The Constitutional Court of Romania orders to recount the votes of the presidential elections in which the pro-Russian Georgescu won

The Constitutional Court received on Wednesday two requests to cancel the first round of the elections that were presented by the candidates Sebastian Constantin Popescu, of the New Romania Party; and Cristian Terhes, of the Romanian National Conservative Party, who obtained marginal percentages of the vote, 0.15 and 1.03 percent, respectively.

The response to this appeal will likely be known this Friday afternoon, although it has not been ruled out that it will have to be postponed until Saturday, on the eve of the parliamentary elections on December 1. Just a week later second round is scheduled of the presidential elections.

Calin Georgescu, brand new winner of that first round with 23% of the votes, has preferred to remain silent after hearing the news. “It is a decision of this institution, which we do not comment on,” its communication team concluded, according to the Romanian press.

Although the appeal presented by Popescu for alleged irregularities in the financing of Georgescu’s campaign was rejected by the court, the one presented by Terhes was not, who has alleged irregularities in the counting of the votes of the second winner of the election night, Elena Lasconi.

The candidate of the conservative Union to Save Romania (USR), Elena Lasoni, won by a narrow marginby just about 2,000 votes, to the Prime Minister, Marcel Ciolacu, who after the electoral setback presented his resignation a few hours later as leader of the Romanian Social Democrats.

The leader of the USR in the Chamber of Deputies, Liviu-Ionut Mosteanu, has questioned the decision of the Constitutional Court and has assured that “some people want to retain power at any price.”

“On Monday all the political leaders seemed to have accepted the results, some were even not happy with themselves,” he said, alluding to Prime Minister Ciolacu, who this Thursday came out to remember that was presented to the citizens to recognize the results and congratulate the winners.

Mosteanu has stated that “what the Constitutional Court is doing at the moment is playing with fire at a gas station” and has warned of the “risks” What this means for democracyasking the rest of the parties to reject the court order in order to begin the campaign for the second round as soon as possible.

“Any day lost is a day lost by the pro-Europeans, I don’t think they want to give an advantage to the extremist candidate,” he said, alluding to Georgescu.

Doubts on Georgescu’s campaign financing

The candidate Sebastian Constantin Popescu presented a brief on Wednesday in which he questioned the financing of the campaign of Georgescu, who had presented a report with zero expenses since he had used social networks, especially Tik Tok, to get his message across, accusing him at the same time of having received funds from abroad.

“He promoted himself as the fair and honest candidate so that Romanians would vote for him, while he violated the electoral law by illegally financing his entire campaign,” says the letter, which emphasizes that “Georgescu used an apparently amateurish style” to create the illusion of natural popular support.

“This method represents a form of manipulation, which creates the impression that it has great popular support among Romanians, which affects public perception and contravenes the principle of transparency,” he denounced.

Doubts about the financing of Georgescu’s campaign They are also on the table of the Prosecutor’s Officeafter the Electoral Authority received several proposals to investigate how the candidate managed to be the most voted and claim not to have allocated any money.