Romania’s elites are riding the populist tiger George Simion presents a seductive opportunity

“Simion, Georgescu same! Number one!” says my taxi driver animatedly, turning back to me and away from the busy traffic ahead, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis, as we speed down the tree-lined boulevard into central Bucharest. His pithy analysis is precisely what’s alarming Brussels and Romania’s centre-left political establishment. Following December’s last-minute annulment of Romania’s presidential elections, purportedly but unprovenly on the grounds of Russian interference, the wave of populist support for the Right-wing candidate, Călin Georgescu, has been transferred to the national-populist George Simion, whose AUR party was only founded in 2019. Riding popular anger at both the perceived election interference by Romania’s political establishment, and the sense that the post-communist economic boom has stalled, the country’s populist wave seems to echo trends across Europe and the wider West.

Cited by JD Vance as an example of the centrist antipathy towards democracy, Romania’s dramatic election seems, at first, to echo narratives across the collapsing liberal order. On the one hand, an increasingly unpopular centre-left establishment invokes the spectre of Kremlin meddling to maintain its faltering grip on power; on the other, a dissatisfied electorate swings sharply to the Right for change — like it has across Europe. As a country with the EU’s longest borders with Ukraine, both Kyiv’s supporters and opponents in the West have divined in Romania’s electoral tumult fodder for their Manichaean worldviews. Yet in Bucharest itself, what emerges from talking to political insiders is something subtler, more uniquely Romanian, yet which also highlights under-emphasised aspects of the populist wave more generally: a Rightward swing driven not just by the dissatisfied masses, but also by elites increasingly willing to gamble on a dramatic shake-up of the country’s political order.

On the steps of Romania’s Senate, part of the vast and gaudy palace complex left unfinished by Ceaușescu at his overthrow, George Simion is giving an impromptu press conference to the assembled international and local media, as the first-round voting draws to a close. A dark, energetic man, derided as a gypsy hooligan by his bourgeois liberal opponents, Simion is a former football ultra barred from entering Moldova and Ukraine for his irredentist activism in the cause of a greater Romania. Now he glowers at the cameras as he accuses Romania’s political establishment of cooking the electoral books by registering long-dead citizens as active voters. “We were humiliated by annulling the elections,” he says. “It is against human nature to annul elections in a normal country. Nothing changed in Romania after 1989, we are still run by the security services.”

Much of Simion’s discourse derives from a popular belief that Romania’s post-Communist transition was only partial, and that behind the scenes, the country’s powerful intelligence services play an outsized role in politics. Romanian political figures speak more expansively off the record than on, regarding this claim: some suggest the security services prefer Simion to his opponent, the reclusive mathematics professor, Nicușor Dan, simply because they have more dirt on him. But in any case, they add defensively, is politics in the West really any different? Trump’s grappling with the FBI is well-known here: fighting the “deep state”, true or not, is a Romanian narrative that may yet play well with Washington’s new regime.

Yet if Simion feared deep state interference, he needn’t have: when the results came in hours later, he had won 40% of first round votes, as much as his two most popular challengers — the establishment candidate Crin Antonescu and the liberal reformist mayor of Bucharest Nicușor Dan — combined. Among Romania’s huge diaspora, formerly the engine of liberal reformist change, the scale of victory was even starker: Simion had won 61% of the diaspora vote, a marker of dissatisfaction both with Romania’s progress, and with life in the West. One Romanian friend in London, a liberal professional, highlighted the West’s increasing squalor and disorder as a major factor in the diaspora vote.

In his palatial office, watched over by framed portraits of historic Romanian heroes — Vlad the Impaler, the Dacian king Decebalus, Stefan the Great— and with an Orthodox icon of his namesake St George slaying the dragon behind him, Simion speaks to me after the results came in. “The diaspora always wanted a change in the country because they were forced to go and work in the West. They want to work and live here at home. And they voted not for liberals, not for sovereigntists, they are voting for a change,” he said, but “the European Union establishment is corrupt, greedy and in many ways shady. They do not respect the popular vote.” Instead, Simion describes his Right-wing AUR as “Trumpist” and “a MAGA party”, pledging to raise Romania’s already-high Nato spending even further. “Some would want to pay for the Green Deal and for gender operations for children,” he adds. “We would like to concentrate on the economy and to invest a lot in our military industry.”

In Bucharest, a stronghold of the liberal opposition, views on Simion are decidedly mixed. “We need a strong leader in Romania, like [Vlad] Dracul,” Ștefan, an older man shopping at the city’s Obor farmer’s market told me, “Not someone crazy like Ursula [von der Leyen], or a gay like Macron.” Florentina, the young, tattooed proprietor of a coffee shop in Bucharest’s bohemian Old Town, is less enthusiastic. “I want us to stay going in a European direction, but I am afraid that if Simion wins he will bring back Georgescu, who is an extremist, as Prime minister. If Simion wins I will move to Spain,” she says. Yet after a pause she adds, “This is the first time in 30 years that my parents did not vote [for the governing centre-left] PSD. Prices are higher here than Spain or Italy but wages are much lower — and all this inflation is because of corruption here.”

The collapse in the PSD’s vote share behind the establishment candidate, Crin Antonescu, is one of the most telling markers of Romania’s populist swing. I’d arranged to speak with the PSD, who some insiders suspected would tacitly swing behind Simion, on the night of the election. In between arranging the interview and meeting the PSD the next day, the government collapsed as the PSD Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu resigned, saying the ruling coalition now “lacks any credibility”.

In his parliamentary office, the PSD’s young deputy head Mihai Ghigiu seemed resigned to events. “Many people feel that they are not represented, feel that the politicians are not trying to deal with their needs. Because if we look to Georgescu, Simion, or whoever you want, their voters are not necessarily extremist, but they’re very unhappy with the current situation. We have to admit that us, the politicians, had or we are still doing a lot of mistakes. So I think they’re right, but at the same time, we have to admit that when somebody is wrong, you don’t set on fire and demolish the house.” With the PSD out of the running, Ghigiu admitted that a large chunk of its voter base will now vote for Simion over his second-round rival, the aloof Nicușor Dan, “not necessarily because they love Simion”, but because Dan’s grouping “called our electorate uneducated, that they are peasants and a lot of other harsh words”. In Ghigiu’s telling, a Simion victory is now more or less certain, but his ability to form a functioning government is very much in doubt: “Simion doesn’t have the votes, and I don’t think the pro-European parties will have a coalition or alliance with him.”

But Simion’s ascendant party feels history is on its side. Opening the French windows of AUR’s senate offices, the party’s Scruton-quoting, British-educated senator, Mihail Neamțu, takes me onto the balcony to admire the huge new National Cathedral still under construction. “Romania is the only country, I think, today in Europe which is still able to build a cathedral like this,” he says. Like the new cathedral, AUR’s meteoric rise “speaks for all these people who felt that EU integration somehow left behind some important elements of the human soul. Just talking about economic resilience, just investing in infrastructure, that’s not good enough. And so there is a battle for the soul of the nation. There’s nothing fascist about saying, we have a country, we have a nation, we have a people with a certain type of values, and we want to preserve that.” That’s why, Neamțu claims, the Romanian diaspora has swung so solidly behind Simion. Imagine yourself in the place of a Romanian emigrant in “the Tower of Babel”. That is London, Neamțu says: “You ask yourself, Wow, was it worth it? I mean, my kid is now trans, my wife divorced me, I am not fulfilled spiritually, I have some money, but where is the sense of purpose and belonging? And so these people seriously question whether they should stay in the West or come back to Romania. And when they saw George with a very specific message, ‘Come back and we will rebuild this country’, they started to see life.”

Neamțu scoffs at the PSD’s hope that Simion won’t be able to form a functioning government. All he needs to do as president, he says, is refuse the first two attempts to form an opposition coalition, and then call snap elections, as the constitution permits. “And then what happens? You have a very popular president with a very popular party, and we could win. If next Sunday we would have snap elections, I’m sure we would win 40%. So George will be in a very powerful position.” He can appoint new heads of the security services, change the make-up of the constitutional court, Neamțu adds, “and he will be able to talk individually to lots of politicians who will understand that he is the future.”

Overlooking the English-style lawns of a plush country club in leafy, affluent north Bucharest, I have lunch with Romania’s ultimate political insider, Anton Pisaroglu. The urbane, Paris-based, professional rugby player-turned-political consultant, briefly stood as a presidential candidate — “Georgescu II” he says — after the December annulment, before withdrawing for personal reasons. “I cannot accept the fact that they cancelled the elections, because at the end of the day, no Russians entered in the voting cabins with the Romanians. They saw Călin Georgescu, they voted Călin Georgescu. This is the will of the people, and we should respect it, whether the system likes it or not. So yes, the Romanians, they are right to vote anti-system, because the system, it took from them their vote.” In Pisaroglu’s view, the remaining phase of the election will see Simion running off the back of Georgescu’s popularity, promising to enthrone him as Prime Minister and reaping the benefits. Yet at the same time, he adds, while the voters demand change, “the system never dies”, whether in Romania or in the EU as a whole. Romania is undergoing a transition from an old form of politics to something new, but the elites in both Brussels and Bucharest will adapt themselves to the new order. “At the end of the day, if Simion is going to win, they’re going to stay with him on the table. What can they do? The king died, long live the king.”

Simion’s messaging places him as both the upstart outsider candidate against Romania’s failing elites, but also at the heart of an emergent European Right-wing mainstream. Less radical in his rhetoric than Georgescu, Simion’s strong pro-Nato and pro-US stance aims to both endear him to the Trump administration and cement his place as Europe’s “new Meloni”, a phrase he often uses. “He loves the framing of MAGA guy. He prefers to be America’s guy or MAGA guy, rather than be Russia’s guy,” the well-connected political analyst Radu Magdin tells me over a lunch of lamb and Negronis. “I honestly believe he’s not Russia’s guy, but I don’t think he’s a MAGA guy either. I think he’s a very pragmatic, semi-populist guy who is very hungry for power.”

In Magdin’s view, Romania’s worldly, well-heeled political elites are unruffled by Simion’s populist rhetoric, confident that the old order had run out of road in Romania as in the rest of Europe, and that the new order offers them a comfortable billet. “Simion is informally courting a lot of smart people, and a lot of the older, intelligent ones who are very centre-right and very reformist in mind were surprised to see that AUR and Simion know how to play their cards,” Magdin says. “You can be middle class and frustrated. You can be rich and you can vote radical. So for example, I also know rich people of Bucharest who vote Simion because they have a feeling they could be even stronger. The rich Romanian entrepreneurs, they have a problem now with some of the multinationals with whom they compete, they have the feeling that we need a more patriotic presence.”

Despite Romania’s disputes with its historic rival Hungary, Magdin adds, many among Romania’s ruling class, as with its working class, observe Budapest’s self-aggrandising presence on the European stage and desire an Orbán of their own: “There is a feeling in Romanian society that our leaders, they don’t really stand up for our rights, and they really aren’t present, or defend national interests.” For Magdin, Romania’s populist wave is merely a natural stage of the country’s political development. “What happened in the Visegrad [countries] will eventually happen with us as well, discovering culture wars, discovering ideology, becoming more conservative, more patriotic or now nationalist. It was only normal for us to also become more patriotic.” Yet, for all the nationalist rhetoric, Brussels’ concern is overblown: “When different analysts ask me, Do you think somebody can take over the Romanian state the Hungarian way?’ I always say, No worries, we’re not that competent. Romanians are great people, but we’re very disorganised. I don’t think that Simion will have a problem assembling people who can give him ideas, but he will spend some critical months in initially wiping out his image and trying to explain to the world that he’s actually Meloni-ising, and everything is going to be fine.”

Outside a function dominated by Simion for the Romanian-American Business Council, in the echoing chandelier-lit marble halls of Ceaușescu’s white elephant palace, well-fed Americans with Southern accents mingle with sharp-suited young Romanians, discussing the profits to be made under the new order. “We here are at the eastern edge of Western civilisation,” an elegant young Romanian says to an American businessman, nodding over his goats cheese canapé, “We are the frontier.” Romania has boomed from EU membership, yet there is a feeling among the country’s political elites, as well as in Georgescu and Simion’s voter base, that the country’s growth has stalled, and that Romania is less powerful in Brussels and Europe than its educated population, bounteous resources and strategic position deserve. In Bucharest, a charming city of grand boulevards and crumbling, Belle Époque magnificence inherited from the Kingdom of Romania’s prewar oil wealth, there is a sense across society that the past few decades have seen the country fail to live up to its untapped potential.

Though not certain, a Simion victory in the second round on 18 May is now by far the likeliest outcome, and Romania’s political class are more relaxed about the prospect than a lot of the discourse might make it seem. For all that his campaign leverages the anger of those who failed to prosper from the country’s transition from communism, a sizeable chunk of Romania’s elites have adopted the idea that, perhaps, a populist victory here at the same time the rest of the Western world swings Right can make Romania great again — or at least, that profits can be made in the transition from the old order to the new.

In an age of geopolitical flux, there are lucrative prospects opening for Romania as a self-interested, well-situated middle-sized power hungry to enhance its own influence instead of submitting to a dying multilateral order. After decades of being financially subsidised, but looked down on by Europe’s Western elite, its frustrated business class sees a chance to grab a slice of power and influence, as other leaders buckle before a changing world. Instead of taking orders from Europe, they want to put their stamp on it.

Romania’s liberal centrists, increasingly viewed as narrow-minded provincials by Bucharest’s sophisticated power-brokers, may still look to Brussels for reassurance; but the elites, sniffing out a political change in the West as transformative as the country’s transition from Communism, increasingly see seductive opportunities. If not Georgescu or Simion, then someone else will fill this role, they say, which is now structural rather than personalist, driven by history and not the angry masses. Rather than turning against Europe, Simion’s rise shows Romania firmly embedded in a rapidly changing Western mainstream.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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