Threats to Democracy

The main rival to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been formally arrested and charged with corruption.

Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of the Turkish city of Istanbul, is expected to be selected as the opposition Republican People's Party's (CHP) 2028 presidential candidate in a ballot on Sunday.

The European Commission announced today the opening of formal proceedings against TikTok, suspected of breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) by not adequately mitigating risks linked to the integrity of Romania's election.

Scrapping an election between two rounds of voting is a massive step to take, but Romania’s Constitutional Court decided it was essential to protect democracy from foreign attack.

The court’s move to annul the Romanian presidential election plunged the country into turmoil, and it’s not clear where the upheaval will end.

Here is POLITICO’s guide to the extraordinary crisis in democracy engulfing one of the EU and NATO’s most important Eastern European member countries. 

The first round of the elections saw a previously unknown far-right nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu top the polls in a shock result.

The Romanian presidential run-off between far-right candidate Calin Georgescu and centrist pro-EU Elena Lasconi is now off, after the Constitutional Court (CCR) cancelled the results of the first round of votes and announced entirely new elections will be held instead.

This dramatic and unprecedented decision comes just as the voting has begun in the diaspora.

Something unprecedented just happened in the NATO and EU member country of Romania - a top court on Friday annulled the first round of the country's presidential election. Essentially there will now be a 'do over' election.

Many people saw the letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan earlier this week as old news. In 2022, Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Facebook had limited the spread of the New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop in response to information from the FBI. “The FBI basically came to us and was like, ‘Hey, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election; we have it on notice that basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that.’”

In May 1971, on The Dick Cavett Show, the theatre director Jonathan Miller had a prickly encounter with the Conservative politician Enoch Powell. He rebuked Powell for raising concerns about integration, culture clashes and social disruption, claiming that the Tory MP and others were creating a problem where none needed to exist. In Miller’s account, ordinary Britons would barely notice any downsides of immigration in their day-to-day experience — unless those like Powell primed them to regard it as a problem.

Tuesday night, while self-styled Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard described being tracked by teams of government agents in a surveillance regime more reminiscent of East Germany than a free country. Whistleblowing Air Marshals told Uncover DC Gabbard was singled out as a terror threat under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program, and the former presidential candidate says she noticed.

Some Hawaii lawmakers are calling on the director of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for answers to why former state congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is included on a suspected terrorist watchlist.

Rep. Gene Ward, R - Dist. 18, Rep. Diamond Garcia, R - Dist. 42, Rep. David Alcos, R - Dist. 41, and Rep. Elijah Pierick, R - Dist. 39, sent a joint letter to TSA Director David Pekoske on Sunday.