The Romanian presidential election, explained

Two challengers confront an establishment in decay

After the cancellation of the election in 2024, Romania has been in the international spotlight. The re-run of the presidential election there suddenly seems pivotal for the very future of the European Union. The country faces a stark choice tomorrow between a Europhile right-liberal Maths prodigy and a Trumpian ex-football hooligan. But how did we get here? Why are people so angry with the establishment — or ‘the system’ — in Romania? And who actually are the two contenders? Our Romania correspondent explains all…

The emergence of a two-party establishment

Romania’s first post-Communist President was Ion Iliescu, the dominant political figure for most of the period from 1989 to 2004. It was Iliescu who was responsible for much of contemporary Romanian political culture, including the character of any ‘anti-system’ opposition, to this very day.

The Russian-educated Iliescu was in fact a senior member of the Romanian Communist Party, only removed from the Central Committee by Ceaușescu in 1985. In the course of the sudden, violent uprisings that ousted Ceaușescu at the end of 1989, Iliescu emerged as the de facto leader of the National Salvation Front (FSN, Frontul Salvării Naționale), a party which mostly consisted of ex-Communists suddenly converted to social democracy. The precise character of the Romanian Revolution remains fiercely debated to this day. Conspiracy theories — some plausible, others less so — abound.¹ The Revolution’s ambiguities set the stage for a rather conspiratorial political culture in contemporary Romania, something which reached a climax with Călin Georgescu.

Iliescu and the FSN would win makeshift elections in 1990. It was only in 1992 that Romanian politics would begin to take its modern form. Under the new Romanian constitution, Iliescu won re-election as President in 1992 by a much smaller margin; meanwhile, Iliescu and his supporters, who had left the relatively big-tent FSN, founded a more ideologically focused party, the Democratic National Salvation Front (FDSN, Frontul Democrat al Salvării Naționale). The rump of the FSN, led by former Prime Minister Petre Roman and soon renamed the Democratic Party (PD, Partidul Democrat), was more economically liberal than the new FDSN. FDSN, as the biggest party, formed a minority (and later a coalition) government. The FDSN itself would eventually be renamed the Social Democratic Party (PSD, Partidul Social Democrat) — the leading political party in Romania to this day. The other party of present-day interest in this period was National Liberal Party (PNL, Partidul National Liberal), a revival of Romania’s dominant pre-Communist party — and Romania’s second most dominant political party to this day. PNL, at this time popular with students, positioned itself as somewhat more right-wing than PD, with which it would eventually merge.

Much like in many other ex-Communist countries, Iliescu and the FDSN were assisted in their activities by the persistence of many pre-Revolution political networks; networks that, while obviously not static in the years since, have only seriously began to be dislodged in the Romanian case over the last decade. It is in the places that these networks still remain influential (e.g., Oltenia) that PSD is strongest nowadays, but in the past they penetrated the country to a much greater extent. These networks operated in many ways; some legitimate, others much less so. Low-level vote buying, most famously through offering free buckets to the elderly rural poor, was common in the ’90s and early ’00s. Allegations of PSD activists being bused around to vote multiple times at different stations were also widespread. Another concrete example of these networks at work was the so-called Mineriad of 1990, in which unionised miners from the Jiu Valley were — with the support of Iliescu — ferried to Bucharest to brutalise PNL (and PNȚCD, another centre-right party) student protesters, who objected to the heavy presence of ex-Communists in the new government.²

Iliescu, who is still alive today, is now one of the most despised men in all of Romania, accused of destroying the ‘spirit’ of the Romanian Revolution. These pre-Revolution political networks in Romania are themselves blamed, both accurately and inaccurately, for a whole host of problems (especially cronyism and corruption), as well as a general sense that much that happens in Romania is ‘rigged’ by a ‘system’. Additionally, Romania’s economic performance in the ’90s was very bad. Especially in the early years, Iliescu was a staunch opponent of serious economic reform, and in particular privatisation. He was also, by Romanian standards, an only lukewarm supporter of alignment with the West, instead — albeit highly inconsistently — seeming to want to pursue a ‘middle path’ between East (i.e., Russia) and West (i.e., the EU and NATO) to a greater extent than most Romanians desired.

Most fundamentally, Iliescu can be understood as cementing a sovereigntist and isolationist strain in post-Communist politics here — or, perhaps more accurately, ensuring a continuance of certain aspects of Ceaușescu’s own desire for nationalistic autarky, both economic and geopolitical. It should be remembered that unlike other Communist governments in Eastern Europe, which were effectively run by national traitors, Ceaușescu’s commitment to nationalism was basically unimpeachable. Internationally, he pursued friendly relations with as many countries as possible, both East and West (to the extent that was possible for a country deep within the Eastern Bloc), and generally pursued a policy of trade and non-interventionism. This political strain, which would become known as ‘sovereigntism’, would be greatly watered down over the years, but is still present across the political spectrum, Left and Right. Simion and (even more so) Georgescu would not have gotten anywhere without it.

Both Iliescu (in a rematch against his 1992 opponent, PNȚCD’s Emil Constantinescu) and the FDSN were defeated handily by their centre-right rivals in 1996, but the new coalition governments (consisting of the centrist PD, the agrarian PNȚCD, the centre-right PNL, and the Hungarian interest UDMR), struggled with much the same issues as their predecessors over the next four years.³ Iliescu would win his second term as President in 2000, easily defeating the extreme-right poet laureate Corneliu Vadim Tudor in a contest reminiscent of the 2002 French Presidential Election (featuring Chirac and Le Pen). The centre-left were returned to office, with PSD as the largest party.

It was around this time that the Romanian economy, after the chaos of the ’90s, finally started to kick into gear, recording growth rates of at least 4.7% in all but one year from 2001 to 2008. Romania would join NATO in 2004 and accede to the European Union in 2007. While Romania suffered a deep recession in 2008, the economy mostly returned to form from around 2011. This growth was led by a resurgent manufacturing sector, which currently employs around one-third of the workforce, and a new ‘tech’ sector, particularly centred around (but not confined to) Cluj. Regional inequality is substantial: the countryside has been emptied out; industry has shifted away from many of the old centres in Moldova, and moved more towards Wallachia, with all of the social consequences this entails.

Today, Romania has a GDP per capita of $21,570, up from $1,659 in 2000 (which itself was barely higher than in 1990), representing a substantial convergence with the European average over a very short period of time in historical terms. However, it is currently suffering from a huge budget deficit and a toxic demographic cocktail of low and dysgenic birth rates combined with years of massive emigration. The question of how to deal with the budget deficit is one of the main issues this election. Inflation (especially for groceries) is another common complaint. In general, there is far too little recognition among Romanians of the extent of the economic progress the country has made, with astonishing numbers of people sincerely claiming nothing changed since 1990. If you really believe this, then it is not surprising that you would want radical change!

In 2004, Romania was greeted with its second domineering post-Communist political figure: PD’s Traian Băsescu, who served as President from 2004 to 2014. While it certainly cannot be said that Băsescu is ‘popular’ today, mostly thanks to his highly unpopular reforms to the justice system and a vague stench of corruption, he is certainly more respected than his fellow ex-presidents (Iliecsu, Constantinescu, and Iohannis respectively). Băsescu, a former merchant marine officer involved in smuggling, had an almost Trumpian style, insulting journalists by calling them ‘faggots’ and ‘stinking gypsies’, while claiming to stand up for ordinary Romanians against a ‘corrupt elite’ backed by ‘media barons’.⁴ Băsescu also firmly cemented Romania’s pro-Western and anti-Russian geopolitical orientation, overseeing Romania’s entry into the European Union, exploring reunification with Bessarabia (i.e., the Republic of Moldova), and sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was also in this period that the general economic direction of Romania for the next two decades was firmly set in place. This mostly occurred through the complete and total defeat of economic leftism in the country. While this defeat of economic leftism came in many forms, including significant progress with privatisation, the most obvious was the opposition of all major Romanian parties to progressive taxation. In 2005, PNL’s Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu (Prime Minister, 2004-8) switched Romania onto a flat tax, something that was strongly opposed by PSD.

However, over time, PSD came to like the new system. The flat tax was at least tacitly accepted by PSD’s Victor Ponta (Prime Minister, 2012-15) and actively endorsed by PSD’s Liviu Dragnea (de facto⁵ Prime Minister, 2016-19), with the latter even reducing it from 16% to 10%. Whilst PSD’s Marcel Ciolacu (Prime Minister, 2023-25) has explored progressive taxation, this has been in the context of a need to raise revenue rather than the redistribution of income, and has proven politically impossible to implement. As such, there is now a surprising degree of consensus in Romania on the matter of taxation: that the state should be not exactly small, but small by contemporary European standards, and primarily funded by a flat system of taxation, reliant upon heavy social security contributions.

The most important thing to say about Băsescu’s successor, PNL’s Klaus Iohannis, who was President from 2014 to 2024, is that he certainly did not match Băsescu’s work ethic or political influence. Iohannis, a Transylvanian Saxon who previously served as Mayor of Sibiu, seemed to spend much of his time in office on holiday, costing the Romanian taxpayer millions in the process. His only real activity, in contrast to the highly active presidency of Băsescu, was to sometimes involve himself in the formation of new cabinets in the course of Romania’s interminable political crises (there have been sixteen different cabinets in the last fifteen years).

These crises, principally relating to difficult parliamentary arithmetic (see below) combined with various scandals or minor interparty disputes, are generally of no real interest to the outsider and are not worth discussing here in any detail. One exception is the Colectiv nightclub fire in 2015, which claimed the lives of 67 people, and was at least exacerbated by corruption (especially in the hospital treatment of the victims) and flagrant breaches of regulations, unchecked by an incompetent state. The Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, resigned after the mass protests that followed. Simultaneously, the aforementioned Dragnea was being investigated for tax fraud, and received a two-year suspended sentence; later, in 2021, Dragnea would be sent to prison for corruption.

Iohannis is now extremely unpopular, though it is difficult to point to much in particular that he has done to deserve this (other than being lazy).⁶ Given Romania’s continued economic growth, perhaps Romanians should learn that it is, at least occasionally, better to have a President who does nothing than a President who does something.

An establishment in convergence and decay

As a consequence of the manoeuvres described above, the distinctiveness of the Romanian centre-right tradition (represented by PNL) from the Romanian centre-left tradition (represented by PSD) has collapsed into almost nothing. While PNL’s merger with PD-L (which itself was a merger of the centrist PD and PLD) also had an effect, this was principally because PSD recognised that it had lost the argument on economic policy, and thus ceased being in any way a meaningfully ‘left-wing’ party, even if it is true that they remained somewhat more left-wing than PNL (mostly thanks to their wish to increase pensions) and had a different cultural cachet. After all, what sort of ‘left-wing’ party supports a flat tax?

But the biggest irony is that even though it was PSD who lost intellectually, they have actually suffered less than PNL from the lack of real political differentiation between the two that followed. This is probably because PSD’s political networks are much superior to PNL’s, and because it has a much broader social base, traditionally relying upon farmers, industrial workers, and the elderly rather than the relatively well-to-do, who were more likely to defect to right-liberal competitors. While it was humiliating that Marcel Ciolacu, the incumbent Prime Minister and PSD’s candidate in last year’s cancelled first round, was narrowly beaten to the run-off by USR’s Elena Lasconi, PNL’s candidate (Nicolae Ciucă) did far worse, coming in a distant fifth place. Though that is not to say that PSD are in a happy place either, with historically poor election results in 2024.⁷

As a consequence of the gradual decay of Romania’s two main parties, mostly owing to generalised dissatisfaction combined with limited voter choice, neither of the two candidates who made it into the second round are from either the broad centre-left (but in reality, centrist) Romanian political tradition or the broad centre-right Romanian political tradition. Rather, they are from the two main ‘insurgent’ Romanian political traditions at present, positioning themselves against both: namely, the anti-system liberals, represented by Save Romania Union (USR, Uniunea Salvați România); and the anti-system nationalists (or ‘sovereigntists’), represented principally by the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR, which is the Romanian word for ‘gold’, Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor), but also by SOS and the misleadingly named Party of Young People (POT, which is the Romanian word for ‘I can’, Partidul Oamenilor Tineri).

We will explain what exactly these two new political traditions mean below. However, here it is important to note that their growth, particularly as it has occurred more-or-less concurrently, has thrown Romanian politics into complete chaos, as it has become very difficult for any government to have a stable majority (given proportional representation). This, unfortunately for the establishment, has only accelerated matters.

The results of the 2024 Parliamentary Elections, which took place shortly after the first round of the cancelled Presidential Election, should paint the picture: in terms of vote share, PSD won 22.0%, AUR 18.0%, PNL 13.2%, USR 12.4%, SOS 7.4%, and POT 6.5%. This put the ‘establishment’ bloc (PSD, PNL, UDMR) on 157 seats, the ‘sovereigntist’ bloc (AUR, SOS, POT) on 115 seats, and the ‘anti-system liberal’ bloc (USR) on 40 seats. In Romania, 166 seats are required for a majority. The ‘anti-system liberals’ and the ‘sovereigntists’ are very reluctant to work with the ‘establishment’; the ‘establishment’ in turn is very reluctant to work with the ‘sovereigntists’. To make things harder still, relations between the composite parties in each informal bloc (especially PSD and PNL, and AUR/POT and SOS) are also very uneasy. After the elections, there was only a functioning government because of a quirk of Romania’s constitution: namely, the fact that designated ‘ethnic minority’ parties are not subject to the 5% threshold.⁸

The near-impossible parliamentary arithmetic has driven the two ‘establishment’ parties, PSD and PNL, along with the Hungarian interest UDMR, into ever-closer cooperation, greatly helped along by their aforementioned ideological convergence. The two parties (if we include PD, now part of PNL) have repeatedly been in unstable coalitions for years now: in 2008-9, 2012, 2012-14, 2021-23, 2023-24, and 2024-25.

In 2012, the two parties formed an electoral pact, the Social Liberal Union (USL, Uniunea Social Liberală), but it broke apart less than two years after winning a massive majority in the 2012 Parliamentary Elections. Nine years after this first experiment, the cooperation between the two parties has once again deepened. In 2021, PSD and PNL formed the National Coalition for Romania (CNR, Coaliția Națională pentru România), also backed by UDMR.⁹ In the most recent European Elections, PSD and PNL presented a joint ticket under the CNR banner. Finally, in the re-run of the Romanian Presidential Election, PSD, PNL, and UDMR all backed a single candidate, Crin Antonescu of PNL. As a consequence, the general sense in Romania of the ‘establishment’ closing ranks in order to protect a ‘rigged system’ has only intensified. That this is almost without doubt the cleanest government in Romanian history has been unable to save them.

After Antonescu’s failure to reach the second round — having been pipped to second place by Nicușor Dan — PSD left the coalition, once again throwing Romania into political crisis. But who was it that beat out Romania’s old establishment?

The sovereigntist challenger: George Simion, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), endorsed by POT

The favourite, albeit only very narrowly if the polls are to be believed, is surely George Simion, the leader of AUR. In the first round, Simion won a massive 41% of the vote, winning all but seven of Romania’s forty-one counties, and of the seven he did not win, all but Bucharest and Cluj were primarily driven by Hungarians backing the joint PSD-PNL-UDMR candidate en masse.

Who is Simion? Despite his thuggish demeanour and deliberate ambiguity when asked about rumours that his grandfather is a gypsy (owing to his appearance), both of Simion’s parents are economists by profession. He attended the second-best high school in Bucharest, and then studied at the University of Bucharest. After this, he received a Master’s degree in History, writing a thesis on ‘The Crimes of Communism’. Having followed Simion closely for a number of years, it is very obvious that he is a highly intelligent man: agile in interviews and debates, and more than capable of turning on his charm and wit when he’s not shouting at rallies. That is not to say that I think he would make a good President.

During his studies, Simion became heavily involved with football hooliganism (for Steaua Bucharest) and nationalist activism. He never seems to have held a ‘real job’. As a nationalist activist, Simion was involved with commemorations of the Romanian Revolution and agitating for the unification of Romania with the Republic of Moldova. Due to the latter, he has repeatedly been beaten up by the Moldovan police, and was eventually banned from the country completely. He has also been banned from Ukraine — once again, not due to being ‘pro-Russian’, but because of his advocating for the Romanian minority there.

In 2019, after many years of activism, Simion co-founded AUR. At first, it focused on Moldovan reunification — AUR also competes, without much success, in Moldovan elections — but this has been deprioritised in recent years, with the party repositioning itself as a standard-issue, right-wing populist party in the general European model. It first came to prominence during the Pandemic, as AUR, virtually alone in Romania, criticised mask and vaccine mandates. In the 2020 Parliamentary Elections, AUR would win 9% of the vote and 33 seats.

Simion was widely expected to do well in the presidential election last year: he was well-funded, with some polls showing him narrowly entering the second round. However, in the end, it was not Simion who triumphed in 2024, but someone who wasn’t in the polls at all, rising in popularity out-of-sight on TikTok: the former agronomist and current conspiracy theorist Călin Georgescu. As it happens, Georgescu was previously involved in AUR, but was removed following a dispute with the leadership after he made pro-Legionary comments. No matter: Simion gave his endorsement to Georgescu anyway. (You can read more about Georgescu the man here.)

The rest, of course, is well-known even outside of Romania. The second round never actually took place, as the first round was cancelled, primarily on the grounds of electoral fraud (as Georgescu had failed to declare his campaign spending). In the parliamentary elections soon after the first round of the presidential elections, AUR became the second-biggest party after PSD (61 seats); however, ‘sovereigntist’ rivals, in the form of pro-Georgescu ultras POT (40 seats) and the far-right SOS (28 seats) also gained, weakening Simion’s position as the undisputed leader of the ‘sovereigntists’. Georgescu’s attempt to register as a candidate in the repeat election was blocked, and after it became clear that Georgescu could not run, Simion made a deal with the unlikable leader of POT, Anamaria Gavrilă (an easily-flustered woman who always looks like she’s about to cry and peppers her interviews with random English phrases), that whoever was polling higher would become the official candidate of both AUR and POT. To no-one’s surprise, Simion polled higher and Gavrilă dropped out. (You can read more about the circumstances behind the cancellation of the Romanian Presidential Election in 2024 here and here.)

Simion has recently attracted a great deal of attention from Anglophone media outlines, such as the Financial Times and Unherd (to name just two). One fundamental error that they make is profiling Simion as some kind of ‘hick’ candidate; someone who attracts the support of a great, unwashed mass, lurking somewhere unspecified, but definitely ‘rural’. While it is true that Dan heavily panders to the capital — not least in how he keeps bringing up how becoming President is in fact the best way to help Bucharest, of which he is currently Mayor — and does best in wealthy urban areas, Simion’s main themes are not particularly ‘rural’ at all. Unlike with Georgescu, there is no real agrarian emphasis with Simion.¹⁰ This should not be surprising, given that Simion does best with the diaspora, almost all of whom live in towns and cities. He also does better with younger voters, not with older voters — who are both less educated and more likely to be loyal to PSD.

What Simion’s campaign revolves around is first, ‘democracy’, meaning his support for Georgescu and his opposition to the cancellation of the first round of the elections; and second, ‘sovereigntism’, broadly defined, meaning economic nationalism and a more isolationist foreign policy tilt. While social issues are not absent from Simion’s campaign — Simion will often play into his Orthodox Christianity, and will regularly attack gay marriage — these are not nearly as politically central in Romania as they are in Poland. One interesting recent addition to Simion’s rhetoric has been his attacks on immigration. He accuses the Romanian state of importing ‘people from the Third World, such as Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis’, instead of filling labour shortages by attracting back the diaspora. Once again, this is rhetoric that is squarely aimed at the diaspora, given the sort of unpleasant places that they are often living in abroad, filled with dangerous non-European immigrants who they certainly wouldn’t want back home in Romania (though it should also be noted that immigration to Romania has rapidly increased recently, mostly from Nepal).

Moving back to foreign policy, Simion is best described as taking his cues not from Moscow or Brussels, but from Mar-a-Lago; he is not ‘pro-Russian’, but ‘pro-Trump’. (Georgescu is a somewhat different story.) Simion emphasises that while he strongly supports Romania remaining in the EU and NATO — important, given that Georgescu’s biggest political weakness was being out-of-step with Romanian opinion on these matters — he takes generally anti-Ukraine stance, as he believes Ukraine is simply not Romania’s problem. More broadly, Simion sees Romania’s international future as being in a growing club of ‘anti-globalist’ countries in the West, both inside and outside of the EU, led by Trump’s America and Meloni’s Italy, and hopefully soon joined by Poland’s PiS (with which he enjoys very close links) and France’s National Rally.¹¹

Whilst a lot of anti-EU sentiment elsewhere in Europe is tied to the real or alleged imposition of foreign social values, in Romania the economic side of ‘sovereigntism’ is given more of a role than is typical, and Simion plays into this. This often connects to the general idea that Romania, in terms of natural resources, is a ‘rich country’, but that these — gold, oil, forests, farmland, and so on — have all been sold off to foreigners. In this week’s debate, Simion argued that the Romanian Government should try to acquire most of Petrom’s shares (Petrom being Romania’s largest oil company, now majority-owned by the Austrian OMV Group). He also complained of foreign contractors being allowed to ‘mess with us’ (this presumably being a reference to either the Microsoft licensing scandal or the Bechtel Transylvanian motorway scandal).

So, given all of the above, what is there to dislike? Sadly, Simion’s policies are either blatantly opportunistic, or make little logical sense. (This is mainly going off of the head-to-head debate with Dan on Euronews.) We can say a lot about the problems with his general stance above, but to keep things simple, let’s discuss something more objective: balancing the budget. Romania, as noted above, has the biggest budget deficit in the EU. Everyone agrees that this is not sustainable. Whoever wins must do something about it.

So what is Simion’s diagnosis? And what is his cure? Simion seems to believe, in Elon Musk style, that the state is not merely too big, but in fact filled with rapacious civil servants who funnel money to, and I quote, ‘their mistresses’. The boring reality, of course, is that the budgetari (as government employees are called in Romania) are unambitious individuals who waste resources through their lethargy and manipulation of overtime regulations to secure bonuses. Sadly, unlike America (which has the advantage of the dollar), Romania can’t afford to waste time with DOGE. Worse still, this has been combined, in Trump-like fashion, with threatening to fire the governor of the National Bank of Romania.

Meanwhile, in terms of spending, Simion — while still not as welfarist as Poland’s PiS, or as statist as Hungary’s Fidesz — has tacked very much to the Left of his ‘establishment’ and ‘anti-system liberal’ opponents, supporting more agricultural subsidies and criticising his second round opponent, Dan, for cutting disability benefits in Bucharest. In terms of welfare more generally, he seems to imply that Romania needs to expand its provision to be more in line with European norms. He has even hinted, after (rather astonishingly) admitting that he was outright lying about his promise to build houses for only €35k, that he would introduce a social housing programme. All of this should be very disconcerting to any right-thinking person, however much they might hate the European establishment.

The final question that remains is the following: what about Georgescu? Many analysts suspect that Simion, always opportunistic and ambitious, and in any case in serious ideological disagreement with him (at least in the past), will find some way to discard of Georgescu, or at least to marginalise him, whatever his rhetoric today. But while Simion has been somewhat evasive during the campaign, at times he has seemed to say that his Prime Minister will be Georgescu. Of course, this will be completely impossible with the current Parliament. While they will accept many people as Prime Minister if Simion wins, Georgescu is a step too far. However, if Parliament rejects Simion’s choice twice — say, if he proposes first Georgescu’s (second) wife, Cristela, then Georgescu himself — then he can force snap elections. This holds the potential for a big ‘sovereigntist’ victory in parliamentary elections to cement his success this May.

The anti-system liberal challenger: Nicușor Dan, Independent, endorsed by USR, PNL, and UDMR

Nicușor Dan is currently the Mayor of Bucharest, a position he has held since 2020. Prior to this, he was an MP from 2016 to 2020. In Bucharest, Dan is generally popular, though he has been criticised for his allegedly overly complex, technocratic projects, and for his relative NIMBYism (though this, importantly, means by Romanian standards). In the first round, Dan won 21% of the vote, just barely ahead of PNL’s Crin Antonescu. Dan is an independent, but he has been endorsed by USR, PNL, and UDMR; PSD, by contrast, have declined to endorse him. Dan receives his support primarily from major cities and the diaspora.

Dan therefore has a lot of ground to make up, but polling suggests an extremely tight race. Simion’s momentum has definitely stalled, partly thanks to a lackluster second round campaign. It is safe to assume that the vast majority of the supporters of Antonescu (20.1%),¹² Lasconi (2.6%), and minor candidates like Șandru (0.6%) and Funeriu (0.5%) would vote for him. The main question is where the supporters of former Prime Minister Victor Ponta (13%), who ran a vaguely left-populist, quasi-sovereigntist, pro-pensioner campaign, will go. Ponta, favoured by actual hicks (not Simion), has pointedly refused to endorse either candidate, but has attacked Simion somewhat more vehemently than Dan.

Ironically, given their respective reputations, Dan, born in Făgăraș, Brașov County, is from a more humble background than Simion: his father was a factory worker and his mother was an accountant at a chemical factory. Dan was a maths prodigy, attending the International Mathematics Olympiad in 1987 and 1988. Both times, he got (joint) first place and a perfect score, and in 1987, Romania won the entire competition. After studying further in Romania, he left for France, where he was eventually awarded a PhD in Mathematics from the Sorbonne. In 1998, he returned to Romania, vaguely citing an ‘inability to adapt to French culture’ as his reasoning. Upon returning to Romania, he involved himself in elite maths education and politics.

Perhaps as you might expect for a maths prodigy, Dan is a somewhat socially awkward man. People have regularly accused him of being an ‘autist’. This culminated in Simion himself recently calling Dan an ‘autist’ in an outburst against a hostile journalist, causing such outrage that Simion issued a rare apology. In truth, Dan is not autistic; he is merely awkward by the standards of a politician. If he wasn’t a politician, he would be considered normal enough. But this is enough to make him somewhat unusual in the political sphere.

Perhaps this awkwardness (and the associated prudishness) may help explain one of the defining moments of Dan’s political career: his departure from USR (previously USB, Uniunea Salvaţi Bucureștiul), the party he founded in 2015. Originally, the party was similar to Civic Platform in noughties Poland: ‘anti-system’, strongly economically liberal, vaguely environmentalist, and so on. For USR, the ‘system’, in short, means corruption, cronyism, working through the old networks, bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence, welfare spending for pensioners and farmers. As the establishment parties have somewhat cleaned themselves up, and with PNL in particular beginning to work with people like Dan, USR are no longer quite as distinctive, and are certainly nothing at all like the shock to the ‘establishment’ that the ‘sovereigntists’ would be; nonetheless, differences still remain, especially in internal party culture.

However, soon enough — much like Civic Platform — the party began associating itself much more with socially liberal causes. Dan opposed this tendency. This should not have been entirely unexpected, given that in 2000, Dan published an article that rejected ‘homosexual behaviour in public spaces in Romania’. (He later distanced himself from these comments, but without clearly stating what his current position is.) Matters came to a head when in 2017, Dan left the party as he believed USR should take a neutral stance in an upcoming referendum to constitutionally ban gay marriage (which ultimately failed due to low turnout), something which was strongly opposed by USR’s members, who are much more socially liberal than their senior leadership. Despite Dan’s departure, he still maintains close relations with USR.

Dan thus definitely represents the more conservative side of the ‘anti-system liberal’ tendency. In general, Dan declines to take a strong stance on social issues, though he has made mild criticisms of transgenderism and immigration over the course of the campaign, and continues to be evasive about his own views on gay marriage (which we can conclude he likely opposes for personal, maybe religious, reasons).

Dan, unlike Simion, was not a candidate in the 2024 Presidential Election. Instead, the ‘anti-system liberals’ were represented by USR’s Elena Lasconi, the Mayor of Câmpulung. Lasconi, off the back of diaspora supporters, narrowly beat out PSD’s Marcel Ciolacu to second place, and was set to face Georgescu in the second round before it was cancelled. She very likely would have lost this contest. After the cancellation, the ‘anti-system liberals’ and their donors seem to have taken some time to reflect, and decided — accurately — that the easily flustered, gaffe-prone and strongly socially liberal Lasconi was not a good candidate. Dan announced his candidacy for the re-run; slowly but surely, her supporters, aside from a few die-hard supporters of gay marriage, all defected. USR eventually endorsed Dan as their candidate, but Lasconi (who had gone slightly nuts by this point, alleging Dan was involved with the security services) refused to accept this, remaining on the ballot, but winning only 2.6% of the vote.

So what does Dan stand for? On foreign policy, Dan is as conventional as one can get. This should be clear enough from his foreign endorsements: Emmanuel Macron, Donald Tusk, Maia Sandu. But there is another big difference: Simion, in what will have been a critical error in the event he loses, has spent much of the campaign after the first round jetting across Europe, meeting with various right-wing leaders; Dan, by contrast, has stayed at home, using this to emphasise that he is the candidate who cares about Romania. Partly as a result of his travel, Simion has missed most of the scheduled debates, with the empty chair becoming an enduring image of the second round campaign.

In terms of economic policy, Dan is very critical of taxation. While he isn’t a radical, he was probably the most economically right-wing candidate in the first round, and is definitely to the right of Simion in this respect. Dan has opposed the IMF’s advice that Romania should increase VAT to reduce the deficit; instead, he calls for more efficient tax collection and cuts to spending. Whenever asked about healthcare or education, unlike Simion, Dan tended to avoid committing to increased provision, questioning where the money would come from, and seeming to reject the claim that such spending would pay for itself. Dan, much like outgoing Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, has been especially negative on increasing spending on education, despite Romania’s relatively low enrollment in tertiary education, even compared to countries with similar or even lower incomes (e.g., Turkey).

However, unlike Simion, Dan has not said anything about reducing the number of state employees. In the Euronews debate, he even made fun of Simion for not being able to say who and from what department he would fire people. Most likely, much of his strategy to reduce the deficit will be a continuation of the outgoing Ciolacu Government’s strategy: freezes to government salaries and hiring, and de-indexing pensions. But he has also proposed general administrative reform, especially through rationalising local government by merging small communes.

Dan has — in a perhaps politically unwise move — also doubled down on centralising the Romanian economy around a small number of major cities, ‘poles of growth’, especially Bucharest. In achieving this, the development of transport infrastructure is seen as critical: Dan argues that ‘a man from Târgoviște’ (a declining town 82km from Bucharest) should be able to commute into Bucharest in forty minutes, rather than ninety minutes as it is now.

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Image credits: AUR Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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1. Certainly, it is undeniably true that the Army and Ceaușescu’s infamous, Stasi-like security service, the Securitate, defected to the opposition very quickly, and that (at least to an extent) the Revolution was effectively ‘co-opted’, even if it seems unlikely that it was instigated by them, as some Romanians will allege.

2. It should be noted that the following year, the miners would turn against Iliescu, staging another Mineriad in opposition to his mild economic reformism.

3. Namely, the difficulties of transitioning from a command to a market economy, including a deep economic downturn from 1997 to 1999.

4. Despite being from PD, supposedly a centrist party, Băsescu was generally conservative and nationalistic in orientation, exploring reunification with the Republic of Moldova, attacking King Michael (and defending wartime fascist leader Ion Antonescu), and trying to block the construction of mosques in Romania.

5. Liviu Dragnea never actually held the post of Prime Minister, but is widely considered to have been the most influential politician during this period.

6. People are advised to ignore the claims, advertised on Wikipedia, that Iohannis was an ‘authoritarian’, with ‘democratic backsliding’ when he was in power, or that there was a lack of ‘press freedom’ (strange, considering that the entire press in Romania, from all sides, is relentlessly negative). For all his many failings, this is absurd.

7. It is notable that PSD’s few popular politicians, such as Lia Olguţa Vasilescu, the Mayor of Craiova (and former Italian-style neo-fascist), are the sort of people who, if they were from a different city, would simply be PNL instead. Those who are really of the old PSD networks are almost always intensely unpopular. This sort of PSD politics thus seems to be on its last legs, even if it was enough to allow them to lumber on to remain Romania’s largest party in the Parliamentary Elections last November.

8. This means that there are nineteen seats for ‘minorities’ (not including UDMR), despite many of these parties, such as the ‘Democratic Union of Turkic-Muslim Tatars of Romania’, receiving under 5,000 votes. This allowed the ‘establishment’ bloc to just barely obtain a majority with these tiny parties’ support.

9. According to the CNR’s protocol, the Prime Minister would rotate between the two parties every eighteen months.

10. And even Georgescu’s agrarian emphasis was very weird: culturally rather than economically orientated, primarily aimed at those who weren’t actually farmers. This should not be surprising given that nowadays, only a tiny proportion of Romanians work in agriculture.

11. He is also trying to repair relations with Hungary’s Orban, with whom Simion has previously had a tense relationship (mostly thanks to the anti-Hungarian sentiments of prominent AUR members). Orban has recently delivered a somewhat cryptic message that seemed to endorse Simion’s candidacy in this election, much to the anger of ethnic Hungarians in Romania.

12. This being on the assumption that most of the kind of PSD supporters who would prefer Simion to Dan were already voting for Ponta.