@Bienenvolk I'm confident rn. We'll hear again after the next 5 years, I guess :D

@Bienenvolk there's quite a strong propaganda, coming from the traditional parties (PSD - Social Democrats and PNL - National Liberals) claiming, but later taken by the extremist parties, demonizing him because he said he doesn't say I love you to his children (or something like that), because he's not married to his partner despite having children and living with her for so long, the fact that he's still living in a rented house at his age etc.

Most notably, he is a friend of a man called Matei Păun, who had business with Russia and Belarus and held some questionable views a while ago, but he emphasized repeatedly that he doesn't share his views. And George Simion is a persona non-grata in both Ukraine and Moldova, and pushed a lot of anti-Ukraine and anti-Moldovan narratives, so this fact was irrelevant as well.

He pretty much has the appearance of a modest man, just a regular guy doing every day stuff, driving a 20-year-old Renault Clio and living with his family, taking care of his children, something along the lines.

I'm personally following him since a while, and what I noticed was that in the previous campaign for the city hall of Bucharest, even when his opponents attacked him, they did it in a somewhat respectful way (don't know how to explain it). So he does seem like a man who gets respect and decency without explicitly asking for it.

Imo I think we'll have some interesting 5 years ahead.

@thorhop As a centrist, he did great things while being the mayor of Bucharest. He reorganized the public transit to cover more areas previously uncovered, brought new vehicles to the fleet (both trams, buses and trolleybuses), signed contracts to repair the tram lines that give you a bumpy ride and haven't been repaired since ages (funding is due from the EU, as the local budget was sabotaged by the "social-democrats" in the local council) and contracted a consulting company to create a master plan for a bike path network all around the city. He also focused on repairing the aging central heating pipes so that we won't have problems with heating in the winter anymore, especially by replacing them with new pipes with special sensors to detect leaking in time. Public lighting was also switched to LED on multiple arteries, saving money and electricity at the same time, and he managed to complete the water treatment plant at Glina, a project that should have been finished years ago by the previous "social-democrat" mayors.

Imo he's more than just an alternative, he's simply the way to go, and I'm glad he's now a president.

@davriellelouna I hope more Romanians will use Signal. You failed to overturn our elections, bă, pulă!

Edit: too bad tho, Telegram just looks gorgeous.

@Hubi Grok knows all too well.

@latenightnoir Ieșim la vot și va fi Nicușor! ✌️

Dacă te ajută cu ceva, eu weekendul trecut am fost la Cotroceni, am luat un steag și un balon cu UE, apoi m-au oprit niște puști pe la Victoriei să mă întrebe de unde le-am luat că vor și ei :D

Fingers crossed!

@Kennystillalive we sadly did. Many people voted for that guy and we, the others that are deeply attached to the EU and it's values are quite afraid of the possible outcome. Fortunately there is hope.

@kek no, democracy is not when you ban your opponents. Democracy is when you sanction contenders if they don't respect the rules of the game. When they declare 0 spending in online campaigns, when they don't properly label their political propaganda material as such (even when the law requests it), when they do not disclose their spending but they spend huge amounts of cash coming from far-right affiliates and other sketchy sources, when they threaten with riots or outright coups involving mercenaries that fought in Congo alongside Wagner, this is when the rules of the game are not respected.

I would be more concerned for democracy if we would have only two political forces and barring one from running would make the other one the only choice, than barring a sketchy guy from entering the race.

Just fyi, we had 11 candidates this election and we had 3 debates last week, where all of them were invited.

@witty_username yesterday. There was a huge gathering in Bucharest and we marched from the University Square (the place of the bloodiest clashes in the 1989 revolution) all the way to the Victoria Square, where the largest protests hapened almost 10 years ago, when corrupt politicians like Dragnea were seizing the state institutions.

There were also gatherings in Iași, Timișoara, Cluj and other cities.

@Anarchotron666

I quit Meta because of tech bro fascism, and hated Twitter even before it was X because, let’s face it - nobody has ever changed their opinion on anything because of a Twitter conversation (I know I’m exaggerating, to get my point across). I was in Reddit for a few weeks [...]

I'm assuming you previously used Facebook mostly, right? If so, there's also a Facebook alternative called Friendica, with pretty much the same core functionality as Facebook (sans Marketplace). Besides that, you can also format your posts and comments, add titles to them, get a dislike button and customize your experience more than you could do there. Plus you can also follow Lemmy communities straight from there, as well as Mastodon accounts, Flipboard publications etc.

Check out friendica.world to try it out.

@Blaze @morrowind Unpopular opinion: Facebook until around 2016 or so (whenever it added stories for the 1st time) was the best social network in terms of UI and concept. It's just Zuck that decided to just copy everyone, every single feature, cram everything in a single website and gobble all user data (and now he's also supporting Trump and free speech). Oh, and the ads. The stupid ads getting you everywhere.

@Wizard_Pope Cancelled for good. The first round will start again in March, and all the candidates will have to go all the way to gathering the support signatures (which is the 1st step). We already have one new candidate - Nicușor Dan, the incumbent mayor of Bucharest, which just announced he'll run yesterday evening.

@FundMECFSResearch