> Yes it's always the evil Russians and the stupid people are influenced by TikTok so we need to tell them what they should vote!
I didn't call anyone stupid. I have been deceived many times in my life. It happens to all of us and it is happening to you now.
> At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
Yes, that is the issue with misinformation, isn't it? It works. Otherwise nobody would care, would they? Misinformation is incredibly destructive, for example it caused Brexit, which was based on mostly lies, some of them famously written on a bus, along with algorithmic manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, that were never properly challenged leading to the referendum. This is all well-known by now and easily verifiable.
> How convenient he got fired
He didn't get fired, you are making things up. This is precisely the sort of misinformation that destroys democracy. He had resigned months before this appearance on French TV because of frictions with von der Leyen, who tried to block him from being reappointed. By the time he gave the interview, he was already a private citizen and his resignation had nothing to do with this incident.
Also, and importantily, he never claimed that the problem was that any party of candidate was "bad" or "not acceptable". Breton framed his remarks around enforcing EU law against foreign interference, specifically in the context of Elon Musk's (a foreign actor, by the way) support for the AfD ahead of Germany's snap elections. He said: "Let's stay calm and enforce the laws in Europe. They did it in Romania and, obviously, it will have to be done, if necessary, in Germany as well".
The misrepresentation that you are repeating was initially posted on X by the account Visegrád 24, a well-known propaganda account that constantly posts lies and disinformation with an anti-EU bias.
> But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place.
Unfortunately there is indeed one European member state that is suffering democratic backsliding and that is Hungary, but this is not the EU's fault. Otherwise, everything you wrote is demonstrably false.
> If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
AfD has not been banned, and the issue is not them being on my side or not. There are plenty of political parties that I dislike in Europe and I don't want them to be banned. I only wish to ban parties and candidates that break the law, namely by receiving illegal funding from out geopolitical enemies because, unlike the "nationalist" post-truth movements, I am actually a patriot and I love Europe, open societies and liberal democracy.
What actually happened was that former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly stated on French TV in January 2025 that if the AfD won in Germany, elections there could also be annulled by the EU "as was done in Romania". That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen, he did not represent the EU in any capacity, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the EU pressured Romania. Of course, post-truth political movements run with a distorted version of this story to play the victim.
Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.
Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.
Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
IANAL, etc. but this risk is usually exaggerated by people with a political agenda. EU legislation takes into account the size and purpose of websites. I have never heard of any small website being targeted by such legislation. Do your own due diligence, of course, and take care not to buy into internet hysteria and over-simplification.
If the actions and beliefs of a group are fundamentally morally repugnant to me, I think that it is reasonable to not expect me to be able to find "something positive" in it. We are not amoral automata with grocery-list style utility functions.
I have people in my personal sphere that make this sort of argument and it honestly feels like gaslighting. The undercurrent is: "Look, you don't like this guy, I get it. But if you can't see that he does some good, then you are the one who is irrational and not really in a sound state of mind." Meanwhile completely preventable, life-threatening, life-destroying diseases such as measles are back because of the obscurantist beliefs that come with this "new refreshing outlook". This is a bit like saying: "look, you can say what you want about the Spanish inquisition but they kept rates of extra-marital affairs down."
Corporations love this sort of feel-good campaign (the same way they love performative LGBTQ / feminism / diversity when the culture wars swing the other way) for two main reasons: (1) they distract from fundamental issues that threaten their real interests; (2) they shift the blame on big societal issues completely to the public. They do this with climate change, they do it with increase of wealth inequality and they most certainly do it with public health.
All developed nations have a problem with processed food. Granted, it is particularly severe in the USA, but the ONE THING that separates the USA from almost every other developed nation in our planet is the absence of socialized healthcare. This is the obvious salient thing to look at before all others, so also obviously, a lot of money will be spent to misdirect and distract from this very topic.
I didn't call anyone stupid. I have been deceived many times in my life. It happens to all of us and it is happening to you now.
> At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
Yes, that is the issue with misinformation, isn't it? It works. Otherwise nobody would care, would they? Misinformation is incredibly destructive, for example it caused Brexit, which was based on mostly lies, some of them famously written on a bus, along with algorithmic manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, that were never properly challenged leading to the referendum. This is all well-known by now and easily verifiable.
> How convenient he got fired
He didn't get fired, you are making things up. This is precisely the sort of misinformation that destroys democracy. He had resigned months before this appearance on French TV because of frictions with von der Leyen, who tried to block him from being reappointed. By the time he gave the interview, he was already a private citizen and his resignation had nothing to do with this incident.
Also, and importantily, he never claimed that the problem was that any party of candidate was "bad" or "not acceptable". Breton framed his remarks around enforcing EU law against foreign interference, specifically in the context of Elon Musk's (a foreign actor, by the way) support for the AfD ahead of Germany's snap elections. He said: "Let's stay calm and enforce the laws in Europe. They did it in Romania and, obviously, it will have to be done, if necessary, in Germany as well".
The misrepresentation that you are repeating was initially posted on X by the account Visegrád 24, a well-known propaganda account that constantly posts lies and disinformation with an anti-EU bias.
> But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place.
Unfortunately there is indeed one European member state that is suffering democratic backsliding and that is Hungary, but this is not the EU's fault. Otherwise, everything you wrote is demonstrably false.
> If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
AfD has not been banned, and the issue is not them being on my side or not. There are plenty of political parties that I dislike in Europe and I don't want them to be banned. I only wish to ban parties and candidates that break the law, namely by receiving illegal funding from out geopolitical enemies because, unlike the "nationalist" post-truth movements, I am actually a patriot and I love Europe, open societies and liberal democracy.