George Simion, a nationalist who appears well placed to win the presidential election in Romania on Sunday, has promised to “Make Romania Great Again” and described himself as a “candidate on the MAGA ticket” of President Trump.
After trouncing 10 other candidates to win the first round of the election, on May 4, Mr. Simion spoke on the “War Room” podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser and champion of an international populist movement.
Romanian voters had “totally bashed the globalists,” Mr. Simion rejoiced, echoing the language of American supporters like Vice President JD Vance, who has rebuked Romania for canceling an earlier election that a far-right candidate looked set to win.
For all his efforts to position himself as part of a trans-Atlantic uprising against global elites, Mr. Simion, 38, has built his political career at home on an issue that is more inward-looking.
He spent years mobilizing support for the idea that Romania should be “united” with its largely Romanian-speaking neighbor, Moldova, and also with bits of Ukraine inhabited by ethnic Romanians.
That aim, which he has toned down on the campaign trail in recent weeks, has scant chance of being realized but is sure to further enrage his country’s neighbors. Romania’s presidency is largely ceremonial, but it does have a say in foreign affairs.
“Romania has been kidnapped,” he said last week in a debate with Nicusor Dan, 55, the centrist mayor of Romania’s capital, Bucharest, his rival in the runoff vote on Sunday.
Referring to the former Soviet republic of Moldova, he said it should be merged with Romania, because it made no sense to have “two states with a majority Romanian population.” Ethnicity can be murky in the region, with many in Moldova considering themselves ethnic Moldovans, even as many in Romania see them as ethnic Romanians.
Moldova, most of which was part of Romania until Stalin annexed it in 1940, has imposed a travel ban on Mr. Simion, declaring him “undesirable.” Ukraine has also banned Mr. Simion, accusing him of “systematic anti-Ukrainian activities” that “violate state sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Ukraine’s security service said last year that his “unionist ideology questions the legitimacy of Ukraine’s state borders.”
If elected president, Mr. Simion said last week, his first state visit would be to Moldova, despite the entry ban. He also pledged to visit Chernivtsi, a region of Ukraine he thinks should be part of Romania. Whether either country will let him in is unclear.
Unlike Romanian nationalists in the last century, who allied with Hitler during World War II in pursuit of lost lands, Mr. Simion has never suggested that Romania use military force against its neighbors to expand its borders.
But his belief that people who share the same language and blood should be united in a single nation is still a throwback. It also highlights why Europe’s nationalists have often struggled to forge a united front, beyond their shared contempt for “woke globalists” and a shared fondness for President Trump.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, the would-be standard-bearer of a Pan-European populist movement, has for years infuriated Romanian nationalists like Mr. Simion by wearing a scarf to soccer games that features a map of Hungary including big chunks of Romania and other countries. Hungary lost what is now the Romanian region of Transylvania after World War I, during which it had fought with the losing side, as it did again during World War II.
Romania and Hungary each allied with Nazi Germany hoping to gain territory “lost” to the other and also to Soviet Ukraine.
Despite the bad blood between their countries, Mr. Simion, Mr. Orban and other self-declared “sovereigntists” like Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, which also contains formerly Hungarian territory, all agree on one thing: They don’t like the European Union.
They say they don’t want to give up membership in the bloc, which would mean losing billions of dollars in European funding, but wish to reshape it and shift power from Brussels back to sovereign states.
Asked in a recent interview whether he wanted Romania to follow Britain and exit the European Union, Mr. Simion replied, “Of course not, and it is certain that, in the current international situation, no country is self-sufficient anymore.”
He has also voiced strong support for NATO, which has nearly 5,000 troops in Romania and a sophisticated American-controlled radar facility, part of the U.S. missile defense network that Russia sees as a threat.
Warplanes from the United States and other NATO countries use a huge, recently expanded air base in Romania near the Black Sea as part of the alliance’s stepped-up efforts to defend is eastern flank since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Mr. Simion’s support for NATO has set him apart from Calin Georgescu, an eccentric ultranationalist and former member of Mr. Simion’s party who stunned Romania’s political establishment in November by winning the initial first round of the presidential election.
The constitutional court in December annulled that vote, citing irregularities and possible but unproven Russian interference. Romania’s electoral commission in March barred Mr. Georgescu from competing in this month’s election rerun.
That opened the way for Mr. Simion, who also ran in the annulled election but fared poorly, finishing fourth, to emerge as the strongest candidate on the nationalist right. Mr. Simion has repeatedly denounced the court decision voiding Mr. Georgescu’s first-round victory as an attack on democracy by entrenched elites, rallying support from Romanians who feel the system is broken.
Members of the electoral commission who excluded Mr. Georgescu, Mr. Simion told supporters, “should be publicly skinned alive” for turning Romania into a “dictatorship.”
But unlike Mr. Georgescu — and President Trump — Mr. Simion has voiced no fondness for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Putin, he said last week “must of course be arrested for war crimes.” He has repeatedly denied harboring pro-Russian views, describing himself as Romania’s “most Russophobic party president.”
Founded in 2019, Mr. Simion’s party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians, was initially dismissed as a coven of nationalist cranks. But the party gained traction during the Covid pandemic by railing against government-imposed restrictions and by denouncing vaccines.
In pursuit of the presidency, Mr. Simion has muted the belligerent, often xenophobic message that dominated his early career as a public figure, which began with involvement in groups of nationalist soccer fans known as ultras.
In 2011, he was fined and banned from Romanian stadiums for six months after being accused of hooliganism and racist chants during a soccer match between Romania and Bosnia. He has denied being disruptive, saying he had been punished merely for exercising “freedom of expression.”
On the campaign trail, he has cast himself as a tribune of the people: a determined but responsible defender of the common man against mainstream politicians he reviles as “political parasites.”
Mr. Simion’s makeover mirrors in many ways that of Marine Le Pen in France, who has spent years trying to shed the extreme image of her party.
Romania’s two dominant parties have, amid an endless swirl of corruption scandals, rotated in and out of power since the 1989 overthrow of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
In a message to voters after attending an Orthodox church service this past weekend, Mr. Simion offered himself as a savior from corrupt elites: “They lie and seek to buy souls, we are among the people, with the people and for the people. Godspeed, have a blessed Sunday!”
Andrada Lautaru contributed reporting.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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