Romanian authorities want to annul the presidential election again, a Russian propaganda publication claims.
NEWS: This is getting serious: Romania wants to annul the results of the presidential election again. Romanian TV station RomaniaTV reports that the presidential election, which has already become the most scandalous in the country's history, again faces the prospect of being annulled with cancellation. The Constitutional Court of Romania has filed a request to annul the result of the first round of the presidential election held on May 4.
NARRATIVE: The Constitutional Court of Romania will annul the presidential election again.
PURPOSE: To promote conspiracy rhetoric, to undermine trust in state authorities, to stir and amplify social unrest.
The Constitutional Court cannot submit notifications to itself
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: The Constitutional Court of Romania did not file any request to annul the presidential election, as the action itself is nonsensical. Best-case scenario, the Constitutional Court may take notice of certain developments. There has been indeed a request to annul the election, filed by the candidate of the New Romania Party, Sebastian Popescu, who invoked “mass-violations of democratic principles and direct manipulation of voters”, but his notification has already been dismissed by Constitutional Court judges. According to data published on the website of the Permanent Election Authority, after centralizing all the votes, Sebastian Popescu grabbed 25,994 votes, tantamount to 0.28% of the total votes cast on May 4.
In fact, Sebastian Popescu said he expected his request to be ruled as “inadmissible”, and that he filed the request to annul the election, adding he had no other legal procedure at his disposal, and could not address the Constitutional Court another request. “The goal is not to create chaos, to effectively annul the election, because, anyway, it will not be annulled, because there are enough reasons against making such a decision. The role of this request is to draw attention to the fact that we have not learned anything from what happened last year and, to a certain extent, this is worse”, Popescu said.
The very claim that the piece of news was announced by România TV is false, as this TV station, despite the disinformation and fake news it constantly promotes, this time never made such a statement.
Conspiracy theories, new and not exactly new
BACKGROUND: Seemingly running out of ammunition, Kremlin propaganda is forced to rehash older themes in the public sphere, which they present as new, accusing the disappearance of Romanian democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship. The presidential election in Romania has generated huge interest at international level, and Russia simply cannot sit idly by.
The narrative regarding the repeat annulment of the presidential election initially appeared on politnavigator.news, a site known for promoting disinformation and fake news of Russian origin. It is part of a group of 31 Russian propaganda web portals, blocked across the territory of the Republic of Moldova, at the request of the country's Intelligence and Security Service, because it generates social tensions and conflicts. The website was blocked in April 2023, along with politnavigator.net and news-front.info, which have a similar structure and promote the same false narratives.
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