Organized crime

On December 6, Romania’s Constitutional Court threw out the first-round results of the country’s presidential elections, after a shocking victory by the relatively obscure, pro-Russian candidate Călin Georgescu. The reason for the court’s decision? Clear signs of extensive foreign-influence operations behind Georgescu’s win. 

Just before the decision, Romanian intelligence services released evidence showing that Moscow had paid TikTok influencers, right-wing groups, and various actors with ties to organized crime to promote Georgescu online. Authorities later raided properties belonging to a Georgescu donor suspected of voter bribery, money laundering, and computer fraud. Intelligence files showed the donor had given Georgescu’s campaign €1 million, of which €360,000 went to TikTok. 

Georgescu won the first round with 23 percent of the vote, even though polls shortly before the election had shown his support below 10 percent. He says he spent no money on his campaign, but in the two weeks before the vote, interest in it soared on TikTok, as tens of thousands of new accounts began touting Georgescu relentlessly. And since the now-annulled election, his popularity has only increased, with voting rescheduled for May. No one has made any charges of ballot tampering. 

A Kremlin attempt to manipulate voting in an EU member state may be astonishing, but it belongs to a pattern. During Moldova’s presidential election and referendum on EU membership in October, Moscow sent more than US$15 million to the bank accounts of more than 130,000 Moldovan citizens to buy the favor of domestic political parties and proxy supporters, or even to buy votes outright. 

In Georgia, extensive protests continue over the public accounting of general-election results, also from October. Officially, a pro-Russian party won, but Salome Zourabichvili, the country’s outgoing president says—with the support of international observers—that Moscow was behind vote tampering that denied her party the decisive victory it was headed for. 

Meanwhile, authorities in Ukraine have reported that Moscow spent some $350 million on election interference in 2019 alone. 

Russia’s election-interference tactics first gained global attention during the U.S. presidential election in 2016, after which the Department of Justice ultimately indicted 13 Russians, along with Paul Manafort—the former head of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—on charges including money laundering and bank fraud in attempts to swing the election to Trump. What is all of this? 

Miranda Patrucić is the editor in chief of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative journalists with operations on six continents. Patrucić says Russia, like China and other autocratic states, has been running corruption and influence operations around the world with a varied but clear set of goals. In some countries, it’s mainly economic advantage. But more often, it’s also geopolitical advantage—or even undermining democracy itself. Beijing and Moscow are invested in corroding the legitimacy and stability of democratic systems—in neighboring countries especially, but in fledgling and established democracies worldwide, too— because the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin both see the flourishing of democratic life and leadership as threats to their own autocratic systems ... 

Michael Bluhm: Ben Freeman says that while they’re not the biggest players in the U.S., where so much money goes into legal influence operations, China and Russia are doing the most to corrupt other countries globally. Would you agree with that?