Calin Georgescu has come from nowhere to lead the field for Romania’s presidential elections. A conspiracy theorist who calls the country’s WWII fascist leaders ‘heroes’ is a danger for Romania and its Jewish community, and Israel should back off from its approaches to him. Last Sunday was the most tumultuous election night in Romania’s 35-year post-communist history. Calin Georgescu, a far-right, anti-system candidate, came out on top in the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. The count is still being contested, amid reports of improper interference in the campaign, in what’s been a week of absolute chaos. (…) Until just a week ago, Georgescu was an unknown to most Romanians. But his far-right, Holocaust-revisionist and conspiratorial views represent a concerning prospect for Romania’s pro-European path, and for its efforts to come to terms with the country’s history of Nazi collaboration. As a Romanian Jew, and someone who works on fighting antisemitism and preserving the memory of the Holocaust, his potential victory is deeply concerning. Georgescu’s allure as a political outsider is what drove many of his voters – disillusioned by high prices and perceived corruption among the mainstream political class – to opt for him. Georgescu has been branded the “TikTok candidate,” and even the “TikTok Messiah,” after a short but extremely aggressive social media campaign now ripe with accusations of outside interference, a rise that virtually all political parties, commentators and opinion polls missed. Networks of paid influencers, armies of bots and carefully crafted videos got Georgescu over the finish line. His positions on NATO, the moon landing, cesarean birth, chemotherapy and 5G technology are now coming into sharp focus. So, too, is his abundant praise for World War II-era Romanian fascist leaders Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Marshal Ion Antonescu. In 2020, Georgescu joined the ultra-nationalist populist party AUR (the Alliance for the Union of Romanians). Two years later, he was pushed out on account of his positions being too extreme even for the party that was at the time the farthest to the right on the Romanian political scene. In 2020, he referred to Romanian Nazi-era fascists Codreanu and Antonescu as “heroes” and “standard-bearers of national history” in a clip posted online.
via haaretz: Romania’s Far-right ‘TikTok Messiah’: The Dangerous Rise of a Fan of Nazi Collaborators Who Massacred Jews in WWII