the PNL, in government, secretly finances a Georgescu TikTok campaign!

According to the Romanian news site Snoop.ro, an investigation by ANAF (Romanian Tax Authority) revealed a political scandal involving the Romanian National Liberal Party (PNL). IThe party would have financed a TikTok campaign called “Balance and Verticality” (#equilibrișivertcalitate), apparently intended to promote candidate Călin Georgescu, rather than his own party.

The scandal would be big, indeed enormous, because the PNL is a moderate center-right party, part of the current government coalition and part of the EPP. If that were the case, the Russians would have nothing to do with it, but it would be a sort of internal struggle within the government between the EPP and the social democrats of the PSD. We remind you that the investigation into the TikTok campaign was the basis of the Constitutional Court's decision to annul the presidential elections, a decision seen by many as an anti-democratic strain. Georgescu was ahead at the end of the first electoral round.

The campaign in question, which reached 2.4 million views, was created through the company Kensington Communication, owned by Răzvan Săndulescu and Cătălin Dumitru. The company orchestrated the operation by involving 130 influencers recruited through the FameUp platform, providing them with specific scripts to describe the qualities of a “future president” without naming him directly. However, someone took their foot off the brake and explicitly mentioned “Călin Georgescu” in the comments of their videos.

According to a declassified CSAT (Supreme Council of National Defense) document dated December 5 and a report from the Experts Forum, the campaign was actually designed to promote Călin Georgescu. The CSAT document also reveals that influencers were trained on “methods to avoid detection of content items that do not comply with TikTok platform policies.”

Kensington Communication, when confronted by Snoop on December 20, admitted that the campaign was funded by GNPbut tried to distance itself from some changes. The company claims that the original hashtag “Balance and Seriousness” (#ebilibusiseriozitate) was changed to #equilibriumverticality (#ebilibusiverticality) on the FameUp platform without their consent or that of the party.

This last fact is a bit strange and made the pro-European and left-wing website Politico.eu claim that the liberal campaign would have been “hijacked” by mysterious hackers who would have used the campaign already prepared by the PLN to support Georgescu, but, frankly, it is not clear how.

It could also be the opposite, cthat the PNL organized a trap campaign which could then have invalidated Georgescu's election. I mean, it's a mess anyway.

The investigation was launched by the Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP), which requested ANAF to investigate the financing of various promotional actions on social media during the electoral campaign for the November 2024 presidential elections. A particularly problematic aspect is that these promotions were not marked as political advertising.

According to a confidential source familiar with the results of the ANAF investigation, the discovery that public funds intended for the PNL were used to promote a different candidate has created dismay. The same platform had previously been used to promote the book of former PNL president Nicolae Ciucă.

The analysis conducted by Snoop on the brief provided by the company confirms that the influencers followed the instructions given by PNL, despite the campaign being publicly presented as “a campaign aimed at increasing the level of awareness of the importance of voting”.

The influencers used techniques to try to hide that the campaign was organized by a political party. The changes during the campaign were actually minimal: we went from a reminder of the need for a president for Romania to that of a leader for Romania. All always according to the indications coming from the PNL. If it was a sort of hacking of an election campaign, it was brilliant also because, as we said, Georgescu was almost never mentioned.