2024-11-28
6 分钟As we wait to hear if Romania will annul its first round of elections, Andrew Mueller explains why the shocking result should not be that shocking. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Politics, especially modern politics, is distinguished from all other fields in that relevant experience and hard won expertise appear to be positive disadvantages when seeking employment.
The same voters who would not trust their teeth to an enthusiastic amateur dentist fly with an untrained pilot who just thought it might be fun to have a go at it or rejoice if their preferred football club awarded the manner manager's job to some bellicose heckler out of the grandstand, seem happy time and again to elect to their highest offices posturing yahoos who have somehow managed to leverage their lack of qualifications as a virtue Romanians voted on Sunday in the first round of their presidential election.
The five top polling candidates to reduce them to extremely pithy CVS were a former general and prime minister, an MP who also leads a decent sized opposition party, the current prime minister, a former television journalist turned serial reality TV contestant, a weirdo conspiracy theorist who has never held elected office in what observers who appear not to have noticed the entire 21st century are calling a shock result.
The two who won through to a second round runoff on December 8 were Elena Lasconi, Romania's 2013 Celebrity MasterChef champion, and Kaelin Georgescu, the seething hyper nationalist with a popular TikTok account a caveat at this point.
As of this recording, two minor candidates have petitioned Romania's Constitutional Court to annul the whole thing, claiming that Georgescu's vote was fraudulently obtained.
The Beaks will hear these arguments tomorrow.
Before we plough on re what the weekend's result means, we should probably acknowledge, though we for one current affairs explainer believe our point stands, that our summary of both candidates lives and accomplishments has been arguably somewhat reductive.
Eleanor Lusconi was also on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here.
Okay, that's unfair as well.
She was indeed a distinguished television news anchor and correspondent and has been a popular and effective mayor of Kampulung, a town of about 25,000 people, and is presently president of the Centre Rightish party, the Save Romania Union.
But still and Kalan Georgescu has done more with his time here than just fulminate in favour of Vladimir Putin, praise early 20th century Romanian fascists, condemn the 1989 overthrow of lunatic tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu as a sinister Western plot, and promote pretty much the full slate of quack views on health.
Vaccines make you sick, viruses are bioweapons, chemotherapy makes cancer worse.
Though he has done a tedious amount of all of that.
An agronomist by training, Georgescu has also done various stuff within the United nations, an organization which has never been able to claim a 100% record of excluding foil hatted crackpots from its institutions.
These are Finnish resumes for candidates for the office to which they both aspire.
Nevertheless, one of them will shortly become president of a country of 19 million people, the EU's 12th largest economy, and a NATO ally which shares a border with Ukraine and oversees a chunk of the Black Sea.
Romania's port of Constanta has been a vital hub for shipping military kit to Ukraine and enabling Ukraine to pay for said kit by transporting grain in the other direction.
The swiftly expanding Mihail Korgaliciano air base in that same vicinity is on track to become one of NATO's largest and most geographically significant such facilities.
And Romania's presidency is not one of those entirely ceremonial head of state gigs largely restricted to cutting ribbons, shaking hands and having one's picture taken, beaming inanely at prize winning agricultural produce.
These the holder of the office has a significant say in foreign policy in particular given Romania's location.