A soils scientist, Călin Georgescu, may well be elected president of Romania Sunday. A fringe candidate, he had been kicked out of a right wing party for praising President Putin, deriding the North Atlantic Treaty, and hailing Romania’s World War II-era fascist leaders as “heroes.” A month ago he was languishing at one percent of voter intentions in the polls. So what made the difference?

If Romanian intelligence services are to be believed, a big contributor was a Russia-orchestrated campaign on the Communist Chinese-owned site TikTok. In the two months before the November 24 first round presidential elections, views of the candidate’s TikTok account jumped to 144 million from a few thousand. That is a stratospheric audience for a nation of 19 million people.

Today, Mr. Georgescu’s TikTok account has 5.8 million likes and 527,000 followers. In one TikTok video, he claims that Romania’s government pays Ukrainian refugee children 15 times the support given Romanian children. The clip drew 5.1 million views and 213,000 likes. Later, his assertion was proven false.

In a lesson to political campaigners the world over, the Romanian candidate’s huge viewership was boosted by the coordination of 100 suspect TikTok accounts, recommendation algorithms, and cash paid to influencers. In documents made public at Bucharest on Wednesday, one TikTok user allegedly paid $381,000 to other users to promote Georgescu content. Polls show younger voters are most likely to vote for Mr. Georgescu.

“Romania is a target for aggressive Russian hybrid actions, including cyber attacks and information leaks … and sabotage,” a document from Romania’s Foreign Intelligence Service says. 

In response, Mr. Georgescu says he does not know any of the TikTok influencers and that Wednesday’s release of the documents is an attempt to kill his candidacy. He told a Romanian television interviewer:  “I think it’s the first time in the history of the world when a state is organizing an action against a candidate to stop him from running.” 

The allegations come after Russia was accused of buying votes in last month’s presidential election in neighboring Moldova. Across the Black Sea, yesterday marked the eighth consecutive day of protests against a pro-Russian government that won an October 6 election marred by serious allegations of fraud. 

Of the three Eastern European nations, Romania, twice the size of Pennsylvania, would be Russia’s biggest prize. NATO is building its largest base in Europe in Romania. With a 380-mile shared border, Romania is a major supporter of Ukraine in its war with Russia. Romania is training Ukrainian F-16 pilots. Much of Ukraine’s grain exports pass through Romania’s Constanta port or an export shipping corridor along Romania’s coast.

Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. However, Mr. Georgescu, the front runner in opinion polls for Sunday’s vote, advocates a U-turn in Romania’s pro-Western policies of the last three decades. On Wednesday, he told Reuters that he would stop Ukrainian grain exports through Romania. 

Asked if he would meet President-elect Trump’s goal for NATO nations to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, Mr. Georgescu responded: “This is ultra-secondary. I am not even interested.” Yesterday, he told BBC that he would end political and military aid to Ukraine.

“Zero. Everything stops,” said the man who as president would be commander-in-chief of the armed forces and head of a council that decides defense spending. He went on to praise Mr. Putin as a “great leader and a patriot.” Echoing Kremlin talking points, he derided NATO as “the world’s weakest alliance” and Ukraine as “an invented country.” Before World War II, parts of modern Ukraine were Romanian territories.

The documents alleging a Russia-orchestrated social media campaign to pluck Mr. Georgescu out of obscurity were declassified and made public by Romania’s current president, Klaus Iohannis. In a measure of the distance between the two men, only six months ago Mr. Iohannis was a candidate to become NATO’s  secretary-general.

Mr. Iohannis grew up in Romania under the Communist dictatorship.  This week, he warned that Romania faces “an existential decision.” Sunday’s vote will decide whether the country remains “a country of freedom and openness, or collapses into toxic isolation and a dark past.”

A similar view comes from the center-right candidate, Elena-Valerica Lasconi, who faces Mr. Georgescu in Sunday’s runoff.  She said yesterday: “Romanians must decide by voting if they want to give Romania as a gift to Russia.” However, her party came in fourth in parliamentary elections Sunday.

Political analysts at Bucharest say that in Romania, as in many nations, elections are not won by foreign policy. In last week’s parliamentary elections, hard right-wing parties won one third of seats. Exit polls indicated that anti-corruption, inflation, and a needed change in the political class are big drivers for many voters.

Wednesday’s release of the TikTok dossier may be too late to shift public opinion in Romania. The early political success speaks to the fears of undue influence that prompted Trump in 2020 to order TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell or spin off its American TikTok business. Earlier this year, President Biden signed a law ordering the sale by the end of this month. TikTok has refused, and the matter is being weighed by a federal appeals court, which could rule on the dispute today.

Although TikTok bans paid political promotions, it was slow to detect in Romania that a network of accounts was working to promote the Georgescu candidacy, says Reset Tech, a nonprofit research and policy group. Romanian moderators should have worked aggressively to detect and delete near-simultaneous posts and the use of Georgescu’s name or picture in duplicate account names.

In a report issued yesterday, Reset Tech said: “TikTok’s delayed enforcement of its own policies allowed manipulation to persist during critical election periods.”

At a hearing of the European Parliament Tuesday, members charged that TikTok  could be violating Europe’s Digital Services Act by failing to mitigate election propaganda. Adopted two years ago, the law seeks to suppress unidentified election advertising.

The AP reports from the hearing that TikTok’s top Europe lobbyist, Caroline Greer, said that for the election TikTok deployed 95 Romanian language content moderators, worked with a fact-checking group, and met with political parties. The European Commission has issued TikTok a “retention order” demanding that it “freeze and preserve data” related to Romania’s election.

Separately, Romania’s intelligence agencies report about 85,000 attempted hacks in an effort to access electoral data and change content. They said access data for Romanian electoral websites was published online “on cyber-crime platforms originating from Russia.” 

From Washington, Congressmen Joe Wilson, a Republican of South Carolina, and Steve Cohen, a Democrat of Tennessee, the chairman and ranking member of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, respectively, condemned Russian interference in Romania’s presidential contest.

They wrote:  “Romania is an exemplary U.S. partner and NATO ally. The Romanian people prize their sovereignty and independence and deserve to live free from Russian imperialism and war criminal Putin’s delusional designs.” Looking to Sunday’s vote, they warned: “We urge vigilance from the Romanian people as they go into their presidential election this weekend.”