BUCHAREST — Donald Trump’s approval ratings may be at rock bottom but the far-right frontrunner for Romania’s presidency reckons alignment with the U.S. president is still a winning ticket ahead of Sunday’s election.
George Simion, who proudly wears Trump baseball caps, spoke to POLITICO fresh from a visit to Washington, where he gave interviews to podcast host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and far-right activist Jack Posobiec.
“We are the natural allies of the Republican Party and we’re almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the MAGA movement,” Simion said, referring to his party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR).
To Trump’s camp, particularly JD Vance and Elon Musk, the Romanian election has become a cause célèbre after it was dramatically annulled last December.
While the Romanian authorities said they had to cancel it over alleged election interference and “aggressive” hybrid attacks from Russia, the far right has accused them of overturning democracy because they couldn’t accept the first-round victory of Călin Georgescu, a nationalist firebrand sympathetic to the Kremlin.
The first round of the rerun will be on May 4, with a second on May 18. If he wins the presidency, the 38-year-old Simion has vowed to give a top role to Georgescu, who was barred from reviving his own presidential bid.
“We’re now in a campaign to reinstate democracy, the people’s will, the rule of law and the constitutional order,” Simion said.
AUR is a socially conservative party with an irredentist view of rebuilding a greater Romania, raising the prospect of potential territorial disputes and clashes with Ukraine, Moldova and Bulgaria. While he denies he is pro-Russian, Simion wants to stop military aid to Ukraine.
Founded in 2019, AUR already holds the second-highest number of seats in the Romanian parliament after the center-left Social Democratic Party (PSD). Simion came fourth in last year’s annulled presidential contest but now seems to have garnered support among Georgescu’s voters.
Whether Simion’s Trumpian message chimes more widely with the electorate is being closely watched internationally amid fears that a victory for Simion could destabilize a key NATO and EU member of 19 million people.
Simion is on course to win the first round with about 29 percent of the vote, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. If he wins on May 4, much will then depend on whether voters rally behind the second-placed candidate, likely to be either former National Liberal Party (PNL) leader Crin Antonescu (on 22 percent) or Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan (20 percent).
The second round is a run-off between the top two candidates from the first round.
Job for Georgescu
Within Romania, Simion is under scrutiny over attempts to hire a lobbying firm in the U.S. for $1.5 million to secure meetings with key American political figures and to set up media appearances with U.S.-based journalists. The controversy has focused on whether AUR could have used money given to political parties by the state for this promotional project.
Simion has insisted that the document mapping out such a deal was not a contract but a letter of intent. Even so, Romania’s Permanent Electoral Authority said on April 24 it would investigate the party’s financing.
Antonescu accused Simion of investing “in his own personality cult and in well-known conspiracists abroad. Instead of fighting for Romania here, he chooses to pay someone else, there, to humiliate all of us.”
Simion is also hoping to harness the support Georgescu built last year by saying he’ll have a job for him, even possibly as prime minister.
“I think that’s the normal thing, for him to occupy the role he wants. Because he’s the Romanian who got the most votes, he’s the one who was supposed to occupy the role at the Cotroceni [presidential palace] and it’s a way to go back to normal and fix whatever can still be fixed because democracy and Romanians’ trust in the rule of law were gravely wounded,” Simion said.
Simion has previously said that people who rejected Georgescu’s presidential candidacy should be “flayed,” prompting Bucharest Mayor Dan to describe the AUR leader as a “thug” who “instigated violence in the public sphere and that has harmed society.”
Simion would also not be completely at liberty to appoint a prime minister. Although Romania’s president nominates the post, he would require the support of a parliamentary majority.
In the current chamber, AUR is in opposition, while the PSD socialists and PNL liberals are part of the governing majority. Antonescu is their common candidate.
Still, Simion argues that if Antonescu doesn’t perform well, the coalition parties would have to accept a new prime minister and drop Marcel Ciolacu, the current PM.
Anti-establishment momentum
The far right has profited from long-running frustrations in Romania about the corruption and ineffectiveness of the political establishment — the PSD and PNL — which it has accused of orchestrating the cancellation of the election. Last year’s presidential election was the first time in Romania’s post-communist history that a candidate from establishment parties failed to make it to the second round.
To Simion, the annulment offered further proof that Romania is led by the same old cadre that seized power in 1989, when the country ditched Communism, and that merely faked a transition to democracy after the death of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.
“The government organized the campaign and the elections and lost the elections,” Simion said of last year’s vote.
But he also faces accusations of breaking electoral rules himself.
Several Romanians who received personal letters from Simion recently complained to Romania’s election authorities of a likely violation of GDPR rules on the use of personal data. One regional election authority subsequently sent a complaint to prosecutors, as reported by the ProTV channel. Simion responded that his party had access to the electoral register, which contains the data of Romanians eligible to vote, and said many people on it were dead.
Persona non grata
Simion, who is banned from entering neighboring Ukraine and Moldova due to his past campaigning to reacquire some of their territory, said he prayed Trump would find a way to bring peace to Ukraine.
The war poses a dilemma for Simion. Although he’s a nationalist who aligns with MAGA on leaving Ukraine to fend for itself, he’s far less keen than Trump to align publicly with Russia. Indeed, Simion styles himself as the candidate who can keep the U.S. committed to stationing troops in Romania.
“What we wish, as a country affected by German and Russian imperialism in history, is that this peace formula comes with new security guarantees for the next 30 to 50 years so that Russia cannot do again what it did, violating all international treaties,” Simion said.
While competitors in last year’s election accused him of wanting to take Romania out of the EU, Simion has insisted he wants his country to remain a member, but that the bloc should focus solely on the economy and not interfere in culture and defense.
Simion also stressed he wanted Romania to stay in NATO, led by the U.S.
“I don’t believe that a defense force led by France and Great Britain could be an alternative to the security solution that worked since World War II, the Pax Americana formula,” Simion said, referencing a new security architecture for Europe and notably post-war Ukraine.
Instead, he said, NATO countries should do as Trump demands by increasing their military expenditures.
“All countries must raise this spending; I find it fair to pay for your own security and to invest in your own security,” he said.
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