Another Nationalist Upset: Right-Wing NATO Critic Wins First Round Of Romanian Election

In the continuation of well-established trend observed across Western democracies, yet another populist, nationalist, right-wing candidate has posted an election result that far exceeded what polls indicated he was capable of. The latest upset took place in Romania on Sunday, and it has positioned a NATO critic and Ukraine war skeptic to potentially take over the country’s presidency.

With 99% of ballots tallied, populist Calin Georgescu led all 13 candidates with 23% of votes, edging the Save Romania Union Party’s Elena Lasconi and Prime Minister and Social Democratic Party member Marcel Ciolacu — who had 19.17% and 19.16%, respectively. Another right-winger — the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians’ George Simion — placed fourth with 13.87%. That sets the NATO- and EU-member country up for a second-round vote on Dec. 8 against either Lasconi or Ciolacu; Simion has already thrown his support behind Georgescu.

Calin Georgescu Reuters via BBC

“The 35-years-long economic uncertainty imposed on the Romanian people became uncertainty for the political parties today,” said Georgescu, who took the poll-outperformance phenomenon to a whole new level: An October poll showed him with only 0.4% support, and a November survey had him racking up just 5.4%.

The outcome will be highly unwelcome to the Western establishment: Georgescu pledged to restore Romanian sovereignty and put an end to what he characterizes as subservience to NATO and the EU. He has taken a hard line against the presence of NATO’s missile defense system that’s based in Deveselu, southern Romania, calling it a “shame of diplomacy” that is more confrontational than peace-promoting.

He has also pushed for Romania to pursue a non-interventionist policy in the Ukraine war, and said US arms-makers were manipulating the conflict. Since Russia’s invasion, Romania has facilitated Ukrainian grain exports and furnished military assistance including the donation of a Patriot missile battery.

If EU bureaucrats thought Viktor Orbán was a problem for them and their funding for the proxy war in Ukraine, wait until they meet Romania’s future president, Călin Georgescu.

Zelensky’s worshippers hate this man!
pic.twitter.com/KzvGss1RSn

— Gabe (@GabeZZOZZ) November 25, 2024

As in the US election, a large portion of the Romanian electorate may have been fed up with resources dedicated to foreign refugees and foreign wars rather than the country’s own citizens. According to the X account GeoInsider, “In one widely shared clip, Georgescu highlight[ed]…striking disparities: Romania pays a monthly allowance of 3,700 lei to the children of Ukrainian refugees, compared to just 248 lei for Romanian children.”

“For the unjust, for the humiliated, for those who feel they do not matter and actually matter the most … the vote is a prayer for the nation,” the 62-year-old Georgescu said via Facebook after casting his vote. Georgescu has a doctorate in soil science and previously held various roles in the country’s environmental ministry, and represented Romania as a member of the UN’s Environmental Program. In addition to his broad theme of restoring Romanian sovereignty, he also ran on countering price inflation, addressing Romania’s worst-in-EU poverty rate, supporting farmers and decreasing the country’s reliance on imports.

**Romania shares a 400-mile border with Ukraine and hosts a NATO missile defense system in the country’s south** (via Britannica)

Georgescu’s result was all the more surprising given he didn’t run as a member of any political party, and used social media platform TikTok as the principal mechanism of his campaign. Racking up 1.6 million likes, his account showed him going to church, running, practicing judo, and being interviewed by podcasters. TikTok’s centrality to his highly unorthodox campaign prompted some howling by people who didn’t like the outcome:

What happened today in Romania must be a wake-up call for the entire West that TikTok needs to be banned as soon as possible! I’ve been saying this for over five years: TikTok is a tool of the China-Russia coalition to stage coups in any Western country!

— Alin Vlad (@AlinStVlad) November 24, 2024

…and, as is the case whenever a right-wing nationalist wins these days, people are blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA!

Panic in Romania today as a pro-russian candidate that no one’s ever heard of, with no visible means of funding wins first-round presidential elections after only registering on October 1st.

Romanians and Romanian media are considering it a Russian attack. https://t.co/9G5XZHxhC8 pic.twitter.com/MfjtioNOIq

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) November 25, 2024

Gg Romania… you have been conquered by Russia without even being in an open war with them… The Russian TikTok trolls have managed to influence the votes of almost 23% of the population…

This is why education matters. This is why being informed from the correct sources… pic.twitter.com/hepO2mZHVr

— Larisa Kralik ⭕️ Artoons-Design (@ArtoonsDesign) November 25, 2024

So what I’m seeing is Russia backed a Hitler in the Romanian elections and he came in first place in the first round.

— A. Bartaway🇺🇦❤️✊✌️ (@Bartaway) November 25, 2024

After this extreme pro-russian comes from nowhere tonight to win the first-round Romanian Presidential election, a literal Nazi that no one has ever heard of, a quote from a friend of mine in Romania, who is as shocked as the rest of the country.

It looks like russians have… pic.twitter.com/LwI1eJqu2f

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) November 24, 2024

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Originally Posted at; https://www.zerohedge.com//

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
2 views

The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30

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Another Nationalist Upset: Right-Wing NATO Critic Wins First Round Of Romanian Election

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