Original article (in Albanian) was published on 12/12/2024; Author: Pustina Patris
Claim: The World Economic Forum (WEF) is attempting to assassinate Romanian politician Călin Georgescu.
Verdict: Unverified
A claim is circulating on conspiracy networks that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is attempting to kill Romanian politician Călin Georgescu.
As is often the case, the text of the post does not include any evidence to support this extraordinary claim.
The post seems to be a hasty translation of an article in English, which references a piece published on December 8 on the American portal The People’s Voice, formerly known as News Punch.
This outlet has been flagged as a distributor of fake news. According to a 2017 report by Buzzfeed, NewsPunch was the second-largest source of fake news circulated on Facebook that year.
The article from The People’s Voice does not provide any proof for the claim that the WEF plans to eliminate Georgescu but merely quotes a ‘WEF insider’. This person is said to have warned that Georgescu was on the WEF’s political assassination list and claimed to have seen a memo from the WEF outlining plans to publicly remove the Romanian politician, as they have done with other world leaders.
Naturally, neither this memo nor any other document that could serve as evidence for these allegations has been made public by this whistleblower within the WEF.
The independent ultranationalist candidate Călin Georgescu and reformist Elena Lasconi finished first and second, respectively, in the first round of Romania’s presidential elections on November 24. They were set to compete again in the second round on December 8. However, on December 6, the Constitutional Court of Romania cancelled the entire presidential election process, citing its constitutional responsibility to ensure the legality and fairness of the electoral procedures. The court ordered the process to restart from the beginning. This decision followed recently declassified reports that claimed Russian involvement in cyber activities aimed at undermining the integrity of the election process.
Documents released on December 4 indicate that Georgescu received undeclared foreign funding and included state actors in his campaign, which was mainly carried out on the TikTok platform.
