By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

After months of turmoil, Romania has narrowly avoided electing a president who openly opposes the country’s democratic foundations. In a runoff election on May 18, the far-right candidate George Simion, who had decisively won the first-round vote, was defeated by Nicusor Dan, the moderate conservative mayor of Bucharest. Although Dan’s come-from-behind victory has halted Romania’s slide into autocracy for now, it does not resolve the deeper political crisis facing the country. Simion received 5.3 million of the 11.5 million votes cast. The breadth of support for him also raises larger questions about whether institutional guardrails in Romania (1), and in Europe overall, can be effective in countering a far right that seeks to undermine those democratic institutions themselves.

In his campaign, Simion made little secret of his intent to turn Romania away from Western liberal democracy. He attacked the European Union, NATO, French President Emmanuel Macron (whom he portrayed as an avatar of Western decadence), and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He praised Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, whose policies he promised to implement in Romania. And he attacked Romania’s civil servants, threatening them with a DOGE-style purge. He also presented himself as a fan of U.S. President Donald Trump and the MAGA right, though he never received direct support from the Trump administration. Although he did not call for Romania to join NATO, he opposed all aid to Ukraine and often echoed Russian talking points about the war there. He was repeatedly praised by mouthpieces for the Putin regime, such as the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, and the right-wing ideologue Alexander Dugin.

To outside observers, such a platform may have seemed anomalous. After all, Romania has long been a staunch member of the Western alliance. For years, it has maintained close ties to the United States and hosted several U.S. military bases. With its 380-mile border with Ukraine and its access to the Black Sea, it has acquired additional importance to NATO since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moreover, Romanians have been reliably supportive of their country’s membership in both NATO and the EU.

But these external allegiances have obscured widespread disaffection among ordinary Romanians with their own Western-leaning political class. For years, the Romanian economy has failed to bring broad-based prosperity as the population suffered from the highest inequality within the EU. Public services have been hollowed out. And many Romanians have been disillusioned by a political establishment that has resisted reform and lost much of its popular legitimacy. It was against this backdrop of discontent that the country’s Constitutional Court took the extraordinary step of canceling the December 2024 presidential election to shut down a far-right insurgency. The result was a crisis that nearly brought Simion to the presidency in the rescheduled election this month.

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That a candidate openly hostile to democratic norms came within striking distance of the presidency reveals the extent of public alienation and institutional distrust. Romania today is not an authoritarian state, but it is not a confident democracy, either. The country’s far right, which now controls 30 percent of Parliament, has normalized radical antidemocratic rhetoric and mobilized a disenchanted electorate that sees liberal governance not as a safeguard but as a barrier to reform. The liberal order in Romania has survived, for now. But it stands on alarmingly fragile ground.

 

Playing With Fire

Paradoxically, the survival of Romanian democracy is owed in part to a move by the country’s highest court that many Romanians regard as highly undemocratic. As with this spring’s presidential elections, the first round of voting in November 2024 was won by a far-right candidate—but in that case, Calin Georgescu, an upstart independent candidate with large followings on TikTok, Telegram, and Discord who was linked to Russian propaganda networks, extremist paramilitary groups, and fringe conspiracy movements. A virtual unknown at the start of the campaign, Georgescu had somehow obtained 22 percent of the vote in his first-round victory. In December, Romanian intelligence services declassified reports that revealed coordination among Russian-operated bots and paid users on those platforms, backed by over a million dollars of funding from undisclosed sources, to boost Georgescu. Western governments, including the Biden administration, amplified these claims of Russian interference. Faced with the possibility that a candidate backed by Russia might capture the presidency and possibly overturn Romanian democracy, the Constitutional Court took the unprecedented step of annulling the entire election and ordering it to be rerun from scratch.

It is difficult not to see the court’s heavy-handed intervention—extremely rare in a Western democracy—as a textbook case of judicial activism and overreach. Citing violations of democratic norms and national security threats, the court asserted that it was stepping in to protect the constitutional order. But the annulment and Georgescu’s disqualification ignited a firestorm, as did his subsequent indictment by Romanian prosecutors on charges of incitement to actions against the constitutional order and of the establishment of a fascist organization. (In March, the court disqualified Georgescu from running in the do-over election.) For millions of ordinary voters, the moves confirmed long-standing suspicions that their country’s democracy had become a sham, rigged from above.

That view quickly caught on in right-leaning commentary internationally as well. The incoming Trump administration, which was sympathetic to authoritarian leaders like Orban and critical of European efforts to stymie far-right parties, quickly saw the Romanian situation as a case in point. At the Munich Security Conference in February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance sharply criticized the Romanian high court’s decision—based, as he put it, on the “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and on pressure from European neighbors”—as an elite effort to silence the will of the people.

As the campaigning for the rescheduled election got under way this spring, the far right was newly strengthened by the controversy. As the founder and chairman of Romania’s largest far-right party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), Simion took over Georgescu’s spot and received his endorsement, vowing that if he were elected, he would nominate Georgescu for prime minister. Simion could now cite the court decision as evidence of his core narrative that Romania’s elites, backed by the EU and western European governments and shielded by opaque judges, would do anything to block a true representative of the people. Simion thus reframed the rerun election as a battle not between right and left or even autocracy and democracy, but between the people and the unaccountable institutions that ruled over them. This message fit well with Simion’s longstanding embrace of conspiracy theories. In previous years, he had framed the COVID-19 pandemic as a hoax created to control the population and strongly opposed vaccinations. Throughout his political career, he has promoted anti-Semitic tropes and glorified Romania’s interwar fascist regime. If elected president, he promised to use the power of the state to pursue retribution against those who opposed him and even suggested that Romania should return to the monarchic rule of the interwar period.

Simion was sufficiently extreme that he did not receive much support from far-right movements abroad. Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, for example, recorded a lukewarm message of support; even Orban, who was initially supportive of Simion, later distanced himself from him because he denigrated Romania’s ethnic Hungarian community.) Despite his incendiary platform, Simion dominated the first round of the election, winning more than 40 percent of the vote in a field of 11 candidates, against just 21 percent for Dan, who came in second. Even with parties of the center and center-right rallying around Dan in the final round, Simion still secured more than five million votes including a dominant share of votes cast by the Romanian diaspora in Europe. His message—brash, conspiratorial, and anti-institutional—continues to resonate with a large segment of the population. Given the narrow margin of his defeat on Sunday, Simion’s movement appears to be far from finished.

 

Sick Man of Europe

A significant driver of support for Romania’s far right is the failure of the political establishment to reform the country’s broken economic model. Despite years of strong growth in GDP and deeper integration into European markets, the government has brought little improvement in standard of living to much of the country’s population. Along with high inequality, nearly a third of the population is at risk of poverty. The country also has the highest school dropout rates in the EU, and rural youth unemployment exceeds 30 percent, even as jobs go unfilled in major cities. The divide is the result of decades of absent or mismanaged investment in rural infrastructure. Meanwhile, the country’s entrenched political classes are seen by many ordinary Romanians as corrupt, self-dealing, and lacking a positive vision for Romania’s future.

The government’s inability to address these problems has left millions disillusioned and receptive to fringe ideas and radical political movements. (During the pandemic, for example, there was deep skepticism about the government’s Covid mitigation efforts, and vaccine intake hovered at around 35 percent, one of the lowest levels in Europe.) In December 2024 parliamentary elections, Simion’s AUR and other far-right parties won a third of the seats. Along with the cancellation of the presidential election by the Constitutional Court, this paved the way for Simion’s strong run this spring. Romanians came perilously close to electing a hard-right autocrat not because of culture war rhetoric, but because of long-ignored structural injustices. This is underlined by the political preferences of Romania’s large diaspora.Whereas a minority of Romania’s expatriates are university-educated and able to find good employment around the EU and integrate into local societies, the low-skilled and seasonal workers who make up the majority of the those living abroad, especially in Germany, Italy, and Spain, remain isolated and socially discriminated against. They were drawn in large numbers to Simion’s nationalist promise of building a country worth returning to, along with other voters who revolted against a social model they see as on the verge of collapse.

For now, Dan’s victory has bought the country time. A world-class mathematician and former civic activist, Dan entered national politics from outside Romania’s discredited party system. As mayor of Bucharest, the country’s richest area by far, he earned a reputation for fighting corruption, opposing the interests of big real-estate developers, and seeking to block entrenched clientelist networks from securing public contracts. Yet Dan won the presidential runoff not by pressing a sweeping agenda of his own but by assembling a broad anti-Simion coalition—an alliance of urban moderates, pro-European liberals, and other voters alarmed by the far right’s rise—in a late surge of support. His base included young voters and the elderly, women, the urban middle class, and dual-nationality Moldovans who viewed Simion’s rhetoric as dangerously aligned with Russian authoritarianism. Romania’s more than one million ethnic Hungarians, long a target of Simion’s ethnonationalist rhetoric, also voted overwhelmingly for Dan.

Governing will be difficult during his five-year mandate. His support base is diverse, and its expectations varied. While winning on a moderate conservative platform, Dan is expected to champion the rights of minority groups that no other political force currently represents. Although he is expected to preserve Romania’s EU and NATO orientation, he will also be under pressure to heed the population’s below-average support for neighboring Ukraine. (Unlike voters in Poland or the Baltic States, many Romanians believe that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has nothing to do with them and that NATO and the United States provoked the invasion, a widely circulated claim on Romania social media that politicians have done little to dispel.) Younger and urban voters see Dan as a symbol of clean governance and a bulwark against corruption and clientelism, and hope he will push political parties toward forming a competent and accountable government.

That will not be easy. To isolate the far right and avoid early elections at a time of renewed far-right support, Dan must rely on a patchwork of center-right parties: the National Liberal Party; the Save Romania Union, which he founded but left after clashing with its support for same-sex marriage; and the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania . Together, these parties control just over a third of Parliament. To form a government, Dan will also need the cooperation of the center-left Social Democratic Party in a broad coalition willing to support his choice for prime minister. Although such an alliance should in theory maintain Romania’s pro-Western trajectory, it will be fragile, not least because it risks resembling the stuck political arrangements that have governed the country for the past decade and against which much of the electorate just rebelled.

Meanwhile, the signs of potential economic collapse are growing. Romania’s fiscal system, which is based on a flat tax approach and suffers from chronically low revenue collections, has left the state unable to enact redistributive policies needed to narrow the country’s huge inequality gap and fix its dysfunctional public services. Dan and his coalition will need to urgently address these structural fractures to avoid further defections to the far right. Surrounded by economic conservatives, he is unlikely to pursue the kind of social reform the moment demands. For now, progressive taxation and investment in rural infrastructure do not have broad backing from the political establishment or the urban middle-class voters who supported Dan. Without such measures, more Romanians will be left out of the country’s growth, and support for its liberal institutions and perhaps those of the West itself will continue to erode. The election may be remembered as a brief pause before the next reckoning.

 

Renewal - or Russia?

Romania’s fracturing internal consensus carries significant external consequences. Perched on NATO’s vulnerable eastern flank, the country is on a strategic frontline. Aside from its long borders with Ukraine to the north and Moldova to the east, it hosts key NATO military infrastructure and plays a vital role in Western efforts to contain Russian influence in the Black Sea region. As last year’s Constitutional Court controversy made clear, Romania has become a choice target of Russian efforts to sow division among EU and NATO members.

Although investigations continue and little concrete evidence has been shared with the public, the Romanian Intelligence Service has disclosed that it traced a wave of more than 85,000 cyberattacks targeting the country’s electoral infrastructure in the leadup to the first-round vote last November. And the Kremlin has not been shy about expressing its views about Romania’s handling of the election: after the Constitutional Court’s decision, Peskov accused the Romanian state of having deprived voters of their right to choose their preferred candidate. He cast the disqualification of Georgescu as evidence that the West’s commitment to democracy was both conditional and hypocritical.

Since then, Russia’s meddling in Romanian politics through social media, especially Telegram, has continued. During the spring election campaign, the Russian nationalist and Kremlin ideologue Dugin issued statements in support of Simion, calling him a champion of real people. On election day, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov flooded social media with claims that the electoral process was being manipulated by Western governments—primarily France—to the point that Romania’s Foreign Ministry was compelled to respond in real time to falsehoods. For the EU and NATO, the danger is not only that Romania’s political divide could spiral into domestic instability but that it has also created an opening for hostile actors, foreign and domestic, to undermine Romanians’ wavering faith in the democratic model.

For now, Dan has allowed the country to avert a disaster. But the huge divide the election has exposed between Romania’s Western-aligned establishment and its rapidly expanding far right has not gone away. In fact, the country’s integration into the EU and NATO has long masked tensions between the country’s international commitments and its internal orientation. Even as successive Romanian governments have embraced Euro-Atlanticism, the country’s domestic politics have steadily been shaped by nationalism, corruption, and entrenched inequality. The postrevolutionary elite, in its rejection of communism, often sanitized the country’s fascist past, ignoring enduring xenophobia and anti-Semitism. And its embrace of a neoliberal economic model that served the elites did little to improve the lot of many ordinary Romanians.

This disconnect has bred pervasive distrust of the political elite that now extends to growing skepticism about the value of democratic institutions. Thus, 90 percent of Romanians continue to support EU and NATO membership, but few trust the government mechanisms meant to deliver on the promise of prosperity and the rule of law. Membership in the West is no longer in question, but what that membership means for Romania’s development, identity, and even basic democratic orientation remains up for grabs. By surviving the greatest challenge to its democratic foundations since the end of the Cold War, Romania has avoided disaster. But by relying in part on an emergency judicial intervention to do so, it may have further eroded key institutions’ democratic legitimacy. The country’s future now hinges on whether its leaders can turn this reprieve into renewal—or whether this second chance at democracy will be remembered as a missed one.

 

1) An almost entirely Orthodox state, it is surrounded by two other significant Orthodox countries, Romania, with which the Moldovans feel a strong kinship towards, and Ukraine. Although there are no key religious divides, there is a substantial ethnic divide that exists between the Bessarabians (predominantly Romanian) and the Transnistrians (predominantly Slavic).

 

 

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