TikTok, Water, Energy, the Romanian Elections, -ESCU, Putin and Trump

On November 25^th the Romanians woke up to the stunning news that a man many of them had never heard of won the first round of their presidential elections. Of the fourteen candidates, the first three were: 1. Călin Georgescu, an independent who claimed that his campaign budget was zero; 2. Elena Lasconi, representing USR, a pro-European party; 3. Marcel Ciolacu, Prime Minister and President of PSD (the Social-Democratic party that has been ruling Romania for the past 35 years). On November 28, Iohannis, the President of the country, asked for a reunion of the Supreme Council of National Defense, and then transmitted its findings to the Supreme Court. The difference between No. 2 and 3, initially of only two thousand votes, increased in favor of Lasconi after a recount was ordered. On December 2^nd, the Supreme Court certified the vote only to decertify it four days later.

A 62-year-old agronomist engineer, Călin Georgescu has held various leadership positions, including a job at the UN as the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the environment and sustainability, which is ironic for an “anti-system” candidate. A quality attributed to Georgescu that comes up over and over in his supporters’ evaluation is “calm.” This shows up next to “patient,” “intelligent” and, sometimes, “elegant.” If one watches videos of him, one understands why: the man is attractive in an entrepreneur-type sort of way, with harmonious features and, when filmed in a studio, sporting very elegant suits. He expresses himself in a measured tone, emanating calm and listening with patience to his interlocutors, which in a Romanian context, where everybody screams at, and talks over each other, can’t fail to impress. The appellative of “intelligent” must come from the fact that he isn’t shy to express opinions about anything under the sun. Here, again, we are dealing with a Romanian specificity. Can you imagine an American politician talk about literature or give lessons in linguistics? Even Trump, who is unique in American political history hasn’t ventured so far afield. While No. 45/47 keeps reassuring us that he is “tremendously smart,” he avoids judgments on Melville or the like; not so Georgescu, who, like all Romanian patriots, finds a way to remind his compatriots that their national poet, Mihai Eminescu, was “very dangerous” (presumably for “our enemies”) because his brilliance was unequalled. As for linguistics, Georgescu claims that it was Romanian from which Latin was born, and not the other way around. Romanian, a sort of divine Logos, was the protolanguage from which all languages were born. Likewise, Dacia (the name of ancient Romania predating the Roman conquest) was how Denmark was called until the 15^th century. Other arresting ideas: men never went to the moon, and when one drinks bottled water, one ingurgitates nanochips.

All this esoteric knowledge, not available to the rest of us, is imparted with frowned brows, a virile jaw, and a penetrating gaze. The eyes play an essential role in the transmission of Georgescu’s message: when he wishes to underline a particularly important point, usually after revealing how Romania will soar again to peaks of blinding glory (though no one can remember when, in the past, Romania, has occupied such a dazzling position), he closes his eyes for a few long seconds, for dramatic effect. Then, he reopens them, as if against his wish, forced to “break the divine cord” to which he had tied himself during his interlude of mystical communion with forces out of our grasp. “Break the divine cord” is his expression—though, prone as he is to copying things without quoting them, it is likely he took it from an unrevealed source—and it refers to what happens when women give birth not naturally, but through caesarean section. When I say that he is prone to copying I am thinking, for instance, of the fact that in an interview, in order to prove how much Romanian society and education have fallen, he used for every single example numbers taken from statistics about American society, numbers listed by a character in an American film! (Incidentally, what does it say about the state of America that a Romanian nationalist who wants to prove the decline of his society makes his point by using American statistics?)

Occasionally, Georgescu waxes poetic: “When night comes, stars sparkle in the sky.” If he closes his eyes, we know that more is to be revealed—maybe an encounter with aliens, another of his many experiences not available to regular mortals. Or he announces with a sigh and messianic undertones: “You know, two thousand years ago, Christ too was booed.” He makes such pronouncements in interviews or home videoclips next to his wife, Cristela.

Cristela. I hope I will be forgiven a brief parenthesis inspired by her name, quite rare in Romanian onomastics and which makes one think simultaneously of Christ and crystal balls, thus accomplishing a synthesis that can also be observed in her husband’s thinking. Cristela is a healer, a naturopath, a yoga practitioner, a gemotherapist, a nutritionist, a clinical iridologist (google it!), a specialist in bioresonance and emotional therapy, who films herself dancing, singing, cooking and counseling at the same time. In fact, Cristela brings to mind many women I knew in Northern California where I lived for seventeen years. The difference is that they were not married with nationalist, pro-Putin Romanian men (N.B. the contradiction between nationalism and being pro-Russia doesn’t bother these self-declared “sovereignists”) —that’s what makes the Georgescus so unique and maybe so appealing in their East-meets-West synthesis. And speaking of names, do you know how the husband of Călin Georgescu’s political rival—Elena Lasconi—is called? Cătălin Georgescu. Are you confused yet? Because of its ubiquitousness, the name “Georgescu” has a ring similar to Smith, and so, of course, the memes on social media didn’t fail to appear. Occasionally, Călin Georgescu is mockingly referred to as George Călinescu (the first and the last names are inversed). George Călinescu, now dead, is the most famous Romanian literary critic.

Needless to say, the Georgescus are quite a pair! When Cristela lets us know, modestly, that all the couple says and does is simply God’s will, her husband nods approvingly. She reveals that, having been given no hope from her doctors, she was saved by God, and since then, the couple has vowed to accomplish his will. Cristela’s story of salvation and redemption is so similar to that of Jordan Peterson’s wife that one has a nagging feeling of suspicion that it is, like most other things in their lives, copied and pasted. Husband and wife have a common preoccupation: energy. According to Cristela, in women, energy penetrates through the lower parts, that’s why it’s good for them to wear skirts, while in men it penetrates through the head. Călin: “Everything around us is energy, Jesus knew this.”

The formula “Food, water, energy” was his campaign slogan, a formula repeated by young influencers on TikTok, some of whom didn’t even know that they were participating in a political campaign and thought they were simply spreading an ecological message.

One of these influencers explained, post elections, that many of the videos shared were linked to an invitation for people to “vote 2024” without making it clear that they were a promotional campaign for a specific candidate. Most of the videos were about “energy” and “water”—in one of them, Georgescu swims in a frozen lake and informs us that he doesn’t feel the cold; in another, we see him as a romantic, white-garbed Robin Hood on horseback (the image of a younger Putin comes to mind, he too riding a horse or playing judo).

If, leaving aside Georgescu’s excentric ideas about the environment, one wonders whether he has a specific political vision, here it is: Romania doesn’t need political parties, “the Romanian people is my party,” and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the antisemitic, mystic leader of the infamous Iron Guard from the 1930s, is a hero. Does Georgescu have an economic program? The answer is yes, but, ironically, most of his supporters aren’t familiar with it. In an interview for Politico, he revealed that if one nationalized Romania’s natural resources and charged foreign companies a higher tax than Romanian enterprises, “one wouldn’t need to be part of EU.”

When on December 6^th The Romanian Supreme Court announced that it decertified the Presidential elections (while the second round had already started in certain parts of the world), the candidate Elena Lasconi—who in just a few days must have gone through a rollercoaster of emotions, from someone who was barely known to the Romanians only a few months earlier to a candidate whose chances of becoming President were so high she was congratulated by Macron and the President of the Republic of Moldova, Maia Sandu—issued immediately a video with a declaration that can be qualified at the very least as strident and undiplomatic: “Today, the Romanian state trampled democracy. […] God, Truth and the Romanian people will win.” It’s not that she didn’t have a point—certainly, the decision of the Supreme Court was more than controversial—, but when a Presidential candidate makes such sweeping claims about the Romanian state, while so unpresidentially agitated (by contrast, the image of a calm Georgescu comes to mind) and uses the word God so unsparingly while sporting an enormous cross, one becomes a bit apprehensive. President Iohannis made one of his rare appearances to explain the decision of the Supreme Court and to reassure everybody that the Romanian state was stable and that he will stay in function only until the new president will swear the oath, but meanwhile, a new government must be formed and new presidential elections must be organized, the latter starting from zero, that is, starting with nominations by the various political parties. The Romanians have had enough of their current president, a Transylvanian of German ethnicity—translation: a man of very few words—who, to quote one of Georgescu’s fans, spoke less in his ten-year mandate than Georgescu in the past month.

The announcement that the Presidential elections would start from zero made both sides unhappy, and triggered speculations that someone (maybe in Moscow, maybe in Washington) desired different results. The only one who was happy was No. 3, Ciolacu, and this too invited speculation that maybe PSD was behind the entire drama. George Simion, the President of AUR, the far-right party that came second (19%) after PSD (23%) called the Court’s decision “a coup organized by nine judges.” The fury of the Romanians who, through their vote, were rejecting the traditional parties was palpable. Many of them acknowledged that it wasn’t Georgescu or the three extremist parties (AUR, SOS, POT), which took together 32% of the vote, that they voted for; rather, they voted out of spite and hatred for the three traditional parties (PSD, PNL, UDMR). Still, the distribution of the vote is puzzling: 31% of young people aged 18 to 24 voted Georgescu, in comparison with only 8 % of people past 65. How is this possible, considering that young people are, generally, the most pro-western, and the elderly the most nationalist and the most religious, and so, logically, the proportion should be the other way around? Does the election result mean that the voters simply didn’t know whom and what they were voting for? This is not the impression one gets when interviewing them: they are angry and emphasize their “anti-system” values. Shocking is also the fact that for the first time, the very large diaspora—one in four Romanians lives abroad—voted in proportion of 55% for the anti-EU candidate. But when asked, they either don’t believe that their candidate is anti-EU, or give other reasons for their vote, such as the LGBT politics of the Western countries in which they live. A lawyer sums up the general sentiment: “Georgescu is crazy as a bat, but at least he doesn’t promote mental illness as public policy. In the past, if someone thought he was a cat, he was sent to the doctor. Now, you have to pretend he really is a cat.”

During the month of November, Romanian Intelligence Services signaled 85000 cyber-attacks, a manipulation of algorithms on social media platforms to artificially increase Georgescu’s popularity, and large sums of money to promote him coming from a single TikTok account. The Electoral Bureau confirms that TikTok didn’t respect legislation in the way this candidate was promoted, and the Ministry of Interior adds that a hundred influencers with a total of 8 million followers have been subjected to manipulation. Herein may lie the answer to the question regarding the youth vote. According to the same ministry, Georgescu’s campaign, “Equilibrium (or Balance, depending on the translation) and Verticality” is very similar to the campaign “Brother to Brother” that the Russians have led in Ukraine before the invasion.

“Romania has been and continues to be a target of aggressive hybrid action coming from Russia” (Romanian Foreign Affairs Intelligence).

On December 8, when the second round of voting would have taken place had the elections not been cancelled, social media was hit by a cyber-attack according to which Romania was entering the war in Ukraine and the young men were called to go to the front. The same day, Horatiu Potra, the man in charge of Georgescu’s security, was placed on judicial supervision for possession of lethal weapons (a charge that was later overturned). Potra’s profile is rather ironic, given his boss’s refrain of support for “peace” when it comes to the war in Ukraine: a former member of the Foreign Legion, he is the owner of a company that provides mercenaries to fight in Congo.

All this being said, don’t worry, there is still reason for hope: the two main candidates, Călin Georgescu and Elena Lasconi, do agree on something: they both expect to be saved by Donald Trump. In a recent interview, Georgescu stated that if he becomes President, he will ask Trump to supervise an investigation into all the allegations against him. As for Lasconi, she has authored one of the funniest letters in the history of politics, a letter to Donald Trump, published on X on December 7, in which she reassures him that she isn’t “Soros’s candidate” and which includes the following marvels: “You have my respect for the great things you’ve done;” and “You are a great people’s leader, just like me” (https://x.com/ElenaLasconi/status/1865501542888976665/photo/1). To make sure the letter would reach the addressee, she also sent tweets to Senator Rubio and Representative Waltz, “kindly asking” them to read her letter to Trump. The mockery on social media was brutal—someone even penned a parodic answer from the American President—and, at this point it appears that, from almost-President, Lasconi has imploded.