Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu has millions of likes on TikTok and hundreds of thousands of followers. He ran a successful social media campaign to emerge victorious in the first round of the country's presidential elections.
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00:00Romania is reeling from the unexpected rise of far-right extremist Kalin Georgescu, who
00:08won Sunday's first round of the presidential elections as an independent.
00:13His come-up went unnoticed by the political system, with his victory representing the
00:17first time a fringe candidate won a national election solely through a sophisticated media
00:23campaign.
00:24Georgescu wrote a wave of public discontentment with the political establishment, combined
00:29with an intensive, years-long social media assault filled with anti-Western rhetoric.
00:35He is selling an utopic story.
00:37He is selling a dream for conservative Romanians as an opposite to the classical politicians
00:45that are very transactional.
00:47We have now a TikTok messiah or something like that, very successful, and we are not
00:53sure if he will be able to win in the second round.
01:00Georgescu captured the protest vote against the mainstream political parties and their
01:05economic performance, using a well-oiled social media machine, propagating extreme nationalist
01:12and pro-Russian messages to devout followers.
01:16A very important thing is this idea of viralization, of propaganda and the use of hashtags, which
01:26somehow presupposes some effects of people, this time I am not talking about bots and algorithms,
01:35which are somehow extremely activated, so to speak, and the pseudo-messianic discourse
01:43of Kalin Georgescu, with the way in which it was presented, made more or less followers
01:49win, rather than, as we have in other parts, rational supporters.
01:56Bordering Ukraine and on NATO's eastern flank, Georgescu's statements have all the hallmarks
02:01of a hybrid war against the West, following the same narrative which can be seen in other
02:06European countries.
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