when you're at the point of opining banning your opposition (Germany), cancelling elections after losing them (Romania), or dissolving parliament because you are about to (France), it's not really that big of a step to complain that somebody can afford to buy more stickers for candidate you don't like than you can.
in fact you can even just skip the pretense and go directly back to being a monarchy, which would save on european hypocricy and a lot of bookkeeping in general
@icedquinn For Romania you can also add banning people from running as candidates in an election. It's not as bad as banning an entire political party like Germany is thinking about, but we're trying our best. (by the way, the reason we had 2 candidates banned from participating is basically that they criticized EU and NATO, and maybe vaguely insinuated the possibility of leaving these alliances).
@icedquinn So the latest in the story is that a local TikTok influencer, named Bogdan Peșchir, spent almost $1 million on bribing people (through 265 intermediates) to buy votes for the now banned candidate Călin Georgescu. I guess the insinuation is that the money he was spreading around might have come from Russia, but so far I haven't seen it proven. But we do know that another ally of Georgescu was contacting a Russian military official, so we might end up with something eventually.
That being said, while there are some serious crimes here, and lots of people are gonna end up in jail, based on the evidence we have so far, it's still hard to argue that the fraud was the decisive factor in getting Georgescu beyond the 1st round of presidential elections. Or in other words, cancelling the elections hasn't been justified yet, imo.
@icedquinn
Latest news: France banned Marine Le Pen from running, as a result of being condemned for embezzling EU public funds. Don't know if the accusations itself is real or not, but I've seen politicians here getting guilty sentences over obvious false fabricated cases, so it wouldn't be that surprising.
