The crime was almost perfect. Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown candidate in the presidential election, came close to becoming President of Romania, following a massive manipulation campaign on social networks, notably TikTok. Credited with barely 1% of voting intentions at the beginning of November, this pro-Russian and conspiratorial Romanian came three weeks later at the top of the first round with… 23% of the votes, without having spent the slightest them for his campaign.
Behind this operation, a “state actor” who, according to the Romanian intelligence services, has been preparing for a long time – since 2016 – this sophisticated attack, which would have cost “millions of euros” and involved, among others, the Russian media Sputnik. No doubt it would have succeeded if the Romanian Constitutional Court had not annulled in extremis the second round and postpone the vote, an unprecedented decision in the history of the country.
In Bucharest, we would have liked Brussels to react so quickly. But that was not the case. It seems that the European executive has still not taken stock of the large-scale hybrid war that the Kremlin is waging against the West. Certainly, the EU has adopted a new tool, a “digital services regulation” intended to combat the manipulation of information via online platforms. “But this system does not allow us to react in real time to an attack like the one we suffered,” notes a Romanian source close to the matter.
Thus, Ancom, the Romanian regulatory authority, had alerted the European Commission “in recent months” of irregularities observed on TikTok and the lack of collaboration from the Chinese social network. Without success. Fearing being accused of interference – a real issue in a country traumatized by communism, where distrust of institutions is strong – Brussels has remained in the background. Wrongly. Too slow to react, too timid, Europe is not capable of coming to the aid of a member state when it suffers this type of aggression, now considered by NATO as a major problem for our democracies. What if we started by equipping ourselves with suitable tools? For example, by regulating the financing of online political campaigns to make it less opaque. “Rules have just been adopted, slips a diplomat, but they will not be implemented before… the end of 2025.” An eternity for the Kremlin and its massive propaganda weapons.