Comment by telmo

> Yes it's always the evil Russians and the stupid people are influenced by TikTok so we need to tell them what they should vote!

I didn't call anyone stupid. I have been deceived many times in my life. It happens to all of us and it is happening to you now.

> At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls

Yes, that is the issue with misinformation, isn't it? It works. Otherwise nobody would care, would they? Misinformation is incredibly destructive, for example it caused Brexit, which was based on mostly lies, some of them famously written on a bus, along with algorithmic manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, that were never properly challenged leading to the referendum. This is all well-known by now and easily verifiable.

> How convenient he got fired

He didn't get fired, you are making things up. This is precisely the sort of misinformation that destroys democracy. He had resigned months before this appearance on French TV because of frictions with von der Leyen, who tried to block him from being reappointed. By the time he gave the interview, he was already a private citizen and his resignation had nothing to do with this incident.

Also, and importantily, he never claimed that the problem was that any party of candidate was "bad" or "not acceptable". Breton framed his remarks around enforcing EU law against foreign interference, specifically in the context of Elon Musk's (a foreign actor, by the way) support for the AfD ahead of Germany's snap elections. He said: "Let's stay calm and enforce the laws in Europe. They did it in Romania and, obviously, it will have to be done, if necessary, in Germany as well".

The misrepresentation that you are repeating was initially posted on X by the account Visegrád 24, a well-known propaganda account that constantly posts lies and disinformation with an anti-EU bias.

> But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place.

Unfortunately there is indeed one European member state that is suffering democratic backsliding and that is Hungary, but this is not the EU's fault. Otherwise, everything you wrote is demonstrably false.

> If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.

AfD has not been banned, and the issue is not them being on my side or not. There are plenty of political parties that I dislike in Europe and I don't want them to be banned. I only wish to ban parties and candidates that break the law, namely by receiving illegal funding from out geopolitical enemies because, unlike the "nationalist" post-truth movements, I am actually a patriot and I love Europe, open societies and liberal democracy.