TikTok Bots, MAGA Outrage and the Very Online Fight for Romania's Future
Early last December, Adrian Thiess, a well-connected political fixer in Romania, sent an urgent text message to Brad Parscale, the digital media strategist who had been working off and on for Donald J. Trump since 2012. Thiess and Parscale bonded in 2019, Thiess told me, when Parscale was managing Trump's re-election campaign. Thiess had paid Parscale to speak at a conference in Bucharest called 'Let's Make Political Marketing Great Again' — as it happened, the day before Robert S. Mueller III, then serving as a special counsel, submitted his report about Trump's dealings with Russia. The pair hit it off, both feeling the Russian accusations were a hoax. In the years since, Thiess had parlayed his friendship with Parscale into an entree into Trump's inner circle, even inviting the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., to Bucharest for his own paid talk.
But it wasn't a speaking gig that was on Thiess's mind that night — he wanted to sound an alarm. 'Have you seen what's happening in Romania?' Thiess asked.
Thiess was referring to the Romanian presidential election, specifically to a candidate named Calin Georgescu. Georgescu was a 62-year-old agronomist who had turned to nationalist politics, starting out as a fringe candidate who claimed on television that electronic chips were planted in soft drinks. Georgescu also professed a love for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whose manifesto attacking Dr. Anthony J. Fauci he penned an introduction in its Romanian edition. He made several promotional TikTok videos of himself that appeared to be inspired by Vladimir V. Putin's flamboyantly macho campaign imagery — in which Georgescu was sometimes on horseback, sometimes doing judo.
The iconography was striking because Putin was extremely unpopular in Romania, a NATO member with an expanding air base on the Black Sea whose importance has grown since the war in Ukraine began. Georgescu, however, railed against NATO, which he said was dragging the country into World War III, while hailing Putin as a 'patriot and a leader.' What's more, Georgescu said he had spent no money on his campaign, and he didn't throw a lot of big outdoor rallies like his competitors. So it came as a big surprise when, after the first round of voting in November, Georgescu won — beating all five top candidates and sending him to a runoff that would decide the election.
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