Global News Podcast - Romanian court criticised for annulling election results

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

Both candidates in Romania's presidential election have denounced a court's decision to quash the results. Also: why it's hard to be a woman in Iceland, and the bid to save handwriting in the age of the computer.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If Hitler isn't defeated, it's the end of the free world. Purple Heart Warriors, listen now by searching for dramas wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Saturday 7th December. The pro-Russia candidate in Romania's presidential election says a court decision to scrap the poll amounts to a coup. President Assad's forces are struggling on several fronts across Syria as Islamist-led and Kurdish rebels gain

ground. And the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer, is being bought by an online news site. Also in the podcast… At home we are not any more safe than women anywhere else. Violence thrives in silence. Iceland may top the world rankings in terms of gender parity, but what is life really like for women there? We'll start with an update on a breaking news story we covered in our previous podcast, the cancellation of the results of Romania's presidential election

because of alleged meddling by Russia. The ruling by the Constitutional Court has been criticised by the apparent frontrunner, pro-Russia Kalin Ghegescu. Today's decision by the Constitutional Court represents more than a legal controversy. It's practically a formalised state coup. The rule of law is in an induced coma and justice is subordinated to political orders and has practically lost its essence. It's no longer justice, it's on orders. Calin Giorgescu. The far right candidate was the surprise winner of the first round of the election. He'd been trailing of the first round of the election. He'd been trailing in the opinion polls and apparently spent zero campaign funds campaigning

only on TikTok. But Romanian intelligence then revealed details of a major operation to boost his profile on the platform and influence the vote, funded and coordinated from abroad with Russia, the chief suspect. His rival in the now cancelled runoff, Elena Lascone, insisted the vote should have gone ahead. This is the moment when the Romanian state trembled on democracy. We should have gone ahead with the vote. We should have respected the will of the Romanian people.

Whether we like it or not, from a legal and legitimate point of view, nine million Romanian citizens expressed their preference for a certain candidate by voting. We cannot ignore their will." Meanwhile the current Romanian president, whose term is due to end in two weeks, has said he will stay on until his successor is chosen. I asked our correspondent in Romania, Sarah Rainsford, what she made of the decision to scrap the poll. Well, it's pretty shocking, this move, a very bold move by the Constitutional Court, and one that's proving pretty controversial here in Bucharest. The judges have been meeting

since the morning to discuss whether or not they might annul the election, because of course for the last two weeks, there has been all sorts of controversial goings-on in politics here, all of it utterly unprecedented. It began with the first round win of a far-right candidate who nobody really had ever heard of before and after he campaigned purely on TikTok. The allegation is that there was Russian interference in the vote and right at the last minute, just before the second round of presidential elections, the runoff on Sunday, the court has

intervened and said they're cancelling the whole thing. So right now we're expecting a complete rerun to take place perhaps early next year. But in the meantime, there's a huge number of questions about how this decision was taken, how it's going to play out in Romanian society, whether people will come out in protest and what the candidate himself at the heart of all of this, Călin Găgescu, might actually have to say. Yeah, and have they provided any evidence of Russian interference? Well, yeah, I mean, the decision taken by the court was based on intelligence documents

that were declassified on the orders of the outgoing president just a couple of days ago. And they appear to document what they say is external meddling in the vote. They talk about a state-sponsored actor. They talk about a massive influence campaign on TikTok that was conducted with a lot of money from outside of the country. They also talk separately about cyberatt attacks, something like 85,000 attempted cyber attacks on sites and institutions linked to the electoral process.

So there's obviously a huge amount to look at. And when you join up all the dots of all those intelligence reports, they do suggest that Russia might have been behind it, something that Moscow at this point has denied. Kalin Gheorghevsky himself, I did meet him, I asked him, you know, is he Moscow's man and he denied that. He said he was Romania's man and that the only reason that all of this is happening according to him is because he is a man who's battling the established system and that they don't like it and they're pushing back. And if Russia did indeed influence the result, what's to stop them doing it again when the vote is rerun?

Well, it's a good question. And of course, the only answer is that they'll be far more alert to that, I guess, this time. But I think what's interesting in all of this is the extent now of allegations and accusations of what is essentially hybrid warfare by Russia all across this region and right through Europe. So this is just the latest example

when things are happening, strange things are happening, in this case, an unknown emerging to be the possible winner of a presidential election, a man who is pro-Russian, who's talked about ending aid to Ukraine, totally really changing Romania in terms of its foreign policy orientation. So a man who would be really quite useful to Russia could have been in the presidency here in Romania. And that's happening at a time when you have a Russian sympathizer in the leadership of

Hungary and Slovakia, so three countries that border Ukraine, all at the heart of Europe essentially, NATO members. So the suspicions are quite clear, the accusations are quite clear, that Russia really has been doing an awful lot in different ways right across Europe. Sarah Rainsford in Romania. Just before we recorded this podcast, rebel forces in Syria announced they'd reached the edge of the city of Homs. And given President Assad's forces, forces there a final ultimatum to defect. If Homs falls, it will mean the Islamists hold three of Syria's four largest cities, leaving just the capital Damascus in government hands. Another rebel group in the south has reportedly seized a

border crossing with Jordan, while Kurdish-led forces said they'd captured the main city in eastern Syria and a border crossing with Iraq. I asked our security correspondent Frank Garner just how big a threat this was to the Assad government. Oh, it's massive. This is the biggest threat. I mean, it's an existential threat to the 60-year-old regime of the al-Assads in Syria. So before Bashar al-Assad, there was his father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria as part of this Ba'athist regime since the 1960s. And this is the most serious threat in Bashar's time. I think the big difference is that the last time there was a serious threat was 2015. And Russia wasn't as stretched as it is today in Ukraine. Iran was much stronger.

Both Iran and Russia and Hezbollah in Lebanon all came to Bashar's aid and drove back the rebels. That isn't happening to the same extent this time. Russia is bombing. It's got a track record of doing an awful lot of bombing in Syria. But they are not able to give the same level of support that they were before. Hezbollah, it's a bit of a mystery what forces, if any, they're able to send to help prop

up the regime of Bashar al-Assad because they've been absolutely pummeled by the several weeks of war that they've had with Israel. Iran is also weakened. Iran says they're sending forces. Israel's warned them not to. It's a very unstable situation with a fast moving, kind of moving pieces around the chessboard, where with some pretty clear winners and losers. So I would say that the Bashar regime, Syria, Syria's government as it were, Iran and Russia are all on the losing side. Turkey, which has historically backed the rebels, is probably in a stronger position,

but it'll be worried about the Kurds who have taken the city of Deir ez-Zor in the east. Turkey won't be happy about that because it doesn't want to see the Kurds get any stronger. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing a meeting of foreign ministers from Iran, Russia and Turkey tomorrow, but as you're saying they've got conflicting agendas. After all, we heard the Turkish president saying he hopes the advance will continue. So will they be able to agree on anything? Well, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting in Doha because I imagine the conversation is going to be something along the lines of from Russia and Iran to Turkey.

What the heck are you playing at? What are you doing? This is completely upsetting the chessboard in the Middle East, certainly going against the interests of Russia and Iran. For Iran, this is, I think, particularly worrying because Israel is determined to break Iran's so-called axis of resistance, which is Iran's sort of galaxy, as it were, of proxy and allied militias. So the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza. And one by one, it is doing that. And its big ally in terms of a nation in the Arab world has been Syria. If the Al-Assad

regime falls to a Sunni Islamist militia, who by the way are no friends of the West, but if it falls to them, then that's pretty bad for Iran. It's also not going to look good for Russia, especially if it has to evacuate its naval base of Tartus to the West, pulling back to Libya probably. Our security correspondent Frank Gardner. Syria has been embroiled in conflict since 2011, with various opposition groups hoping to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Demonstrations first sprang up as part of the so-called Arab Spring but they were brutally put down and eventually morphed into a civil war that's

left more than half a million people dead. Rami Jarrah took part in the original pro-democracy protests before becoming a journalist. He fled Syria in 2011 but has often returned to report on the fighting and told Julian Marshall what he thinks about this current rebel offensive. A lot of what's going on right now obviously does not represent the attitude and environment in which the Syrian revolution began in 2011. When the revolution started, they were peaceful protests calling for change within the system. And many people actually expected that the Assad regime, the Assad himself, would welcome that change and that didn't happen. Peaceful protests were very quickly met with extreme violence that went on for months

and escalated, the death toll rose to unprecedented numbers. We're talking about 2011 here. The protests began in March, but in July 2011 is when we saw the first signs of the revolution becoming militarized. So I don't blame the revolution for moving into a more offensive stance, given that I lived it, I saw how it escalated, I saw what

sort of actions were taken by the Syrian regime, atrocities that were committed. Isn't that what we're seeing at the moment, Rami? A militarized revolution? Definitely. I think the difference is, in the beginning, when it became militarised, the rebels were mainly formed of defectors from the government forces. That, I think, was to some extent representative of the aspirations of Syrians. As the conflict went on and on for years, what we had is prisoners that were released from prison intentionally by the Assad regime. There were jihadists that were coming from Iraq, Turkey, had a very loose border policy. There was an Islamification of the uprising. And because of the fact that there was really

a very clear absence of seriousness to provide support to the rebels would, you know, essentially bring down the Syrian regime that opened the way for jihadist groups. Are you concerned that this uprising insurgency call it what you like seems to be led by jihadists? Very concerned. Jolani who is the head of the Haidat Tahrir al-Sham HTS was the head of the Haid al-Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, was the head of Jabhat al-Nusra, which at some point had pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. And this was after Jolani had basically defected from ISIS. He says he's a changed man. You know, there's no way that I could dig inside his head and really see if there's any honesty to this claim. So the overthrow of President Assad outweighs any concerns you might have about this jihadi-led

rebellion? You have the chicken and the egg in this situation. Assad is the chicken and all these other groups are basically repercussions of Assad staying in power and they are the eggs. So I honestly, even if this group had not provided the amount of assurances that it has provided so far, I would still be in favor of an end to the Assad regime. And let alone the situation we're in today, I've honestly seen a lot of signs that there is some hope that religious diversity, minorities, cultural practices, people's personal space, to some extent

is going to be respected. And I say this because we've seen how the fighters on the ground are, but they're basically, I don't, you know, the opposition pro-affidists will say that they're just parroting what, you know, the leader of HDS is asking them to say. But in that process, where you give orders to your fighters, and you tell them that, you know, this is what you're going to do, you're not allowed to harm people, you're not allowed to interfere in people's personal affairs, and you have to respect religious minorities. Giving those orders in itself creates a culture where I think to some extent it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Syrian journalist Rami Jarrah. Iceland is generally regarded as a good place to be a woman, topping world rankings for gender parity for the past 15 years. Mothers and fathers each get six months of parental leave, nearly 90% of working-age women have jobs and there are many female managers and executives. But the country also has persistently high rates of gender-based violence. For the BBC 100 women season our gender and identity correspondent Sophia Petitza explores whether Iceland really is the gender equality paradise it's made out to be.

I am strong, the battle cry let out by one young girl as she hurls a painfully heavy log across her nursery playground. The other girls are encouraged to shout words of support. I'm at a preschool in central Reykjavik. Here they use a teaching method called hjatli. Boys and girls are separated for most of the day and they're encouraged to do things usually associated with the opposite sex. The method was pioneered by Margaret Pala Olaf-Stotir. We need to start at the very beginning, two years old. They have formed their idea of what it means to be a boy or a girl and that will limit them

for the next years, especially when they're having this concrete way of thinking, boy or a girl, you know. So we need to start early. What I have just witnessed reflects the progressive attitude to gender roles that has seen Iceland become the most gender equal country in the world. But women's rights campaigners believe things are not as perfect as they might appear on the surface. We have been marketed as this feminist paradise, which we are not. I sit down with Holda, a survivor of domestic abuse.

She's one of several women in Iceland who believe the justice system has systemically let them down. At home, we are not any more safe than women anywhere else. Violence thrives in silence and we have been taught since we were young to forgive and to forget and stay quiet. At night or during the weekends I was still being molested by my grandfather and I didn't dare say anything because I did not want to shame my family. Close to 40% of Icelandic women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence. And with more than 80% of reports of sexual violence never making it to court, campaigners have taken the Icelandic government's failure to the European Court of Human Rights.

The state is being sued for misogyny. Gudrun Jonstóttir initiated the lawsuit. We thought it was completely unacceptable that women were not taken seriously and we decided to use the European Court of Human Rights to sue the Icelandic state. Now we are just crossing our fingers that we will win. We're at a vigil in Reykjavik. Each person is holding a candle to remember all the Icelandic women who were killed by men. It just shows that even in a country that is supposed to be a great place to be a woman, things are far from perfect.

That report by Sofia Batidza. And still to come on the Global News Podcast. All eyes on Paris for the official reopening of the rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Katie Watson in the Cook Islands where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology but a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the center of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. The European Commission has called it a historic milestone. A huge trade deal between the EU

and four South American nations agreed on Friday after more than two decades of negotiations. However, it is opposed by many European farmers as well as countries like France which has called it unacceptable. Our international business correspondent is David Waddell. This is a free trade deal between the four countries of Mercosur, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and the 27 countries of the European Union. It will cover all sorts of things but essentially it's about allowing these two regions and countries within those regions to trade freely without tariffs. From Mercosur's point of view it will be good for their farmers because they'll be able to trade more easily into the European Union. For the European

Union it will mean they'll be able to sell things like cars, machinery, chemicals into the Mercosur region. Now I read some analysis which suggested that this deal was snuck through against France's wishes by the European Commission because of all the troubles that President Macron is having back home. I mean there's a lot of anger in France. Will this go ahead? The French Trade Minister Sophie Prima has said that France is opposed to the deal, won't

go through with France's blessing if it goes through at all. She said that signing the deal, it only binds the European Commission, not the member states. Now if the deal is passed, it will pass on what's called qualified majority voting. Now that means one, that more than half of the EU member states, that's 15 out of 27, will need to pass it. Two, it needs a simple majority in the European Parliament. And three, EU members representing 65% or nearly two thirds of the

EU population would need to pass it. Now, France is against, Italy has said it's against, Poland has indicated it is probably against as things stand. And those three countries between them represent 36% of the EU population which would be enough to block the deal. That doesn't mean it won't pass but it does mean it's tricky. Okay if it does pass albeit with changes to win over those opposed to it what would that mean for ordinary citizens in Europe? Probably lower food prices it may mean that some European businesses particularly representing

those industries that are strong in Germany, for example cars, machinery, that they'll be more successful. Ursula von der Leyen has said that 60,000 companies are exporting to a Mercosur right now, 30,000 of them are small and medium enterprises, so they represent many workers across the EU and if they can trade more with those Latin American countries, then of course that will be stronger for their businesses and their jobs. On the other hand, farmers, of course, especially in France and Poland and Italy, and maybe even in some other countries that are broadly in favour of the deal like Germany,

may be hurt by this because if Latin American countries that are members of Mercosur can trade more effectively with the EU, they'll be sending cheaper products into the EU, especially beef products, and that of course may hurt farmers' businesses. International business correspondent David Waddell. Here in the UK, the sale of the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer, has been approved, despite a 48-hour strike by journalists. It's being bought by news startup Tortoise Media. David Silito reports. Founded in 1791, one of the observers first stories was the death of Mozart and for decades it's been a

liberal voice in British journalism but this deal is being seen by many of its journalists as a catastrophe. The decision to sell The Tortoise, a small loss-making news website and podcast producer run by James Harding, a former editor of the Times and head of BBC News, was made by the trust and parent company that owns The Guardian and The Observer. A decision driven, it says, by falling sales and a desire to concentrate on one brand. David Silito. Now, have you ditched pen and paper in favour of smartphone and computer? Certainly handwriting skills are a lot less important than they used to be.

But a group of bestselling authors is hoping to change all that. They're auctioning off some of their own handwritten notes as part of a campaign to encourage children to learn penmanship. But is it essential? Jonny Diamond got the opinion of tech journalist James Ball and Melissa Pronti, chair of Britain's National Handwriting Association. Handwriting is really important for early education because it has a very deep level of processing. So when children are learning to read and spell for the first time, what they'll do is they map the sounds of the letters to the visual representation of the letter

and then the instructions for writing the letter and they write it. So it's got a very deep level of encoding which supports spelling development and reading development. And you are convinced that that encouragement that writing brings is not replicated on screen-based communication? It depends on the age of the child, because when I'm having these conversations, the single biggest factor is speed. It's how fluent a person is at that mode of writing. So we know that the number of words that somebody

can handwrite in a minute or the number of words that somebody can type in a minute, that predicts how much they would write in a free writing task, but crucially how good that piece of writing would be. So things like composition, grammar, spelling, cohesion, idea development. James, you are a handwriting sceptic? James McDonnell I have an axe to grind in that I was terrible at handwriting at school. An otherwise excellent and kindly teacher described it as a dying spider crawling across the page. But genuinely, I had to do remedial handwriting in detentions for years. And it's really made me hate the written word and really, it almost put me off reading.

And given I now work as a writer, that's quite bizarre. And so I tend to just be worried of anything too prescriptive. Handwriting will work brilliantly for some children and it will work terribly for others. And when we're in a digital world, when even keyboards are quite outdated now, most people under 25 tap screens, I think we need to sort of look at what works once the child's got the language and they understand how to write, what works for them, what will they be using most and what prepares them for the world? You know, we've got lots of different tools for literacy. I mean, we write in lots of different ways. We write by hand, we send text messages, we send voice notes, we type, we put stuff into AI. We need tools for literacy. And that's how I would see handwriting. I saw some land surveyors on the side of the road the other day in the

pouring rain, and they were holding paper and a pen. So I don't think every profession has moved into this digitalisation world, but having it as a tool is how we would see it. James, can I ask you just on the sort of sentimental front, if you do, I don't know if you ever do anymore, if you ever get a handwritten note or a card with writing inside it, do you think it's a little bit more warmth in your heart than a text message or an email? I think there's still a place for it, isn't it? I mean, most of us talk to our partners far more over a text message than we ever will in a note. And so there's a place for it. I don't want to kill romance just before Christmas, but let's be honest, most of us

are tapping, aren't we? James Moore and Melissa Prunty talking to Johnny Diamond. The US President-elect Donald Trump, the Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and the Prince of Wales are among the guests due in Paris this weekend for the official reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral. The building was badly damaged by fire in 2019 but after five years of painstaking restoration work, a building flooded by light has emerged thanks to the cleaning of the stained glass windows and the removal of hundreds of years of dust and

dirt. What though about the sound inside the building? Well that has also been considered as Brian Katz explains. He's the acoustic researcher from Sorbonne University in Paris. When the fire first happened, there was a general discussion of how the restoration should be done. Should it be back to its original state? Should it be restored to before the fire or should it be modernized? From the research that we've done, the idea of a very clean, empty cathedral is rather a modern conception. And historically, there would be times when the cathedral was

full of tapestries and hanging drapes. I mean, one of the most notable of those is the coronation of Napoleon, where almost every surface is covered in some kind of fabric. He wrapped the columns in velour and there's carpeting. So the acoustics were much more variable in the past and probably more tempered. The 2019 version of the acoustics is not the most ideal acoustics for a certain kind of music or for preaching. How the organ on one side of the transept is heard on the other side of the transept is really affected by where the organ is and what height it's at. Late last year we were actually asked by the restoration committee to do an acoustic study on the proposals for the new choir organ, which didn't survive

the fire. So the grand organ needed to be cleaned but wasn't destroyed, while the choir organ didn't survive. And so they had a number of propositions from organ builders. And some of those propositions had the organ up on the triforium level to project better. And what we found is it doesn't actually project as well because of that triforium and transept separation. In this day and age, it's hard to imagine having the opportunity to basically go into

a Gothic cathedral that's just been built. And I think that's kind of what we're being faced with. The stone has been so cleaned. In the task of removing the lead contamination, they basically sprayed liquid latex on every square centimeter of stone because that helps suck out the lead dust, but it also sucks out all the dust and dirt over the ages.

So you're kind of getting the cathedral in its brand new state, and that's something that you know we haven't had in 800 years. I'm very excited. Brian Katz, Acoustic Researcher at the Sorbonne University. And that is all from us for now, but the Global News podcast will be back at the same time tomorrow. This edition was mixed by Zabiullah Qurush and produced by Alison Davis, our editor's Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway.

Until next time, goodbye. has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.