Romanian dreams, Romanian nightmares
“Europe can breathe a sigh of relief,” said the Norwegian Conservative Party’s Peter Frølich to Nettavisen after Nicușor Dan won the Romanian presidential election on May 18. But is he right?
Frølich made his comment after it became clear that the liberal, pro-European candidate Dan had won the Romanian presidential election on May 18. He argued that the election was more important for Europe than many would think. And he had a point. Much of it has to do with Dan’s opponent: the Trump-inspired George Simion from the AUR party (Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor, Alliance for the Union of Romanians).
Or, as Frølich put it: “A pro-Russian president in Romania could have destabilized cooperation in Europe and sabotaged support for Ukraine.”
There was also reason to be pleased with the high voter turnout, at least by Romanian standards. But the story of the Romanian election has many layers. It’s worth a deeper dive.
Originally, the election was supposed to take place last year. The first round was held on November 24. The ultranationalist candidate Călin Georgescu received the most votes. For many, it was a surprise.
It wasn’t that Georgescu was an unknown figure. The former high-ranking environmental bureaucrat had been floated as a possible prime minister as early as in 2010 and had made regular appearances in Romanian public life.
In a 2018 interview with public broadcaster TVR, for example, he said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel should “jump into a lake, because she has destroyed the German people and nearly all of Europe.” In the same interview, he called Donald Trump the cowboy the U.S. needed, and Barack Obama “a great American catastrophe.”
In 2020, he was embraced as a potential prime minister by the aforementioned AUR — the party’s acronym means “gold” in Romanian. This was repeated the following year, during a period of political crisis in the country.
But his candidacy never materialized.
One reason may have been his highly controversial statements in November 2020 supporting the hardline 1930s fascist Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Ion Antonescu, prime minister and Conducător of Nazi-allied Romania during World War II. Codreanu was the leader of the notorious Romanian Iron Guard (Garda de Fier), a fascist group also influenced by Orthodox mysticism. Antonescu was a fervent antisemite deeply complicit in the Holocaust and personally responsible for the so-called “cleansing of the land” (curățarea terenului), in which hundreds of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Roma were deported to Transnistria and killed.
According to Georgescu, the two men were heroes and “not lackeys of the globalist forces like those who temporarily rule Romania today.”
In a January 2022 TV interview, he reiterated some of these views. The backlash was strong, and even politicians from AUR distanced themselves from him.
When Georgescu ran for president in 2024, it was as an independent candidate. Few gave him much of a chance. As late as October that year, he polled at under one percent.
Many expected the election to be a contest between two established candidates. One was then–Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, who took over as leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD, Partidul Social Democrat) in 2020; in May the previous year the party´s strongman Liviu Dragnea had been sentenced to a lengthy prison term for corruption.
Ciolacu became prime minister in 2023, as part of a power-sharing agreement with the Christian Democratic coalition partner PNL (Partidul Național Liberal, National Liberal Party).
The other expected candidate was centre-right politician Elena Lasconi, a former journalist who rose to prominence as mayor of Câmpulung and was elected leader of the liberal party USR (Uniunea Salvați România, Save Romania Union).
On the far-right flank stood AUR’s candidate, George Simion, seen as a possible challenger to the two.
But on election day, Georgescu turned out to be the big winner. He received nearly 23% of the vote, which neither pollsters nor analysts had predicted. Ciolacu, who had been a frontrunner, got 19.15% and was edged out by Lasconi, who garnered 19.18%, thus failing even to qualify for the runoff.
Georgescu had campaigned on a platform that might seem familiar in today’s Europe. The ingredients were taken straight from the modern far-right’s playbook: national rebirth, anti-globalism, so-called patriotism, vaccine skepticism, denial of human-caused climate change, and not least, attacks on LGBTQ+ people. He also railed against Hungarian-born American financier George Soros, who often appears as a bogeyman in far-right narratives.
But that wasn’t all.
Georgescu also spoke of Christian love and the necessity of a spiritual awakening. At the same time, he embraced numerous conspiracy theories and ideas that can only be described as rather alternative. He has claimed that water has memory and has also alleged that carbonated soft drinks contain nanobots that “enter you like a laptop.” In an interview with Sky News after his victory, he made it clear that he doesn’t believe the COVID virus exists. “No one has seen it,” he said. “I trust the immunity God gave us.”
“All this may sound eccentric – even crazy,” wrote analyst Gabriel Elefteriu in a column published by the right-wing online paper Brussels Signal, a site that often defends far-right perspectives. “[But] to a great many others, it is in tune with much of the content they habitually consume and share on social media.”
Elefteriu added that the key is that Georgescu’s message is different. On one hand, he has a solid résumé that lends him credibility. On the other, he confidently presents “alternative theories.” This creates “a rather unique combination of the authentic and the magical,” Elefteriu wrote.
Polish-American journalist Anne Applebaum — coming from a very different place — has, for her part, written that Georgescu is hard to categorize. In an article in The Atlantic, she notes that calling him “far right” doesn´t quite capture whom or what he represents:
The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
Applebaum describes it as a kind of “neo-obscurantism,” a modern backlash against the ideals of the Enlightenment:
[T]he prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well.
But is Applebaum right? Some of the traits she points to are hardly new on the radical right. Yet she has a point that different currents are converging. It’s a trend worth noting. And it is emerging in many places.
To understand Georgescu’s appeal, one can hardly ignore popular discontent — for which there are good reasons in Romania. Since the fall of communism, Romanian politics has been dominated by PSD and PNL. At the same time, the country has had its share of corruption scandals, also involving top politicians.
While the fight against corruption has made significant progress in recent years, this has understandably bred distrust and suspicion.
Meanwhile, PSD and PNL — long competitors — have governed together in recent years. As journalist Andrei Popoviciu points out in a column published in The Guardian, this has contributed to a sense among many Romanians that the political class is conspiring against the interests of the people.
For many Romanians, voting for Georgescu wasn’t just about ideology, but frustration,” Popoviciu writes.
The question is whether Georgescu’s surprise victory was also about something else. Georgescu himself claimed not to have spent a single euro on his campaign, which was largely driven through social media, especially TikTok.
That’s also where his campaign suddenly took off in the lead-up to the November 2024 election. Videos featuring Georgescu went viral across thousands of accounts. More strikingly, around 800 of those accounts had existed since 2016 — before the originally Chinese platform was even launched internationally — and had shown little to no activity until November 2024.
Before we end up diving into conspiracy theories ourselves: this doesn’t suggest long-term planning. What it does indicate is a well-planned information or marketing campaign using purchased user accounts. The videos also received an unusually high number of comments, many of which appeared to come from automated accounts.
Călin Georgescu went viral. The question is how.
A few days after the election, two other former candidates — Sebastian Constantin Popescu and Cristian Terhes — called for the election to be annulled. Both represented small right-wing parties. Popescu had received 0.15% of the vote. Terhes just over one percent. Their request was not accepted. After a recount, Romania’s Constitutional Court certified the election.
Then, things changed. In the meantime and in response to media requests, incumbent president Klaus Iohannis released a document from the Romanian intelligence service. It described how Georgescu’s TikTok campaign had been coordinated via the Telegram messaging app and revealed that influencer Bogdan Peschir, known in Romania as “the king of TikTok,” had spent 381.000 dollars promoting Georgescu’s candidacy. Peschir, an IT entrepreneur also known as bogpr, has a fortune in cryptocurrency. He argued that it couldn’t be immoral to support a candidate he believed in, who could “bring real change to the vile system that has ruined our country.”
In the background, the mysterious South African company FA Agency also surfaced. According to French newspaper Le Monde, there are strong indications that this company is in fact an empty shell, controlled by Gambling Media Group — a network of companies linked to an originally Ukrainian advertising firm called Zlodei (which means “criminals”), mainly active in online gambling and casino marketing.
The Romanian intelligence service concluded that a foreign state actor might have been playing a role behind the scnes, though it did not specify which. In both Romanian and international media, suspicion quickly turned to Russia.
In any case, the revelations prompted Romania’s Constitutional Court to reverse its decision. It ruled that electoral laws had been violated and ordered a re-run of the first round — just days before the second round was set to take place on December 8, 2024. According to most polls, Georgescu had been on track to win.
Both Georgescu and his opponent Lasconi strongly protested the decision, calling it undemocratic. “The authorities are sowing panic, but no one can stop the Romanian people,” said Georgescu. Elon Musk also took a sudden interest in Romanian politics: “How can a judge cancel an election and not be seen as a dictator?” he asked.
Regardless, the ruling did little to ease the dissatisfaction and mistrust that Georgescu had built his support on. Large protests followed. Romanian voters became even more polarized.
In Die Zeit, Romanian-born German journalist Miriam Davoudvandi points out the obvious: this is about much more than TikTok. It’s about Romanian voters shifting to the right. That was also evident in Romania’s parliamentary election on December 1, 2024. One-third of voters supported far-right parties, including AUR, the more radical S.O.S. Romania, and the somewhat more diffuse Partidul Oamenilor Tineri (Party of the Young). Davoudvandi agrees that TikTok may have given Georgescu a significant boost, but emphasizes that he benefited most from being an outsider:
[In Romania], where many are eager to vote against the system and the so-called establishment, what is usually seen as a candidate’s weaknesses — such as lack of party affiliation and limited public profile — are perceived instead as signs of integrity and backbone.
[...] Old parties and moderate candidates represent the continuation of the status quo. Georgescu, on the other hand, promises change — and at the same time, tradition.
Perhaps it’s not so much neo-obscurantism as a familiar recipe: a blend of a romanticized past and an idealized future. That formula often plays a role when the far right takes to the stage.
So far: the backdrop. In the new presidential election in May this year, Georgescu was barred from running again, once again due to violations of election law. The far-right candidate was instead George Simion, supported by his own party, but also by both Georgescu and by AUR’s rivals in the Party of the Young.
He won the first round with nearly 41% of the vote. Dan, by comparison, received just under 21%. In a speech after his victory, a confident Simion promised to build “the Romania you dream of, the Romania you want to return to.”
That’s no coincidence: Simion was hugely popular among the considerable Romanian diaspora in Western Europe.
In many ways, he comes across as a more conventional and more polished far-right figure than Georgescu. He takes inspiration from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump — although the latter may mostly reflect opportunism. He has also spoken warmly about El Salvador’s autocratic president Nayib Bukele.
Simion holds a master’s degree in history, but profiles of him often focus more on his past as a football hooligan. His political career took off in 2019, when he ran as an independent candidate in the European parliamentary election. Not long after, he founded AUR, now Romania’s second-largest party. Before that, he had mainly made a name for himself campaigning for the unification of Romania and neighboring Moldova, where the majority speaks Romanian. It’s a dream he shares with many Romanian nationalists, who look back to the Greater Romania that existed in the interwar period.
His formula is otherwise recognizable: he delivers scathing criticism of the establishment, attacks globalism, advocates opposition to “gender ideology,” and promotes a form of Euroscepticism that is packaged as “Eurorealism.” His party also stood out for its criticism of strict measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Simion is sometimes described as pro-Russian. That is a truth with certain modifications. Simion has referred to the war in Ukraine—also a neighboring country—as Russian aggression and has called Vladimir Putin a war criminal. At the same time, he is outspoken in his opposition to support for Ukraine, which he accuses of oppressing its Romanian-speaking minority. And during the campaign, he again spoke of Georgescu—who has described Ukraine as “a fictional state”—as a potential prime minister.
Before the second round, Dan, as mentioned, succeeded in mobilizing the electorate. After first declaring himself the winner, Simion acknowledged defeat. Then he asked the Constitutional Court to annul the election, after making highly questionable claims of widespread electoral fraud. The Constitutional Court rejected the complaint. Against the backdrop of mistrust and the annulment of the presidential election last year, it seems doubtful that this will reduce the polarization of Romanian politics anytime soon.
Even though Nicușor Dan—who ran as an independent candidate—won a clear victory, it is debatable how strong a mandate he has actually received from Romanian voters. After the first round of the presidential election, Romania was also thrown into a government crisis, as the Social Democrats left the coalition. In theory, this could result in a snap election, something that would likely benefit AUR.
But why has the far right strengthened its position so markedly in Romania? Again, it may be useful to refer to the journalist Andrei Popoviciu, once again writing in The Guardian before the second round:
[T]he truth is that “pro-Europe” and “anti-Europe” are just labels. They disguise the fact that what Romanians are really rejecting is a domestic political class that has wrapped itself in the EU flag while overseeing years of economic stagnation, corruption and broken promises. After all, nearly 90% of Romanians support EU and Nato alignment, according to a survey from this year.
Both presidential candidates are, in their own way, anti-establishment. While Dan built his career fighting shady real-estate barons and politicians in the courts, Simion built his through televised outrage and fiery speeches that spoke to people’s frustrations with political elites.
Popoviciu describes the election as the end of an era. In both the cancelled election in December and the election now in May, none of the established parties’ candidates made it to the second round. In a sense, this may reason for optimism in a country where politics has long been stagnant. At the same time, it is precisely this political vacuum that has given the far right room to maneuver and achieve electoral victories.
In other words, it is by no means certain that Europe’s liberal democrats can breathe a sigh of relief.
Notes on the Antiliberal is written by Norwegian journalist Øyvind Strømmen. It will include articles on the radical right, extremism, conspiracy theories and other challenges to liberal democracy. This article is available in the original Norwegian on oyvindstrommen.substack.com.