Occam's razor here.. Polling failure and it's very clear from the actual amount of people voting for the guy. Yes you can make a conspiracy theory but it's a bit ridiculous.
Most Romanians that work in IT(and post here) live in their own bubble (because they make 5-10x average Romanian salary) and are totally disconnected from the common folks and can't now believe that the person making less than minimum wage that is serving their 3 euros expresso is not loving it.
Those common folks are similar to the rest of Eastern Europe with strict religious beliefs and very conservative so it's not a surprise they vote for someone that they resonate with.
Similar stuff happened in Brussels where a radical islamist party won seats in the parliament by using TikTok tactics. He did not show up in the polls either.
As you well know since you are Romanian there are not many cases of people tried and in jail in Romania for corruption.
Now take a state actor and imagine that they are responsible. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend there will be repercussions for this mess except - if possible - make people trust even less the 'system'.
Not many cases? There are many people tried and jailed for corruption, including previous mayors, senators, ministers, more than one prime minister even. Of the many possible critiques of Romania, not jailing corrupt politicians is among the weaker ones.
Most of those cases of even the prime ministers were just for show. Getting a suspended punishment while not having to pay anything back from bribery and no repercussions. This is equivalent to how I punish my kid, stay in the corner for five minutes and promise you don't do it again.
If you also relatively think the couple that are actually in jail they are too few for the amount of politicians or general corruption that is in prevalent Romania.
A lot of the things that we buy in Europe are already manufactured cheaply in China with different standards etc. We are moving a lot of manufacturing back to Europe, mostly in the eastern part of it. That part is still 'cheap' aka they can put the made in eu logo on the box, pay employees eastern Europe prices and ask buyers western Europe prices.
The same thing with the eu car companies... they even took the money from the states where they had factories (Germany, Belgium, France) which greatly subsidized them, increased their profits and margins then moved to the next EU state and beyond.
Most of EU countries havr some kind of consultancy embedded deep into the their core financial and governments and other critical institutions. The EU commission is full of barely competent consultants developing some sort of applications.
Probably getting EY or Accenture to solve the problems is one of the key steps in becoming accepted as a 1st world country.
I get it, I live in Belgium and being a freelancer is truly the only way to make a more than decent wage(more or less silicon valley salary with 36 hours week). Problem is that is not really fair
It's because data engineering has been reduced to be able to login to a cloud provider and know which workflow to drag and drop. This is easily learned in a couple of weeks so that s why those skills might not be considered software engineering.
The PDP-11 was unusually well suited for that. They designed it so you needed less skilled workers to assemble it which meant a lot of tolerance in components which leads to much easier maintenance. For example, the backplane is wire wrapped so there's no soldiering there which can eventually tire out. If things move around, oh well.
Also the PDP-11 was designed at the time boundary of core vs semiconductor memory with the clear intent to be able switch to semiconductor which led to an unusually flexible design around memory (and also affected I/O design). Check this 1975 paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800110.803541
Even though bosch engines are amazing their support service is execrable. I had an issue where there was a weird noise after 25km/h and even if there was an warranty they are taking months to fix it. First they said it's normal then send a recording of the sound etc.. Bought a 5k bike with a good engine to not have these kind of issues or if you have them then the repair should be in point.
On the block where I live there are a couple of hairdressers all empty and also a café owned by shady 20 year old Albanians.
A bunch of shops for construction gear where there is nobody etc. It's possible that it's a bad way to launder money but it does still exist.
Most Romanians that work in IT(and post here) live in their own bubble (because they make 5-10x average Romanian salary) and are totally disconnected from the common folks and can't now believe that the person making less than minimum wage that is serving their 3 euros expresso is not loving it.
Those common folks are similar to the rest of Eastern Europe with strict religious beliefs and very conservative so it's not a surprise they vote for someone that they resonate with.
Similar stuff happened in Brussels where a radical islamist party won seats in the parliament by using TikTok tactics. He did not show up in the polls either.