[_mitterpach]

Romania has certain laws pertaining to running in an election, which this candidate has broken. Regardless of any connections to Russia, you have to declare your spending, you have to be transparent about how much you invested into your campaign and there are limits as to how much you can spend.

If a candidate ignores the law, they are barred from running. That is the basis of democracy.

I do agree that it should be noted that this was the winning candidate from the first round, and so a lot more care should be placed into making sure the case is airtight and no errors were made in the investigation.

Do you think there should be no such laws? Or do you think the courts have made an error in their judgment?

[zo1]

Not OP. But it's hard to untangle this entire mess. On the one hand, this person & party is kind of the "choice" made by a large chunk of the people as per the votes, and yet (if true) he's broken certain laws that somehow invalidate said votes.

How do we take this and not see that Democracy is only "Of course it's what the people want! But only if they want it the way we say they can and only if the candidate isn't X/Y/Z."

Like at the very least there should be a mechanism that transforms this kind of election result oddity into a new referendum of sorts so that the people feel like they've at least been heard and that it was all legitimate. Or perhaps a cooling-off period where said campaign finance law implications "wear off" and then the applicable party gets a new election, especially if they won a non-insignificant amount of votes.

Because right now, all that people are seeing is: Popular candidate that's anti-EU and anti-Ukraine Involvement is being de-platformed and kept off the ballot by the EU. Are we trying to make Romania blow up, or are we using this as proof to show the populace "you belong to us, do as you are told, plebs".