European Politics


You are massively mislead my friend. You are ready to applaud anything that is tagged anti-Russian without digging deeper. What happened there is setting a terrible anti-democratic precedent in Europe. Elections were annulled because the anti-systemic candidate who was leading in the first round on grounds of Tik -freaking- Tok influence. Are we serious? Then why not just expose him and let the people decide in the second round? Because he would win, that's why. Not to mention that this was even debunked because it's not the point here.
Now they are trying to stop him from running again overall.

Earlier that year elections in Moldova were equally rigged as the people who lived inside the country voted majority pro-Russian and the pro-West candidate was declared the winner by the votes from the Moldovans living abroad and a thin margin. With a caveat: In whole Russia only 2 ballots were sent, when collectively in West, hundreds.

In Georgia, a perfectly elected government votes a law to control the foreign interference (in Georgia there are ~20,000 NGOs about 1 every 200 citizens). European leaders press Georgia and give speeches to protesters trying to provoke a Maidan -style regime change. Even the President of the country (previously a French government diplomat!!!) refuses to leave after her term expired on the grounds of ....well there were no grounds. Now she is an empolyee ofJohn McCain Institute and a "Kissinger" Fellow. No, it's not a joke.

And more earlier in France we all know what happened. Do you see a pattern? When the candidates are systemic globalists all is good and we turn the blind eye. We can even bend the rules too. As soon as the candidate is America-first or Romania-first or anything, we label him far -right, or Putin puppet or fascist etc., and we bend the rules to stop them running or rig the elections against them. Or when they are elected again and again, i.e. Orban we cut the funding to their countries until we regime change them.

We are for a huge blind spot here. Democracy is not a-la-carte, it's precisely abiding to the majority results we don't agree.
Funny, people crying for "fascism" ready to applaud the cancellation of democracy if the results favour the other side. And about what fascism are we talking about when there are elections? If people vote for far-right now or far-left like in Chile in the 70s with Allende's victory, why this is a bad thing and must be stopped? People know better and their voice must be respected, no matter if we like it or not. This is democracy.

I'm pretty sure that if Farage or AfD or anything like this were elected many would be ok to annul the results like it happened in Romania on any bs imaginary grounds or even better not even allowing them to run. Except that is not democracy. It's the exact opposite. In many ways it's fascism.
 
You are massively mislead my friend.
Cha, cha, Kettle is calling the pot black, my friend :) Imo, Your information channels are exclusively anti west, pro authoritarian and even pro conspiracy, and you even don't understand it (or you understand it all perfectly well, but you are content with that). And yes, give me everything that's anti russia. This country must be razed to the ground. It's very easy to "understand russia" at the same time living afar from it.
I agree that abstract government may use social platforms to achieve it's goals and therefore there must be some regulation and control. But wait... what I am talking about, for You it's not the problem how freedom of speech is abused in russia, no no no. You always exclusively aim at the DEMOCRATIC countries. Sad but true.

For example, for me it's already a problem how Musk acts. Freedom of speech and all that... but he is richest man in the world, he has enormous influence, has X and so on. Therefore he must be kicked in the ass for what he is doing now. EU must to pass some serious laws to counter his influence. Democracy is not equal anarchy and meddling with elections. He is not citizen of Germany etc. (as far as I know)
 
Okay.

*deep sigh*

*inhale*

*exhale*

I'm Zen.

Perfectly Zen.

Let's do this.


Elections were annulled because the anti-systemic candidate who was leading in the first round on grounds of Tik -freaking- Tok influence. Are we serious? Then why not just expose him and let the people decide in the second round? Because he would win, that's why. Not to mention that this was even debunked because it's not the point here.
Now they are trying to stop him from running again overall.

This is a misrepresentation. The elections were not annulled because Georgescu won (I'm using the names of the people so we won't have to say "this guy", "a pro-Russian candidate" and things like that all the time), and not because of TikTok, specifically. They were annulled because Romanian intelligence services declassified documents containing evidence demonstrating that there was electoral fraud. The fact that it was in favour of Georgescu was secondary.

If you speak Romanian, the documents are available here. I'm putting all links in orange because otherwise they might be missed in a text dump as large as this.

I don't speak Romanian, so I ran an OCR on the PDFs and put them in Google Translate - I know, Google could be manipulating that, you're free to take the documents and verify elsewhere - and found they agree with what media have been reporting about them. According to these documents:

1. Over 100 paid TikTok influencers spread pro-Georgescu content without declaring it campaign material, which is against Romanian law.
2. Some 25 thousand largely dormant TikTok accounts, of which nearly 800 were created as early as 2016, when Georgescu was not yet active in politics, suddenly sprang into action in November 2024, sharing very similar pro-Georgescu content, probably coordinated by a Telegram channel. This phenomenon was previously observed e.g. in the 2019 Ukraine elections and is believed to be a typical strategy of Russian troll farms.
3. Georgescu, who had previously declared to have spent merely 1 lei on the campaign, was found to have received hundreds of thousands of Euros in illegal campaign donations, which is against Romanian law.

There are also reasons to believe that TikToks algorithm was manipulated in Georgescu's favour. TikTok denies this, but of course won't make its algorithms transparent. You should be familiar with that idea.

Plain and simple, the elections were annulled because there is evidence of fraud and foreign manipulation, and Georgescu shouldn't run again because he broke Romanian electoral law. If someone does that, they should be punished. Not given to the people to decide. That's not how the bloody law works.

Can I point out that I already did way more digging on this one piece than you did on everything mentioned in your post put together?

*inhale*

*exhale*

Zen


Earlier that year elections in Moldova were equally rigged as the people who lived inside the country voted majority pro-Russian and the pro-West candidate was declared the winner by the votes from the Moldovans living abroad and a thin margin. With a caveat: In whole Russia only 2 ballots were sent, when collectively in West, hundreds.

That's not a rigged election, that's how elections in small countries with large diasporas and mail-in votes work. 328,855 votes can make a significant difference there. There's no "rigging" if the mail-in votes are counted after the votes have already been cast.

Regarding the polling stations - I assume that's what you mean, because 2 ballots in Russia should tip even you off that something's not quite right - then again, you said "sent", so...* anyway: It's true that there were only two polling stations in Russia vs 229 in other countries (including such deeply western nations as Azerbaijan, India, UAE, PRC...).

Only 2 in Russia, but 26 in Germany, 60!!! in Far-Left Woke Hell Italy. Wow, shit, you're on to something. Are you?

Well, it's kind of disproportionate, but not as scandalous as it looks. The 2022 census in Russia counted 77,509 Moldovans, and it's not clear to me if they are Moldovan citizens or people of Moldovan descent who may or may not be eligible to vote in Moldova. Germany and Italy are higher, though not all that much (122,000 in Germany, 102,667 in Italy).

There is a report by Ukrainska Pravda about the polling stations in Moscow (linked below), but I don't know how true it is. I couldn't verify any of the information in there elsewhere. But of course, we must take for gospel the statement of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov that Moldova blocked citizens in Russia from voting, for... reasons, because the Kremlin only has Moldova's best interests at heart.

*or could this statement be contaminated by the news of the loss of two ballots in the Moscow polling stations?


come on Per, you can do this

*inhale*

*exhale*

Totally Zen...


In Georgia, a perfectly elected government votes a law to control the foreign interference (in Georgia there are ~20,000 NGOs about 1 every 200 citizens). European leaders press Georgia and give speeches to protesters trying to provoke a Maidan -style regime change. Even the President of the country (previously a French government diplomat!!!) refuses to leave after her term expired on the grounds of ....well there were no grounds. Now she is an empolyee ofJohn McCain Institute and a "Kissinger" Fellow. No, it's not a joke.

It's interesting that now according to you, the 2024 Georgian elections were perfectly lawful, when investigations have concluded that there were massive obstructions, human rights abuses and manipulations in these elections (cf also a summary here), something which the Georgian public was not ready to take sitting down.
The foreign agent law, modelled on 2012 legislation from Russia, was justified by Nikoloz Samkharadze, a Georgian MP, who claimed there were 25,000 active NGOs in Georgia. Get your numbers right, man. On this, I'll cite the October 2023 USAID report:

Legally, CSOs operate as non-entrepreneurial (non-commercial) legal entities (NNLE). According to the National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR), there are 31,339 registered NNLEs in the country, but only 4,051 are recognized as “active” by the National Statistical Office of Georgia. The large discrepancy between the number of active and registered entities is due to the cumbersome liquidation procedure, which most CSOs tend to avoid. The total number of registered NNLEs is also misleading as, in addition to CSOs, NNLE status is held by a range of public institutions that are owned and operated by municipal or central governments. The new Law on Entrepreneurship is expected to resolve this issue, as all legal entities are required to re-register.

Apologies. I guess Samkharadze should get his numbers right too.

I brought up your wording regarding Euromaidan elsewhere, so I'm not going to get into that here.

As for Salome Zourabichvili, I guess it's a matter of opinion whether it's egregious that she used to be in the French diplomatic service, but she had grounds to not leave office, namely that she contested the 2024 parliemantary elections (see above) by which the election of Mikheil Kavelashvili (previously a professional football player!!!) would be illegal, an opinion shared by Georgian constitutionalists.

Furthermore, Zourabichvili is not now "an employee of John McCain Institute and a "Kissinger" Fellow", but the 2025 Kissinger Fellow of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. We can discuss the implications of this, but what struck me is your choice of words: A fellow is not an employee. In my digging, as you put it, I found the word "employee" used in this context only on Russian government sites news-pravda.com and RT.com.

I bet that's only a coincidence.

After all, you wouldn't just parrot Russian propaganda.

And more earlier in France we all know what happened. Do you see a pattern?

Since the above shows that we don't agree on what happened in Romania, Moldova and Georgia, I'm not sure we know the same things about what happened in France, so let's hear your take and I'll tell you what pattern I see. In case the pattern isn't already obvious, already.

I'm pretty sure that if Farage or AfD or anything like this were elected many would be ok to annul the results like it happened in Romania on any bs imaginary grounds or even better not even allowing them to run.

None of the grounds detailed above are imaginary, my friend. I sourced them all. In fact, I even cited your sources. Now it's up to you to prove I'm wrong.

Yes, I would want an election in Germany annulled if there is evidence of fraud. It doesn't matter who would win it. But it's interesting that you mention AFD and Farage in this context, because who, just who could want to help them get elected illicitly?


I made it. Blood pressure is normal. I'm still Zen. This wasn't a waste of time. I informed myself in this research.

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You can't just go around using facts you know? Not allowed. :p

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For those outside the UK, the twat clapping so creatively is Michael Gove, former Tory MP who famously declared during the Brexit campaign that people “have had enough of experts”.

Nearly 10 years later, fact checking is more necessary than ever!
 
I first intended to add this video in my reply for the Romania case @Perun but this is so good I decided to keep it separated as an stand alone post.

This discussion features Swedish journalist & activist Kajsa Ekis Ekman who explores how after the war in Ukraine started, freedom of speech compromised and propaganda rise exponentially in Sweden, in a similar way it had been described in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. @Yax
How she lost her job after an investigation she did on Kyiv Independent and more.
Whatever she describes for Sweden it explains why liberal EU media outlets, intellectuals and free thinkers didn't bother to challenge the unprecedented annulling of elections, first time ever for a EU country.
Also she explains why in USA -unlike in Europe, its periphery there is still some basic freedom of speech.

"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that critiques the mass media's role in shaping public opinion and serving the interests of powerful societal groups. It introduces the propaganda model, which explains how media operates under economic pressures and biases to manufacture consent among the populace.

 
Noted. I won't tag you anymore, before replying. You don't need to reply now. I wanted to let a few days pass. I also took the time to ask a few Romanians and take some on the ground feeling, things like that.
 
Regarding Kajsa Ekman- let's just say that is not why she lost her job. Stop so easily believing propaganda. The editor-in-chief laid out why she was let go, and made it clear it was not because of the Kyiv thing, but because she started writing pro RT posts, a literal Russian propaganda outlet. In fact, the editor-in-chief explicitly stated that he himself made the active decision to publish the Kiev article. Here's a google translation of the editor-in-chief laying out the case: https://www-etc-se.translate.goog/i..._sl=sv&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=sv&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Correlation in time does not equal cause. In fact, she lost the job she secured after that one as well because she was hired in violation of protocol (however in that case, there was also a secondary reason, which was mass protests at that workplace regarding the RT and/or Kiev thing and consistenly outspoken anti-trans stances in violation of the value base at that place of work).
 
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Regarding Kajsa Ekman- let's just say that is not why she lost her job. Stop so easily believing propaganda. The editor-in-chief laid out why she was let go, and made it clear it was not because of the Kyiv thing, but because she started writing for RT, a literal Russian propaganda outlet. It's behind a paywall, but there were longtanding conflicts and conflicts of interests which came to head (I did read it back in the day), so I can't quote the entire thing. Correlation in time does not equal cause. In fact, she lost the job she secured after that one as well because she was hired in violation of protocoll (however in that case, there was also a secondary reason, which was mass protests at that workplace regarding the Kiev thing and consistenly outspoken anti-trans stances in violation of the value base at that place of work).

No she explains that in the podcast, I just simplified it. The boss had appraised her for what she wrote for Kyiv Independent so when people started to complain about the article he couldn't fire her based on that, as he would have to leave too.
Then he picked up something she wrote in a social media post about RT and he fired her based on that. What she had written was that RT too, has journalists it can't be only propaganda. Which is a fair point in my opinion. In any case he took the pain to look at her personal posts to find an excuse to fire her, and besides, she is entitled to her opinion.

But don't stick just to one point, I encourage you to listen the podcast if you have time and I'm curious about your take on what she has to say for all the other things.
 
No she explains that in the interview, I just simplified it. The boss had appraised her for what she wrote for Kyiv Independent so when people started to complain about the article she couldn't fired her based on that, as he would have to leave too.
Then he picked up something she wrote in a social media post about RT and he fired her based on that. What she had written was that RT too, has journalists it can't be only propaganda. Which is a fair point in my opinion. In any case he took the pain to look at her personal posts to find an excuse to fire her, and besides, she is entitled to her opinion.

But don't stick just to one point, I encourage you to listen the podcast if you have time and I'm curious about your take on what she has to say for all the other things.
You are absolutely unbelievable and just reiterating things that she says - her interpretation of events - and taking it as gospel even when confronted with the editor-in-chief.

And one is entitled to any opinion there is - You are, however, not entitled to be free from consequences if your actions damage your employer.
 
I only know her interpretation of events. The point to take here is do you think that she would be fired for that thing 10 -15 years ago, in the country of Sweden? My understanding from the podcast is that she wouldn't.
 
I only know her interpretation of events. The point to take here is do you think that she would be fired for that thing 10 -15 years ago, in the country of Sweden? My understanding from the podcast is that she wouldn't.
Of course that's your conclusion - that's essentially what she tells you to think.

... And the point of you saying "10-15" years ago is because you want to take things out of context. Things don't exist in a vacuum. In this day and age, it directly impacts her employer, which is generally why real journalists generally abstain from posting personal opinions regarding things that they cover through work. In fact, at public service companies (TV/radio), posting say, political stuff on your personal account (like "the party leader of party X sucks!" can lead to being pulled from any and all work with covering politics, because of the principle of maintaining integrity.

... And Ekman's actions damaged the integrity of the employer.
 
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And the point of you saying "10-15" years ago is because you want to take things out of context. Things don't exist in a vacuum. In this day and age, it directly impacts her employer, which is generally why real journalists generally abstain from posting personal opinions regarding things that they cover through work.

Yes, this is the point she makes that, in this day and age, things are so different, one cannot speak so freely and more. She hints that this was happening before the war, posting controversial things but nobody cared to look at her social media posts, let alone fire her on that.

She also made the point how general fear is spread among the journalists who have no clear instructions what to write and what not. The editor-in-chief for example told them "now things are different we cannot write everything we want" but didn't really explained what was they couldn't write. This was a general phenomenon and as a result journalists everywhere were trying to guess what is allowed and what not and some started to take the NYT or Washington Post as their North Star, to be on the safe side. No matter what this doesn't describe exactly a free press and healthy democracy Sweden once was, this is the point she makes.

To expand on that she mentioned that the PM of the country only critiqued Israel after Biden has done so (something about the West Bank) and suddenly everyone in the political system started to do the same.

Another thing that surprised me was to hear her say some not too PC comments about LBGTQ, I thought this is very brave of her to do that, a self proclaimed feminist and clearly on the traditional and radical left of the spectrum.

All in all she had some very clear views and her thought stroke me as original and free.
 
I have no idea where you're going. You are just quoting stuff. And, to be very clear, "free press" is not about journalists doing what the hell they want and has never ever been. The editor-in-chief os the one that is the defacto publisher, not the journalist, and the one that acts as the director... Which leads us to a quite fitting comparison:

no5: Actors should get to do whatever they want on-screen! Their freedom of speech is being suppressed!

The Director: "You're supposed to play Gilfred, a medieval knight. This is a movie about King Arthur. You can't turn up in a trench-coat and decide that you're playing 007 on the screen.

no5: "But... Stop suppressing!"

If you are to be a credible news organization (or in this case, an independent organization that, according to the organization itself writes articles and editorials in line with Swedish green and left-wing interests) you can't have the people who write your editorials go out and talk about RT, that spews proven, outlandish propaganda on a daily basis, as "they are not propaganda". Why are you always drawn to the fringe characters, or explicit Chinese/Russian propaganda? Is it because you are a free thinker, or perhaps because you constantly are marinated in propaganda that you take to heart? Because you always go around in loops when you are confronted about inaccuracies.
 
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