Networks of Influence: Decoding Foreign Meddling in Romania's Elections

The Romanian presidential election of November 2024 — in which Călin Georgescu's shock first-round victory shocked European observers and triggered the annulment of results — produced the most politically dramatic FIMI-adjacent outcome in recent European democratic history. This FPC investigation uses Osavul — an AI-based FIMI detection platform originally developed for the Ukrainian government — to map the social media amplification ecosystem across Telegram, TikTok, Facebook, and X that enabled Georgescu's rise from obscurity to front-runner status within weeks.

The investigation documents coordinated inauthentic behaviour at scale, pro-Russian narrative alignment, and the exploitation of domestic political disengagement — producing the most comprehensive open-source account of how the Georgescu amplification network functioned. The Romanian case is analytically significant beyond its immediate context: it is the first EU member state election in which a candidate with strong pro-Russian alignment achieved first-round success, apparently with the support of coordinated inauthentic amplification. For practitioners studying FIMI in electoral contexts and for policymakers designing platform accountability frameworks, this investigation provides primary source evidence. Cited by the UK Foreign Affairs Committee's Disinformation Diplomacy report (March 2026).