The hard-right nationalist who lost Romania’s presidential election rerun said Tuesday he has asked a top court to annul the election results, alleging that foreign interference and coordinated manipulation affected Sunday's vote.
George Simion, the 38-year-old leader of the hard-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians had conceded defeat after losing in the runoff to Nicusor Dan, the Bucharest mayor who obtained 53.6 percent of the vote, a margin of more than 829,000 votes.
Simion said in a statement he has filed a request to Romania’s Constitutional Court to annul the vote, claiming he had “irrefutable evidence” that France, Moldova and “other actors” meddled in the ballot, but did not present any evidence. He also alleged that “deceased people” had participated in the vote.
He alleged “an orchestrated effort to manipulate institutions, direct media narratives and ultimately impose a result that does not reflect the sovereign will of the Romanian people.”
According to a parliamentary official who wants to remain anonymous, Simion "urged all Romanians voting for him to file a complaint with the Constitutional Court."
According to the official, speaking to RFI, "it is clearly a public relations move we see more and more often."
Sunday’s vote was held months after a top court cancelled the previous election in which the far-right outsider Calin Georgescu led the first round, following allegations of electoral violations and Russian interference. Moscow denies the charges.
Simion capitalized on the anger over the annulment of that election and, after coming fourth in last year’s cancelled race, allied with Georgescu, who was banned in March from running in the election redo. In the first-round vote on May 4 in the rerun, Simion won a landslide in a field of 11 candidates to enter the runoff
During the campaign, Simion portrayed his movement as championing conservative values like patriotism, sovereignty and the family, and styled himself as the Romanian analogue to US President Donald Trump.
He said Tuesday he will ask the court to cancel the May rerun on the same grounds as the court’s decision last year.
Hours after voting opened on Friday for Romanians abroad, Simion accused the Moldovan government of election fraud, which both Moldovan and Romanian authorities rejected.
In comment to international media on Sunday, he reiterated claims that people were being illegally transported to voting stations in Moldova, allegedly affecting 80,000 votes.
He also said that “we don’t have indications that dead people voted. If we will have these indications, we’ll have a press conference."
(With newswires)
I think people generally tend to dismiss them as idiots or people who buy their own lies.
That's dangerous. They are smart, they know how to manipulate and you thinking they're actually dumb helps them.
The reason they always sue is that they can't simply admit they're wrong because they would lose people. They either win or position themselves into the "this was rigged, just like we told you it would."
So even if they lose, they win with their user base.
The vast majority of them are that dumb. Even a surprising number of their politicians are genuinely dumb.
But yes - they're most certainly not all dumb. The people at the top very much are not.
But even they realize that most of their supporters genuinely are dumb. In fact, they count on it.
As I said, it depends on where someone falls on the right-wing "credulous idiot to lying sack of shit" scale. They all fall somewhere along it, necessarily, with the rank and file almost entirely on the idiot end and the handful of genuine powers on the sack of shit end.
No, the vast majority of them, those who are in politics, are not dumb. Not only people at the top, but pretty much all of them are not dumb and underestimated them is exactly what they from people outside their user base.
Nah - sorry. I'm not buying it.
Granted that most of those at tte top are not dumb and are instead evil, greedy, power-hungry and entirely self-serving, most of the rank and file have to be dumb.
Either they're so dumb that they think that the lies they're told are true, or they know that they're not true but go along with them anyway because they think that the face-eating weasels aren't going to eat their faces, which is just a somewhat different sort of dumb.