That will not happen this week, when the second round of elections was supposed to take place. The Supreme Court of Romania annulled the results of the first round of the presidential elections in which Georgescu, as an independent candidate, had 22,9%. In the second round he was to compete with the pro-European Elena Lasconi of the Alliance to Save Romania, who won just over 19,18 percent of the vote.

But the fact remains that Georgescu was a relative winner in the first round and that Romania could get a president who profiles as a pro-Russian NATO skeptic.

The elections were under hybrid  influence of the Russians

The second round was supposed to take place a week after the parliamentary elections in which the social democratic PSD won with 22,4%. The huge rise of the extreme right, scattered in several groups, which received a historically high vote share of 30% in these elections, is significant.

Calin Georgescu used Tik-Tok to spread his anti-European and anti-NATO messages and win the first round of the presidential election in Romania. Meanwhile, the Telecommunications Agency has suspended Tik-Tok pending an investigation into alleged election-related manipulations. The videos have 52 million views. They became viral, produced in a populist style, accompanied by dramatic music and subtitles. Georgescu is shown flipping opponents in judo like Putin and riding a white horse wearing a traditional Romanian shirt.

Georgescu tapped into voter frustration over inflation and corruption, blamed the EU and NATO for much of the country's woes and argued that Romania's "sovereignty" had been violated. He also praised Ion Antonescu, the de facto leader of Romania in World War II, who was sentenced to death for his role in the Romanian Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard before World War II – one of the largest violent anti-Semitic movements in Europe.

One of his most popular TikTok videos included false claims that refugee children from Ukraine received more government aid than Romanian children.

"Do you know how much child allowance is in Ukraine?" What does Romania, the Romanian state, offer him? I'll tell you – 3700 lei ($780), and for a Romanian child the same allowance is 248 lei, for the same age,” Georgescu said in a Tik-Tok video posted on November 5.

The facts he presented were later verified and found to be false. Despite the false claims, the TikTok video, a clip of a longer interview with Georgescu on state television, proved popular, with 5,1 million views and more than 213.000 likes.

Georgescu relied more on TikTok than any of his opponents to get his messages across, said Dragos Stanca, a media expert in Romania.

As Politico recalls, he described the 1989 revolution that ended decades of communist rule as a coup that was used by the West to steal Romania's resources. He called the Romanian fascists of the 1930s national heroes.

He said in 2020 that bathing in cold water is the best vaccine against the coronavirus. This year he said that Covid does not exist, that no one has ever seen the virus and that "the only true science is Jesus Christ".

He praises Trump and Putin

In an interview with the BBC, in addition to declaring that he would cancel all aid to Ukraine, he praised Donald Trump and Hungarian populist leader Viktor Orbán, and called Vladimir Putin "a patriot and a leader." He rejected claims that he is a "Moscovan, writes Croatian Index.

But the West is most afraid of his attitude towards NATO. Romania has been a member of NATO for two decades and is home to an air base that is currently being upgraded to become the largest in Europe. Bucharest currently spends 2,25 percent of its GDP on defense, which is above the stipulated target of 2 percent. It is also known that Romania sent a lot of weapons to Ukraine and is a key route for the export of Ukrainian grain.

A well-coordinated campaign

In addition to expressing his political views, Georgescu also used Tik-Tok to post videos of himself going to church, practicing judo and running, apparently in an attempt to burnish his image as a pure Christian.

To ensure that his Tik-Tok clips were seen by the widest possible audience, Georgescu encouraged his followers to share and promote them with hashtags that included his name.

In what appeared to be a well-coordinated campaign, short videos criticizing Georgescu, some with his name in the profile title, were shared on thousands of other profiles.

This is a blow to security in Europe?

"The votes he got are against the establishment." This is not the choice of a person but the overthrow of the system, it was a vote against, not a vote for. If Romania is moving away from the identity of the EU and NATO, then the security structure is changing. It is hard to say whether those votes are defined by ideology or some kind of, I would say, hard-to-explain reflex to destroy institutions and elect candidates who are anything but what they are used to.

The wave of elections based on anti-institutional votes continues. We have seen this trend in other countries in Europe. This is extremely interesting to observe from a political point of view, but it is quite worrying. Such election results in an important NATO partner are an additional blow to security in Europe," adds Senada Šelo Šabić from the Institute for Development and International Relations in Zagreb.

It strengthens the pro-Putin bloc

The pro-Putin bloc could apparently become stronger again. The pillars are Hungary and Slovakia, through the activities of Orbán and Robert Fico. Although Aleksandar Vucic tries to maintain a balance between the EU and Russia, Serbia is also perceived as a pro-Russian country.

Austria will have to join this society if the winner of the election, Herbert Kickl of the far-right Freedom Party, becomes chancellor. Next year there are elections in the Czech Republic, where Andrej Babis, the former prime minister, is doing better and better according to the polls. He is famous for saying that he hopes that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO.

"We have a tendency for those who were in power to lose power. No matter how much we rightfully fear the new governments and politicians, who do not shy away from using the institutions for their own needs and autocratic tendencies, they must become reasons for the citizens. dissatisfaction is not only those who are misled and unaware

When you listen to the messages of those who are given the votes, it is clear that they exist to create problems and raise fears, not to solve problems. There is also an anti-liberal moment fueled by the idea against diversity of any kind, fixated on refugees and migrants, which only adds to the tensions.

Democracy gives such freedoms in policy making. But I am afraid that those we are talking about tend to destroy institutions in order to stay in power as long as possible, in fact they turn into autocrats and usurp power. "Democracy should not allow that," said Shelo Sabic.