BUCHAREST -- Even with all the votes tabulated, experts are still scratching their heads over the unexpected victory of Calin Georgescu in the first round of Romania's presidential election.
The little-known, far-right figure confounded the polls and experts to win the November 24 election, beating out favorites including leftist Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu of the Social Democratic Party, Romania's dominant party for decades.
Georgescu's success has largely been credited to his social media campaign, which apparently flew under the radar of many pundits. While he was present on Facebook and YouTube, he ran an adroit campaign on TikTok, generating support and connecting to a young audience in the millions.
TikTok, launched globally in 2017, is now one of the most popular websites on the Internet, even surpassing Google in 2021, with millions drawn to its short videos with algorithms working to personalize the feed of each user.
Targeting Young Voters
While most are drawn to TikTok to be entertained, many people, especially younger generations, are getting their news there as well. In the United States, about half of TikTok users under 30 say they use it to keep up with politics and news, according to the Pew Research Center.
Like elsewhere, TikTok's popularity has skyrocketed in Romania. In February 2019, there were just 175,000 TikTok users between the ages of 14 and 65. By the start of 2024, that figure had ballooned to 8.97 million users.
Many of the top Romanian presidential contenders have TikTok accounts, including Ciolacu and pro-Western liberal Elena Lasconi, the candidate Georgescu will face in the December 8 presidential runoff. But it appears only Georgescu was able to unlock the full potential of the social media platform, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Many of Georgescu's voters were young. In a Facebook post, sociologist Remus Stefureac said that voting data indicated that "31 percent of young people aged 18-24 voted for Mr. Georgescu, in contrast to only 8 percent of voters over the age of 65." Stefureac also added that voters up to the age of 44 were more likely to vote for Georgescu compared to voters over the age of 45.
Georgescu tapped into voter frustration over inflation and corruption, blamed the EU and NATO for much of the country's woes, and claimed Romania's "sovereignty" was being impinged. He also voiced his praise of Ion Antonescu, Romania's de facto World War II leader who was sentenced to death for his part in Romania's Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the pre-World War II leader of the Iron Guard -- one of Europe's most violent anti-Semitic movements.
Throughout his campaign, he regularly criticized the country's membership in NATO and the EU and its support of Ukraine in its struggle against invading Russian forces. In a TV interview just days before the November 24 presidential vote, Georgescu called for an end to aid for Ukraine.
Recipe For TikTok Success
One of his most popular clips on TikTok included false claims that Ukrainian refugee children were receiving more government assistance than Romanian children.
"Do you know how much an allowance costs for a child in Ukraine? What does Romania, the Romanian state, offer him? I'll tell you -- 3,700 lei ($780) -- and for a Romanian child, the same allowance is 248 lei, at the same age," Georgescu said in a TikTok video posted on November 5, which was later fact-checked as false.
Despite the false claims, the TikTok video, a clip from a longer interview by Georgescu on state-run TV, proved popular, with 5.1 million views and more than 213,000 likes.
More than any of his opponents, Georgescu relied on TikTok to get his message out, said Dragos Stanca, a media expert in Romania.
"Calin Georgescu is ideal for digital media, especially TikTok. Sell a dream, sell a vision," Stanca said in an interview with RFE/RL's Romanian Service.
"Social media was not created to inform us, but to convert us into buyers…. And the object on sale can also be ideas. And Mr. Georgescu sells ideas that catch on in social media," Stanca added.
Established in the fall of 2022, Georgescu's TikTok account now has 260,000 followers and 3.6 million likes.
One of his most successful strategies was to take excerpts from interviews he had given elsewhere, often from TV, and post clips from them on TikTok.
An interview on Digi24 from November 13 had just over 70,000 views on the TV news channel's website, but a clip from the same show posted by Georgescu on TikTok racked up 4.1 million views.
"I am running for Romania, not for Ukraine. Neither my supporters nor the Romanian people are interested in either Putin or Ukraine. They are interested in Romania. Let's do it well, let there be welfare, let us be happy, let there be stability, let there be safety", Georgescu said in a clip that registered 241,000 likes, 14,000 shares, and nearly 8,000 comments on TikTok.
Another TikTok clip from the same TV interview features Georgescu evading a question on his opinion of Putin. "I see you are very insistent on this matter. Why don't you insist on the problems of the Romanian people? Why don't you insist on the problem of poverty, on the problem of people with disabilities, on the problem of people who are selling a kidney?" Georgescu said in the video, which had 3.1 million views on TikTok.
Well-Coordinated Campaign
Besides airing his political views, Georgescu also used TikTok to post videos of himself attending church, doing judo, and running on a track, an apparent attempt to burnish his image as a clean-living Christian.
To insure his TikTok clips were seen by the widest audience possible, Georgescu urged his followers to share them and promote them with hashtags that included his name.
In what appeared to be a well-coordinated campaign, short videos featuring Georgescu's remarks were shared by thousands of other accounts, some of which included his name in the account title and others simply posting with the hashtag #călingeorgescu.
Hashtags and keywords with the far-right populist's name appeared to snowball as the first round of the presidential election neared.
With Romanian TikTok bombarded by the term -- Calin Georgescu -- the social media platform began to autocomplete his name in the search bar, a standard TikTok practice with popular and trending keywords.
The strategy has worked so far for the outsider Georgescu. The question for many Romanians is whether it will work again on December 8, when he faces Lasconi in the runoff.
