The Economist | Why Romania ousted a pro-Russian presidential candidate.

He thinks nanobots are secretly slipped into Pepsi cans. Covid doesn't exist and the moon landings were faked. He believes there is a global political battle going on between Satan and Archangel Michael. He admires Vladimir Putin and would stop aid to Ukraine.

On December 8, Călin Georgescu could have been elected president of Romania. But two days earlier, the country's constitutional court annulled the election and ordered it to be restarted from scratch. Romanians are divided between those who believe the court has saved their democracy and those who believe it has been undermined.

Before the first round, Călin Georgescu was polling around 5%. But in the first round of elections on November 24, he managed to win by 23%.

How did Mr. Georgescu come from nowhere to the top spot in two weeks?

On November 28, Romanian intelligence services presented evidence of illegal campaign financing, illegal use of social networks and "Russian hybrid actions" against the country's internet infrastructure. The court said it annulled the election because voters had been "misinformed" and because Georgescu had illegally benefited from "the abusive exploitation of the algorithms of the social media platform - Tik Tok''.

His campaign materials were not correctly labeled and the will of the voters was "distorted."