Dezorientarea strategică: exacerbarea nemulțumirilor societale prin mijloace hibride în criza electorală din România (2024-2025)
Strategic Disorientation: Amplifying Social Grievances through Hybrid Tactics During Romania’s Electoral Crisis (2024-2025)

Summary/Abstract: The 2024 Romanian presidential election represents a turning point in European constitutional history: the first instance in which an EU and NATO Member State annulled a national vote due to proven hybrid interference by a foreign actor, namely the Russian Federation. This article argues that the primary objective of such interference is not merely the promotion of a specific candidate – in this case, the independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu – but rather the creation of “a sense of strategic disorientation” within the targeted society. By combining long-standing domestic populist grievances with sophisticated “grey zone” tactics – including AI-driven amplification on TikTok and the illegal financing of electoral campaigns – foreign actors create a “zero-sum democratic trap”. If state institutions intervene to protect electoral integrity, as demonstrated by the Constitutional Court’s annulment decision in December 2024, the intervention is immediately reframed by populist actors as a coup orchestrated by the “Deep State”. If institutions fail to act, democracy, as a matter of principle, fails. This dynamic generates a toxic narrative that erodes institutional trust regardless of the legal outcome. Using Romania as its primary case study, this paper examines the transformation of overt pro-Russian propaganda into “sovereignist” disinformation, which weaponises existing socio-economic anxieties for manipulative purposes. The study concludes that countering this form of hybrid warfare requires moving beyond traditional fact-checking approaches towards a framework of strategic resilience capable of addressing the populist mechanisms through which foreign influence is disseminated.

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