Back to the polls Romania canceled its presidential vote after an upset win sparked fears of Russian influence. But the new frontrunner may be no better for Ukraine.
For the second time in seven months, Romania is trying to elect a new president. The previous vote, held in November 2024, was annulled by the country’s Constitutional Court after the victory of far-right candidate Călin Georgescu raised suspicions of Russian interference. A do-over vote was held on May 4, without Georgescu in the running. This time, the first-round winner was far-right candidate George Simion, who won 41 percent of the vote with 53 percent turnout. This is despite the fact that in November’s vote, he placed fourth. In the runoff scheduled for May 18, Simion will face independent candidate and Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan, who received just half as many votes in the first round. Meduza looks at how the new far-right contender became the favorite to win — and what his chances are in the second round.
No president, no prime minister
Party-less, far-right candidate Călin Georgescu winning the November 2024 Romanian presidential election was a shocking upset. Virtually unknown in Romania before his campaign began, he surged ahead of the other candidates thanks to nationalist and populist messaging and a highly active TikTok campaign, ultimately securing nearly 23 percent of the vote.
Georgescu began preparing for the runoff, scheduled for December 8. But just days before the vote, then-President Klaus Iohannis released data suggesting Russian interference in the election, prompting the Constitutional Court to annul the results. The decision sparked mass demonstrations in support of Georgescu. On February 10, far-right parties in Romania’s parliament called for Iohannis’s removal, forcing him to resign — although his term was set to end in May anyway.
The next chapter in the political crisis came on February 26, when Georgescu was arrested in Bucharest on his way to file paperwork for the repeat election. He was released within hours, but ultimately failed to secure the right to run again.
Before his arrest, polls showed Georgescu had the support of 38 percent of Romanian voters. His base, largely driven by protest sentiment, quickly rallied behind a new favorite: George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians. Simion had also run in November but finished in fourth place, with just 14 percent of the vote.
On May 4, Simion took first place in the repeat vote — and the political fallout was immediate. Social Democratic Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu announced his resignation the following day, saying the ruling coalition of centrists and Social Democrats, formed in December, had failed in its mission to put forward a winning candidate. The coalition’s nominee, Crin Antonescu, came in third. “Yesterday’s vote showed that the coalition has lost its legitimacy,” the outgoing prime minister said.
As it stands, Romania has neither a president nor a prime minister. Their duties are being handled temporarily by the speaker of the senate and the interior minister.
An E.U skeptic who wants to unify Romania and Moldova
George Simion entered politics in 2019, when he ran as an independent candidate in the European Parliament elections. His campaign slogan was “A Greater Romania in Europe,” and he focused on defending the rights of Romanian minorities in Serbia, Ukraine, and other neighboring countries, as well as Romanian emigrants living in E.U. member states. The strategy didn’t pay off — Simion received just over one percent of the vote and failed to win a seat.
At the time, he avoided joining any party, but just a few months later, in September 2019, he co-founded the Alliance for the Union of Romanians. The new party embraced a distinctly far-right platform, summed up in its slogan: “Family, Nation, Faith, and Freedom.” It takes a Eurosceptic stance and calls for Romania to defend its national sovereignty from Brussels. The alliance also advocates for unifying Romania and Moldova within the borders that existed before 1940.
In 2020, with pandemic-era lockdowns and restrictions in place, this kind of rhetoric — alongside calls to resist mass vaccination — struck a chord with many Romanian voters. In its first-ever parliamentary election, the Alliance won nine percent of the vote. Four years later, in December 2024, the party doubled its support, securing 63 out of 330 seats in the lower house and 28 out of 130 in the senate, becoming the second-largest political force in the country after the Social Democrats.
In the November 2024 election, Călin Georgescu backed George Simion despite technically being his opponent — and even went with him to the polling station.
But Simion’s real appeal lay in populist slogans like “Let’s give back to Romanians what was taken from them.” He supports state control over key strategic companies, such as the oil giant Petrom and gas producer Romgaz, and is a frequent critic of the E.U. He champions an alternative vision of Europe as a “continent of sovereign nations” — a model promoted by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Simion has also said he’s ready to defy Brussels if necessary: “If tomorrow the E.U. passes a law we didn’t vote for […] or laws that harm Romania, I’ll use every power at my disposal to prevent damage to my people.”
Much of his rhetoric echoes that of U.S. President Donald Trump. Simion often wears red baseball caps with the slogan “Trump, Save America!,” calls his party “Trumpian in style,” and emphasizes that he has contacts in the U.S. administration.
But Trump isn’t his only role model. Simion is also an admirer of Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who he says helped "restore Italians’ faith in the European project." He’s even called for a “Melonization” of Europe. So inspired is he by Meloni that he’s promised a “Simionization” of Romania if elected — though he has yet to explain what that would actually entail.
Simion’s foreign policy views are highly radical. His plan to return to Romania’s pre-1940 borders would mean annexing Moldova and parts of Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, his rhetoric has ruffled feathers abroad. Moldova deported him in 2015 and banned him from entering the country for “organizing actions against the constitutional order.”
Ukraine followed suit in 2024, citing Simion’s “systematic anti-Ukrainian activity, which contradicts Ukraine’s national interests and violates its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
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Simion’s stance on Ukraine and Russian aggression is mixed. On one hand, he has called Vladimir Putin a war criminal. On the other, he voted against legislation allowing Romanian forces to shoot down Russian drones that enter Romanian airspace. He's also claimed Kyiv discriminates against the half-million-strong Romanian minority in Ukraine, argued that Romania spends too much on aid for Ukrainian refugees, and vowed to cut off military and logistical support to Ukraine if elected. Given that 70 percent of Ukraine’s grain exports pass through Romanian territorial waters, this is not an empty threat.
Simion is also known for staging a public wedding in 2022, which Romanian media compared to the controversial 1925 marriage of Corneliu Cordeanu, founder of the World War II-era fascist and anti-Semitic Iron Guard movement. Simion invited all Romanian citizens to attend, even booking free buses to transport them — and several thousand people showed up.
His success in the 2024 election also owes a lot to his media savvy. He had a strong example to follow: Călin Georgescu, his political ally, achieved explosive popularity the previous fall thanks to TikTok. Simion followed suit, flooding the platform with close-up shots, emotional speeches, and behind-the-scenes footage from his rallies. As a result, by election day, he had 1.3 million TikTok followers and more than 30 million likes on his videos.
TikTok helped Simion mobilize not just young voters in Romania, but also Romanians living abroad. While he won 41 percent of the vote inside the country, his support among the diaspora reached 61 percent. Out of the 3.6 million votes cast for Simion on May 4, about 600,000 came from abroad.
The lagging moderates
Elena Lasconi, who ran as the candidate of the liberal Save Romania Union (USR) and came in second in November with 19 percent of the vote, has seen her support all but collapse over the past six months. In the repeat election, she managed to get just 2.7 percent of the vote.
According to polls conducted right before the May election, much stronger prospects were expected for Crin Antonescu, who was backed by the ruling coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party. He was projected to win up to 23 percent of the vote — enough to make it into the runoff. In reality, though, he only received 20 percent and finished third.
As a result, Simion’s opponent in the second round will be 55-year-old Nicușor Dan, who secured 21 percent of the vote. A co-founder and former leader of USR, Dan is a center-right, pro-Western politician who has pledged to fight corruption and increase defense spending. He was elected mayor of Bucharest in 2019 and re-elected five years later.
After the first-round results were announced, Dan framed the upcoming runoff against Simion as a fight against anti-Western forces: “Our task is to convince Romanians that the country must move in a pro-Western direction — and that will be the focus of our campaign over the next two weeks.”
But Dan faces significant hurdles. For one, the Romanian press has criticized his past ties to businessman Mihai Păun, who for years operated in Russia and Belarus and praised Vladimir Putin in the 2010s. Dan’s performance as mayor of Bucharest has also drawn mixed reviews: while he tried to curb uncontrolled development, he was accused of dragging his feet on permits for building a new hospital and a Holocaust memorial museum.
Unlike Simion, Dan has struggled to harness TikTok and other social media platforms. In fact, he stopped campaigning online altogether in April. He also faces difficulties with his voter base: while he’s popular among educated, affluent urban voters, he remains little known in the regions — where voters tend to favor Simion and his bold, populist slogans.
The candidates who were eliminated in the first round haven’t rushed to endorse Dan either. On the night of the vote, Crin Antonescu — who, again, received 20 percent — declined to endorse any candidate.
Story by Alexander Dunaev