Calin Georgescu, the little-known far-right politician, used TikTok to spread his anti-EU, anti-NATO message and win the first round of Romania's presidential election.
Romanian here. In surveys, it seemed like he was just another independent. It looked like another year of PNL vs PSD (natinal liberal vs social democrat).
Calin Georgescu had a lot of publicity on tiktok. I don't use that app, so i had no idea, but the man has nearly 300000 followers on tiktok, which is enough people to go from 2nd to 1st in a country with only 9.2 million voters, and a pretty close election.
At the same time, a lot of kids (mostly 14 and over) are now begging their parents to vote for the other candidate to make if to the 2nd round of voting, Elena Lasconi.
She is backed by a small party, and is more or less just a puppet, but it beats mandatory army.
The candidates from PNL and PSD, by far the two biggest parties, got angry and just quit. Marcel Ciolacu was the first presidential candidate from PSD to not reach the 2nd round of voting.
The way I see it, all the candidates this year were shit, but this asshole's by far the worst.