On Sunday, Romania may be the latest to fall to the far right

Nationalist George Simion is benefitting from public anger over the nullification of the first attempt at an election. Despite his negativity toward Hungarians in the past, Orban is hugging him close.

Romanian presidential candidate George Simion is in Brussels today ahead of his country’s election on Sunday. In normal circumstances it would be quite unusual for a candidate to be abroad just four days before an election. But Simion is on a charm offensive here in the EU capital to try to convince voters back home that he is not an extremist that could put Romania on a course to crash out of the European Union along with Hungary.

Sunday’s election is being closely watched both in Brussels and in Washington. The American government has cast its lot with the Romanian far right, as it has done in Germany and other countries, after JD Vance publicly rebuked the Romanian constitutional court (though he seemed to be confusing it for an EU decision) for nullifying the first election result in November 2024. The court said that Russia had manipulated TikTok to boost far-right candidate Călin Georgescu, who came first in the first round. As was feared, that decision only increased the support for the far right and boosted nationalist candidate George Simion. He came first in the first round on 4 May with 41% of the vote - majorly boosted in popularity after he walked out of a live television debate in protest of the first round being invalidated.

Simion calls himself a “Trumpist” and has railed against both the EU and Ukraine. The only man who can defeat him in Sunday’s second round is the centrist pro-European mayor of Bucharest Nicușor Dan, but the odds seem stacked against him after he got 21% in the first round. Only half of Romanians turned out to vote. While most countries in Europe have parliamentary systems where the president or monarch is just a figurehead, Romania and France both have presidential systems where it is the president who attends European Council summits.

Simion has become an unlikely ally of Viktor Orban of late, which is odd because he has spent most of his career stressing Romania as a monoethnic state and denigrating the country’s minorities - particularly the sizable Hungarian minority in Transylvania. Hungarians account for 7% of Romania’s population, and in some regions at the centre of Transylvania they make up up to 80% of the population. Their status has been a long point of contention between the two countries and has in the past made Simion’s Romanian nationalist party AUR a natural enemy of the Hungarian nationalist Orban. But the two have struck an alliance and Orban has endorsed Simion, resulting in the strange sight of pro-Simion leaflets with Orban’s photo being distributed to Hungarian homes in Transylvania. What binds them is their mutual sympathy for Russia and their insistance that their countries and the EU should stay neutral in the Ukraine war and no longer send support to Kyiv. Europe’s Ukraine politics are making for strange bedfellows these days (as evidenced by Meloni, Simion’s group leader, as I’ll examine below). Needless to say, the prospect of Simion being elected on Sunday is making Brussels very nervous.

In the European Parliament today, I overheard Simion reassuring people. “Everybody should be relaxed,” he said. But at the same time, he accused his opponent of being the “Macron candidate” while he is the “Trump candidate”.