US didn't stomp the shit out of the denialers and liars from the get go.
We allowed them to fester, then take hold like a bad disease.
Now we're a country filled with gangrenous appendages yet we STILL won't cut them out.
I will have to disagree. The media is bowing down, the administration is constantly telling everyone to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears, and political opposition is being intimidated into silence. Not to be combative, i suppose we will see who is correct in the coming years
All true. But Ru has been way past all these things since the early 2000s. The US still has a functioning judiciary, plenty of free speech, assembly and protest, vibrant political competition, and oppositionists aren’t getting poisoned. The contrast between the US and Ru is still stark
Fair, I just get frustrated as I don't see the will to preserve any of it. There is an openness to collaborate and mobilize to the scale needed in Europe. Americans are running out of time but I don't think they notice. Or they do and I am just not seeing the full picture.
I really want to believe that, but Simion was forced to concede due to Dan’s victory being so decisive.
If it had come down to a 1% difference or less, I fear the Russian script for election hacking would have been followed, just like in the US, but a new and more effective version.
Good discussion between @popovaprof.bsky.social and @joopeydoop.bsky.social. Thank you both. I, too, feel the frustration of the pro democracy movement in the US not reaching getting to where we can topple the regime. But I remain hopeful.
One story is that one of his older supporters (another radical traditionalist) visited him in the middle of the night and told him that a real man accepts defeat. Even the traditional norms of masculinity are more robust in Romania! 😄
The Constitutional Court did it in line with the constitution and the legal process. Bush vs Gore clearly decided the election too. Either decision may be debatable on legal grounds but I don’t think they are a priori outrageous or anti democratic.
I think it does. There's nothing inherently undemocratic about enforcing legal rules that make sure the competition playing field is even and competitors don't unfairly get the upper hand.
the purpose of an election is to have a standard and legal process to transition power. when we let mr 51% take power, it’s not because the people overwhelmingly back him, it’s because that is the rule of how the system works. if you don’t follow the rules of an election, you aren’t running
if we make it a principle that we can never enforce the law on politicians because that is infringing in the democratic process, you are conceding to the corrupt and antidemocratic. this is how you end up like America.
That said, I’m not an expert, and I realize that experts disagree on this issue. But this does not make the intervention obviously undemocratic; in fact, reasonable disagreement is an indication of its being democratic, imo.
not disclosing 1m euro of campaign spending seems like a really bad reason to nullify an election. like he just didn't hand in a form and now you're nullifying 9 million votes. and the other excuses given (russia, tiktok) were bullshit
I don't know about 'undemocratic', in some jurisdictions like France or Romania, there's this sort of code of behaviour that elected representatives agree on, known as 'The Law', and if it's broken, even by political figures, there are actually things to be done about it...
Says who? If they managed to catch Melenchon pulling such obvious breaches of the rules agreed on democratically, I'd be quite pleased. And I am also quite happy that the old PSD couldn't propel a candidate into the second round, even with PNL on board.
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We allowed them to fester, then take hold like a bad disease.
Now we're a country filled with gangrenous appendages yet we STILL won't cut them out.
If it had come down to a 1% difference or less, I fear the Russian script for election hacking would have been followed, just like in the US, but a new and more effective version.
And this Jake Tapper hypocrisy is a warning sign that the "getting better" part is a 50/50 proposition at best.