-
2025-01-17 07:27:03Here anyone who gets 200k signatures can participate to the presidential elections, independent or with a political party. 200k that's about 1% of the people to put things in perspective. Usually such elections are held in 2 rounds. If any candidate gets 50% of the votes it is declared winner after the first round. If neither get 50% then 1st place and runner up go into the second round. This time 15 candidates participated. One woman was disqualified by the Constitutional Court (CC) before the contest even begin. Then there were 14 of them out of which 4 were posed to be above 10% in the polls. Two of them were of the more historical parties while all the rest were new entries in a matter of speaking. The big surprise was that the guy who got roughly 2M votes and won the first round was an unknown independent candidate for most. He reported no budget for his campaign while he got #9 trending worldwide on tiktok. The runner up was a woman, the mayor of a small city and a former news anchor. Then there was a huge scandal and one day before the second round, CC voided the first round, therefore the entire process. A future date will be announced for the new election, probably in the Spring. For now I'll refer myself from casting any judgement on the candidates or the overall process since I have no horse in this race. I'll only state that the information about the winner of the first round got to me the night before the first round started. If I knew beyond any reasonable doubt you can bet that the ones in charge were dead sure about the outcome. That or I'm the deep state. 🐸