Bucharest, Romania – Romania is heading towards its most polarised presidential election in the country’s democratic history, with voters braced for the battle between a right-wing populist and a centrist technocrat on Sunday.
Recent polls show the race is close, with only a few percentage points separating the two candidates – George Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and Nicusor Dan, an independent and the current mayor of Bucharest, where 25 percent of the country’s 19 million citizens live.
Simion aligns himself with populist leaders such as the United States’s Donald Trump and Hungary’s anti-immigrant leader Viktor Orban.
The vote comes at a critical time for Romania, a member of the European Union and NATO that borders Ukraine.
Western countries are currently struggling to agree on support for Kyiv – with Washington’s backing for the war-torn nation in doubt, a strategy to deal with the fallout from increased US tariffs, and on how to deal with Russia as it continues to wage war and scold European heads of state.
The 38-year-old Simion secured 40 percent of the vote in a first round on May 4. Dan, a former mathematician, followed with about 20 percent.
The first round came in the wake of the controversial annulment of Romania’s October 2024 presidential election, in which ultranationalist underdog candidate Calin Georgescu advanced to the final. The constitutional court cited reasons of irregular financing and suspected foreign interference.
Simion has promised to redo the second round of the 2024 election if the Romanian public so desires.
A supporter of banned candidate Georgescu, Simion is likely to have swept up much of his base in the first round and has spoken of promoting Georgescu to the role of prime minister.
“After the annulment, completely abusive and unfounded, of the [2024] elections, Romanians have seen the ugliest face of this deep state that decides beyond the will of the people,” Simion told Al Jazeera.
A divisive figure, he is banned from entering Ukraine and Moldova. He has previously called to restore Romania’s old borders. He is also sceptical about sending more military aid to Ukraine. He has organised nationalist rallies in the past, as well as demonstrations against corruption. He founded AUR in 2020.
“I have promised that the first thing I will do as president is to unseal the files on the annulment of the elections. To do justice, we must know the truth,” said Simion.
Romania’s 2024 election fallout earned the nation criticism from high-profile populists who claimed free speech was being threatened. US Vice President JD Vance condemned the annulment at the Munich Security Conference, saying the ruling was based on the “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency”.
Political analyst Anamaria-Nicoleta Ciobanu defined Simion as a “chameleonic leader” who began his career as a moderate, but has since shifted towards the hard right.
“Most of Simion’s voters are not extremists; they are only disappointed in how the Romanian political and economic space looks”, she said.
Simion maintains an official stance of neutrality on the Ukraine war, but voters tend to be drawn to his anti-establishment message.
“The establishment, made by old socialist and liberal parties, which have been in power for 35 years, has always talked about ensuring stability. This stability has turned out to be not just an illusion, but a huge lie. Romania has been recently downgraded to a hybrid regime,” Simion told Al Jazeera.
In 2024, Romania was moved down 12 places to number 72 in a Democracy Index published by The Economist, falling out of the category “flawed democracy” and into “hybrid regime”, a mixture of authoritarianism and democracy.
Despite committing to staying in both the EU and NATO, Simion is critical of Europe.
“The federalist super-state that the globalist left is creating is not what European citizens want,” he said.
Last week, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu from the Party of European Socialists (PSD) resigned following his government coalition’s failure to secure their candidate, Crin Antonescu, in the run-off. The failure was something of a political earthquake – the first time in the country’s 35-year post-revolutionary history that a leading party has not reached the final.
With Ciolacu gone, the incoming president will have the power to nominate a new prime minister.
If that figure fails to win parliamentary approval, Romania could face snap parliamentary elections.
Dan called Prime Minister Ciolacu’s resignation “long overdue”, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Dan built his reputation as an anticorruption crusader, founded and later walked away from the Save Romania Union party in 2015, which he called the “first large-scale national party arguing for profound reform and modernisation of the political establishment in Romania”.
Drawing most of his support from Romania’s urban centres, Dan positions himself as a bulwark against the rising tide of populism.
“I’m now running as an independent, specifically because Romanians are distrustful of traditional party structures and their vested interests”, Dan stated.
Independent candidates do not receive state-subsidised campaign funding. Dan’s team raised 600,000 euros ($670,000) to support the campaign.
After trailing Simion by nearly 20 percent in the first round, he needs a large dose of support to win Sunday’s run-off.
“I sympathise entirely with voters feeling left behind,” Dan told Al Jazeera. Last year’s election scandal showed Romanians to be “torn between fear and hope, between turning inward and moving forward”, he said.
“Romanians expressed a deep desire for honesty, competence, and a leadership that respects both our European identity and our national dignity,” he said.
Dan’s presidential priorities include tackling tax evasion, fraud, drug trafficking, and creating conditions for Romania’s large diaspora of up to five million people, about 25 percent of Romanian citizens, to return home.
In the first round, a record number of diaspora Romanians turned out to vote, up 24 percent from last year. Of 966,000 voters, 60 percent supported Simion, while 25 percent supported Dan.
Simion voter Sherghei, a 47-year-old Moldova-born Romanian citizen in Norway, made his choice clear on May 4.
“I like how Simion fights with the world, together at protests,” he told Al Jazeera. “The diaspora is tired of working abroad, we all hope for a change, we want to go home.”
According to political analyst Ciobanu, Romania’s international reputation is at stake.
