Romania’s elites are riding the populist tiger George Simion which presents a seductive opportunity – by Aris Roussinos for UnHerd – 10.05.25
- Michael Julien
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
“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.”
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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.
George Simion won the first round of Romania’s presidential election. (Credit: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty)
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