The leaders of Romania’s governing coalition parties also reaffirmed their support Wednesday for former National Liberal Party leader Crin Antonescu as their common candidate for president. The parties first announced Antonescu’s candidacy last month.
The announcements come just over a month after Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the initial election just a few days before a runoff was to take place between independent ultranationalist candidate Călin Georgescu and Elena Lasconi, a reformist candidate from the center-right Save Romania Union party.
The top court made the unprecedented decision and ordered a do-over due to suspicions that Georgescu was propelled by Russia into first place in the first round of the presidential election on Nov. 24, when he and Lasconi edged out Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu.
Declassified intelligence documents alleged that paid influencers, along with members of extremist, right-wing groups and people with ties to organized crime, promoted Georgescu’s candidacy online and especially on TikTok ahead of Nov. 24.
The documents didn’t directly state that Russia was behind those influencers — but they strongly suggested it. No more evidence has come out since the election cancellation to substantiate the allegations.
A majority of Romanians think it was a bad decision to cancel the election, according to a small poll of nearly 1,000 respondents by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy, a think tank. Georgescu would have won the runoff if it wasn’t canceled, according to the poll.
