Not to sound like a government vuvuzela but in Romania we've just had an election cancelled because of a massive disinformation campaign that took place largely on TikTok and for which local representatives got repeatedly called in by the EU governing bodies.

The highest court in the country has the right to overturn existential dangers to the state, that's a function it has - in a democracy. Voting is not the only thing that there is.

Reminds me of some of the yearly recordings Ceaușescu used to do for the single tv channel that existed.

I was contradicting the conclusion that it's a PDS maneuver, since not all judges were nominated by that party.

It was an unanimous decision between judges nominated from 3 different parties, so this conclusion is going by feels, not by actual facts.

Nobody is actually doing anything besides reporting on it and we're going to the polls on Sunday for round two, in which all polling shows him as favorite. We're up shit creek with no paddle, truly.

I think there's quite a wide reaching similar vibe when it comes to other Eastern European countries. I'm from Romania, where we love our pickled and fermented stuff and kill dictators -we're the only ones in the communist block that did.

In the last week, after the shocking first round presidential election results, college students, the bellwether of society, have come out to our city squares again. I really hope that we don't ruing their future today.

Today we fear that what has recently happened in Georgia will happen to us: a far right, pro-russia front that has promised fairy tales to our most downtrodden and poor will sweep in and destroy what we have so painstakingly achieved, pushing us back into totalitarianism.

What is usually forgotten is that our revolution was not a peaceful one, we didn't kumbaya our way to it. Young people went out to the streets and were gunned down by the military in our city squares. You can see the bullet holes in walls around it still.

I am a child of our fledgling democracy and my first memory is of the revolution. I am a child of the transition period, going from sitting for hours at queues to get one load of bread before 1989 to walking past shops and having not a solitary leu to your name in the 90s.

After the first rounds of presidential elections everything seems up for grabs, since traditional exit polls failed to see massive Russian interference. What I am saying is that tomorrow I could wake up in a country that has gone back in time to my childhood.

In the left corner we have: a party that claims its social-democratic roots but is in fact just 20 criminals in a trenchcoat who've had their mitts on policy for most of the democratic years and a couple of scrapy newcomers who might not even get enough votes to access parliament seats.

In the right corner we have: the Russian supported front, ranging from hysterics, former football hooligans, a weird group of old people sporting zz top beards claiming to represent the young vote, then there's a technocratic party that one of the presidential candidates is the leader of