Early last December, Adrian Thiess, a well-connected political fixer in Romania, sent an urgent text message to Brad Parscale, the digital media strategist who had been working off and on for Donald J. Trump since 2012. Thiess and Parscale bonded in 2019, Thiess told me, when Parscale was managing Trump’s re-election campaign. Thiess had paid Parscale to speak at a conference in Bucharest called “Let’s Make Political Marketing Great Again” — as it happened, the day before Robert S. Mueller III, then serving as a special counsel, submitted his report about Trump’s dealings with Russia. The pair hit it off, both feeling the Russian accusations were a hoax. In the years since, Thiess had parlayed his friendship with Parscale into an entree into Trump’s inner circle, even inviting the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to Bucharest for his own paid talk.
But it wasn’t a speaking gig that was on Thiess’s mind that night — he wanted to sound an alarm. “Have you seen what’s happening in Romania?” Thiess asked.
Thiess was referring to the Romanian presidential election, specifically to a candidate named Calin Georgescu. Georgescu was a 62-year-old agronomist who had turned to nationalist politics, starting out as a fringe candidate who claimed on television that electronic chips were planted in soft drinks. Georgescu also professed a love for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whose manifesto attacking Dr. Anthony J. Fauci he penned an introduction in its Romanian edition. He made several promotional TikTok videos of himself that appeared to be inspired by Vladimir V. Putin’s flamboyantly macho campaign imagery — in which Georgescu was sometimes on horseback, sometimes doing judo.
The iconography was striking because Putin was extremely unpopular in Romania, a NATO member with an expanding air base on the Black Sea whose importance has grown since the war in Ukraine began. Georgescu, however, railed against NATO, which he said was dragging the country into World War III, while hailing Putin as a “patriot and a leader.” What’s more, Georgescu said he had spent no money on his campaign, and he didn’t throw a lot of big outdoor rallies like his competitors. So it came as a big surprise when, after the first round of voting in November, Georgescu won — beating all five top candidates and sending him to a runoff that would decide the election.
The next jolt came days later from Romania’s top court: It abruptly halted the second round, essentially canceling the country’s election. All ballots from the first round were thrown out, and the judges told the country to vote again. Georgescu had cheated, Romania’s intelligence agency now said — his campaign had colluded with Russia, which had run a vast disinformation campaign on, it turned out, TikTok. An army of fake accounts, some 25,000 strong, had been mobilized on the platform by the Kremlin to promote Georgescu. And authorities said a series of illegal campaign payments had been made through cryptocurrencies to support Georgescu online, leading to speculation that the candidate would soon be under criminal investigation. The accusations stunned Romanians, but the solution — to cancel an election and order a do-over — shocked the country just as much.
Parscale, though, didn’t speak Romanian. “Can you send me some articles in English?” he asked, according to Thiess.
Thiess thought the drama in his home country — a “stolen” election, a hunt for Russian interference and a presidential hopeful whom authorities wanted to put on trial — might find a sympathetic ear with his American friends. “Georgescu and Trump are in the same situation,” Thiess told me recently. “The difference is one is the 47th president and the other is being destroyed by the system.” The comparison had almost written itself, Thiess thought — but he couldn’t be sure whether anyone in Trump’s circle agreed.
Then, after midnight Bucharest time, came a post on X from Trump Jr. “Wow, look what’s happening in Romania!” Trump Jr. wrote. “Another Soros/Marxist attempt at rigging the outcome & denying the will of the people.”
What ensued was an election unlike any other in Eastern Europe’s history, if not the internet age itself: one involving a cast of characters of the Make America Great Again movement that included the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Jack Posobiec, the internet provocateur who pushed “Pizzagate”; former Trump officials like Steve Bannon and Parscale; Elon Musk, the owner of X; the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and an Australian cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Mario Nawfal — all of whom have interviewed Georgescu or supported him in some public form since the Romanian election was canceled.
By winter, the canceled election had also begun catching on in the American right-wing environs of X, with posts containing words like “Romania,” “Georgescu” and “Bucharest” appearing six times more frequently than the six months prior and gaining more than 900 million views on the platform since December. By spring, Trump’s inner circle was directly lobbying the Romanians, an effort that included JD Vance, Trump’s vice president; Richard Grenell, the presidential envoy for special missions; and Trump Jr., who came with Thiess for another speaking engagement in Bucharest in April, only days before the election.
What follows is the story of an alliance that formed between America’s conservatives and European nationalists who saw common cause — not just in a canceled election in Romania, but across a global map where the right is on the rise. No country in the European Union has ever taken such a measure as drastic as canceling a presidential election, and it comes at a time when the political establishment across the region, facing an antidemocratic right and an increasingly anti-establishment electorate, is taking other measures once seen as unthinkable. As Thierry Breton, a former E.U. commissioner said of the canceled election: “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously do it if necessary in Germany.”
And then there is the Trump administration. By February, MAGA’s obsession with the Romanian presidential election reached the top rungs of power. That month, Vance appeared for a speech in Munich in which he blasted the country for acting on what he called “flimsy evidence” of Russian interference, comparing the Romanians to Soviet apparatchiks who jailed dissidents. The European leaders gathered in the room were shocked. Russia had run a clandestine campaign to try to hand the country to the anti-NATO candidate. Now America was supporting the same man — and this time, it was making no secret of it.
Among Europeans, Romanians have a particular affinity for TikTok’s short videos — almost half the country uses the platform, one of highest rates of use in Europe. Even retirees are known to use the app to stay in touch with children abroad. TikTok’s surge wasn’t unnoticed by officials in Romania, who told me they had feared a foreign government would eventually try to use the platform to sway an election. When Romania moved to the 5G network, it banned the Chinese tech giant Huawei because of concerns that foreigners could interfere with mobile phones. When American lawmakers proposed a ban on TikTok in the United States, their Romanian counterparts briefly explored doing the same there.
According to Romanian intelligence officials, the TikTok plot to push Georgescu to the presidency was run out of two shell companies with ties to Russia. In the early run-up to the election, the companies approached around 150 internet personalities popular in Romania and offered to hire them for what was described as a “civics and democracy campaign.” Romania’s official campaign season wouldn’t start until late October, so the influencers were told not to support an individual candidate, but to promote general nationalist talking points on TikTok — that NATO membership risked starting a war with Russia, for example — which mirrored what would become Georgescu’s platform. The influencers were then paid by a third shell company using cryptocurrency, an official told me, making it virtually impossible to track until the scheme was well underway.
Until then, Georgescu’s appeal lay mainly with a growing clique of far-right nationalists in Romania — “sovereigntists,” as they are called in the country, because of their belief that commitments to blocs like the E.U. and NATO dilute the Romanian national character. Georgescu courted their ranks in a video in 2021 in which, on a snowy day, he undressed and then plunged into a mountain lake surrounded by trees. “I trust my immune system,” he said. “My immunity comes from the sovereignty of my being. I don’t feel the cold — I feel strength, I feel life, I feel freedom.” Georgescu’s message appeared aimed at vaccine skeptics, many of whom began to support the sovereigntist fringe during the pandemic. The nationalist movement was also gaining traction with voters in Romania’s neglected countryside and religious families who were against socially liberal policies promoted in Brussels, like expanded gay rights.
In Georgescu, some saw a mystic appeal that they felt could unify the nationalists. Mihai Rapcea, a right-wing activist lawyer in Bucharest, told me he met Georgescu years before, after he spoke at a meeting of Romanian sovereigntists where the preserved bones of “prison saints” — members of the fascist Iron Guard movement who were killed in prison under Communist rule — were venerated by the audience as holy relics. Rapcea liked that Georgescu had sprinkled his speeches with Iron Guard rhetoric. He said he had “the calling of the nation,” Rapcea recalled. “His voice had the same tone as Marshal Antonescu,” Romania’s virulently antisemitic wartime dictator, who was himself imprisoned and executed. Georgescu, Rapcea enthused, had captured the spirit of that age. (Georgescu declined to be interviewed for this article through his campaign manager.)
That fall, Romanian authorities were already taking unprecedented steps to deal with their growing concerns about election interference. In October, a court disqualified Diana Sosoaca, the founder of a small nationalist party, after she posted pictures of herself at receptions in the Russian Embassy and took a hard-line stance against NATO. “I am a dangerous woman,” she told me when we met. Sosoaca didn’t think she was banned because of her views — she now holds a seat in the European Parliament for which she was allowed to run — but rather because Romania’s establishment parties didn’t think they could win with voters. Whatever the motive, it was the first time a candidate had been banned like this from running in Romania.
By early November, the campaigns were underway. Many thought that Mircea Geoana, who left his post as NATO’s deputy secretary to run for president, would be the front-runner that year. But the anti-NATO campaign had perhaps borne fruit: The first polls showed Geoana well behind a field of contenders including the incumbent prime minister and a former journalist, Elena Lasconi, who was then serving as mayor of a small city in the Carpathian Mountains. Georgescu, however, was polling at less than 3 percent.
Elena Calistru, the head of a Romanian NGO that was helping TikTok fight misinformation, told me she now began to spot unusual activity on another platform — Telegram, the Russian messaging app. Telegram is not widely used in Romania, and had recently been used to support pro-Russian candidates in neighboring Moldova. “This was one of the first red flags,” she told me, saying several dozen groups were directing their support to Georgescu.
Back on TikTok, Romanian authorities would later report that more than 25,000 accounts — some which had been dormant since 2016 — suddenly activated. They began a kind of fake grass-roots campaign for Georgescu, flooding the internet with his name in hashtags and positive comments — which soon pushed him to the top of the algorithm.
Suddenly Romanian TikTok began to look different. There was a man riding a white horse across a grassy field — it was Georgescu. There was a man practicing judo in a dojo — Georgescu again. The videos going viral showed Georgescu at an Orthodox church, running on a track, standing in a suit in front of the colors of the Romanian flag; each one, it seemed, tailored to a different voting bloc in Romania.
Even Sosoaca, the banned candidate, could tell something strange was going on. At one point “as a kind of experiment,” she told me, she started a broadcast using TikTok’s “live” feature that initially had 1,500 viewers. When she started chanting in Romanian “Georgescu,” the number suddenly shot up to 7,500. “There’s no way this was for real,” she told me. (A spokesman for TikTok said the company “can track spoken words in a live broadcast, but we don’t use keywords expressed during a livestream to inform the recommendation algorithm.”)
By Nov. 24, Election Day in Romania, Georgescu had become a bona fide factor in the race for president, now polling at 16 percent in a crowded field. But his surge had only just begun. By late afternoon, Georgescu was polling at 20 percent. “He was going up a point or two every hour,” said Mirel Palada, the director of the Romanian polling firm Sociopol, who did phone surveys that day of how people were voting. Around 3 a.m. the next day, Georgescu was announced the winner of the first round, with 23 percent. “It was the law of Christ’s wonderful multiplication, of the five loaves and two fish, which multiplied to 2,120,404,” Georgescu said afterward, referring to the number of votes he received as a miracle from God.
The Romanian political class was shocked by the result. Still, Emil Hurezeanu, the country’s current foreign minister, told me he realized the establishment had been due a rebuke by Romanian voters who were frustrated with it. Many Romanians had left the country for other parts of the European Union. The countryside remained poor. “Their practice was ‘business as usual,’” he told me of the country’s politicians. Still, Calin Georgescu, who many in Romania had hardly heard of the month before, was favored to become the next president in a runoff. How could this be possible?
Intelligence agents in Romania had their own theory. Georgescu, according to two figures I spoke with in the intelligence community, had been under surveillance for what he called “concerning” contacts with figures linked to the Kremlin. Within days of the vote, case officers began uncovering evidence of the TikTok plot — the shell companies making secret influencer payments, which they called a “cyberattack” — and presented it to Romania’s president, Klaus Iohannis.
Iohannis called an emergency meeting of his top advisers, intelligence heads and cabinet ministers, known as the Supreme Council of National Defense. At the meeting, Iohannis looked on from a desk at the presidential palace, which sits on the grounds of a 17th-century monastery, as the details of the plot were explained, from the shell companies to the cryptocurrency payments. The defense council was unsettled, those there told me — but few were surprised that the culprit was Russia. Romania’s foreign ministry provided a translation of the intelligence report to NATO partners, and they confirmed the conclusions.
Despite the growing intelligence on the Russian plot, none of Romania’s elected authorities, not even its president, had the power to challenge the vote, even as Georgescu appeared to be maintaining his social media momentum. The Romanian officials I talked to said that they were flagging posts, but they had a hard time getting them taken down. Georgescu’s surprise win had energized his supporters, leaving many thinking he would steamroll his way to winning the runoff, just two weeks away.
The only body with the power to take action was Romania’s Constitutional Court, a nine-member bench that, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, can issue an order on its own initiative. On Dec. 4, Romanian authorities declassified a four-page summary of the intelligence it had on the TikTok plot, hoping for a long shot: that the judges would step in and annul the election. Two days later, in a unanimous decision, the judges did just that. Marian Enache, the president of the court, explained the order for a new election, to be held in six months, by comparing the past election to a poisoned chalice: “If you wanted to drink a glass of water and knew it contained a dose of poison, would you try to extract the poison and drink the now ‘purified’ water, or would you choose a different glass of water?”
The case would become the country’s own version of Bush v. Gore, an emergency decision with almost no precedent in the law. While some Romanians were happy to see big consequences for the supposed Russian subterfuge, many others thought the court had gone too far. Elena Lasconi, the journalist-turned-mayor who would have been Georgescu’s runoff challenger last year, told me Romanians should have taken a page from France, where the far-right candidate was defeated in the second round by a united establishment. After all, Georgescu believed in covert nanochips in soft drinks: “Obviously I could beat him,” she said.
Hurezeanu, the foreign minister, told me that Donald Trump Jr.’s X post about election rigging and denying the will of the people nonetheless came as a surprise. The Biden White House had supported Romania’s earlier efforts to withstand Russian influence — a day before the election was annulled, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointedly noted the “Russian effort, large in scale and well funded” against Romania. But with Trump’s son seeking to take Georgescu’s side, it wasn’t clear whose story the new administration would believe.
Shortly after the election was annulled in December, a Romanian named Victor Ponta arrived at Mar-a-Lago, the guest of an old business contact, for a few days of golf amid the growing crowd that surrounded the returning president. Ponta was once Romania’s prime minister. But he resigned after corruption scandals hobbled his government and criminal indictments, including for tax evasion and money laundering, raised the prospect of prison time. Ponta eventually took Serbian citizenship and became a private businessman, and the Romanian courts acquitted him. When I asked him for his opinion on what happened with the election last year, Ponta told me that, while he was no fan of Putin, “my analysis is that Russia was not involved.”
Back at Mar-a-Lago, Trump hadn’t yet taken office, but to Ponta, it felt as if he already had. Deals were being made around him, and important diplomatic matters were up for debate on the golf course. What’s more, it was already clear to Ponta that the second Trump administration would be more aggressive with Europe than the first — “I want Romania to be on the winners list, not the losers list,” he told me — and the Romanian government’s story about Russian election interference was not something Trump wanted to hear.
Before long, Ponta says, he bumped into Richard Grenell, the political operative and former Fox News personality who now serves as Trump’s special diplomatic envoy. Grenell wanted to know what on Earth was happening in Romania. Ponta had a blunt answer: He told Grenell that Romania’s political bosses had “panicked” at Georgescu’s win and canceled the election with flimsy evidence — the very kind of thing, in his view, that Russia itself might do. “You can’t fight Russia with Russia’s methods,” Ponta told me.
Word soon reached Bucharest about Ponta’s visit. The Romanian government officials I talked to said they were immediately concerned: Ponta, once a center-left figure, had taken on a nationalist streak in recent years and was rumored to be weighing his own bid for the presidency. They feared he might say anything to curry favor with Trump.
In the weeks to come, more and more of the Romanian right would see the MAGA movement as the key endorsement. In January, a 38-year-old nationalist named George Simion made his way to Washington for the Trump inauguration. He had already been texting with Steve Bannon, whom he had met the year before at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering of the American right. On this trip, however, it was Trump Jr. whom Simion was looking to meet. That happened, Simion told me, at an event organized by a conservative group where the president’s son appeared for photos. Simion sidled up to him for a handshake. Trump Jr. “was like everybody — he asked: ‘What the hell happened with your elections? Why were the elections annulled?’” Simion says he replied: “Don’t trust Blinken,” linking Romania’s Russia allegation to the Biden administration.
Georgescu himself was not yet out of the game. In January, he made a surprising appearance, by video link, on “The Alex Jones Show,” a show hosted by the founder of Infowars and promoter of conspiracy theories around the Sandy Hook massacre. During the 2024 campaign, Georgescu spoke poorly of Trump, saying in a podcast Trump was “not what he used to be” and calling JD Vance “a virus.” Now he was seeking their help, saying “we are looking to President Trump in order to act,” apparently on Georgescu’s behalf. The livestream on X got more than 13 million views.
MAGA media was also making its way out to Romania. Later that month, Shawn Ryan, a Blackwater contractor and former member of the U.S. Navy SEALs, flew out to Bucharest to interview Georgescu for his popular podcast, “The Shawn Ryan Show.”
“Is Romania in the midst of a coup right now?” Ryan asked. Georgescu replied that it was. As the conversation turned to Russia, the two men settled on familiar MAGA talking points, questioning Europe’s role in the Ukraine war and portraying NATO as the aggressor in Russia’s invasion. “Just to be clear, the biggest NATO base ever to be built in Europe is going to be constructed to conduct a major offensive into Russia?” Ryan asked.
“Exactly this is the word, offensive,” said Georgescu. “And we cannot accept this. Simple as that. Because it’s not our business, it’s not our war.” Ryan nodded in agreement.
By February, things had reached a low point between the sitting Romanian government and the new administration in America. Sources close to Iohannis — still in his job, as no successor had been chosen — said he tried to call Trump to share the evidence of Russian interference but couldn’t get through. Hurezeanu said he was likewise unable to reach Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state. The Romanians had access to the American Embassy, but the diplomats there seemed almost as out of the loop as they were.
When the Romanians arrived at the Munich Security Conference, Vance was scheduled to give a major speech, and the delegation was hoping for a breakthrough, or at least some kind of informal contact. And sure enough, in the hallway, Hurezeanu spotted Grenell.
Trump’s special envoy didn’t recognize the foreign minister, but Hurezeanu was determined to break the ice. So he asked about a topic he’d seen Grenell posting about on X: Andrew Tate, a right-wing influencer known for his misogynistic views. Tate, and his brother Tristan, were longtime heroes within the MAGA manosphere, who were arrested in 2022 in Romania on charges of human trafficking.
That got Grenell’s attention, but only briefly. I’ve tweeted about them, he said. He kept walking, adding that he didn’t have time for a meeting. The foreign minister hadn’t even got a question in about the Russian interference.
But America’s views on it would be heard by everyone when Vance took the stage. The European leaders were in a packed auditorium for the speech, with officials and translators spread across a ground floor and two mezzanine levels as the vice president walked onto the stage. And as Vance began, he addressed the issue of the Russians head-on. “The threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” he said. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
Vance compared the E.U. to the Soviet Union, and claimed that President Biden “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.” He chided Germany for its political “firewall” — a pledge by mainstream parties not to join with neo-Nazi politicians, even when they become popular — saying that such measures thwart the will of the people. He urged his audience to embrace Elon Musk, comparing his efforts for the right to Greta Thunberg’s on the left. “There is a new sheriff in town,” Vance said, referring to Trump.
There was mostly silence in the room as he spoke; the leaders were in shock. Not since World War II had such a high-ranking American official questioned Europe’s commitment to democracy this way.
Vance saved his most withering criticism for Romania. “This December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors,” he said. “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
The Romanian government had no warning that Vance’s attack was coming. And just as when the vice president and Trump ambushed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the White House in a televised shouting match, Vance’s words left unclear whose side America was on. What was plain to see was it would not be the Romanian government’s side — or perhaps even Europe’s.
By late winter, it was becoming more clear that pro-Georgescu disinformation in Romania was also accompanied by concrete, if sometimes ill-conceived, plans aimed at overthrowing the government. On Feb. 28, prosecutors ordered the arrest of Horatiu Potra, a Romanian mercenary who ran a private army similar to the Wagner Group, the Russian state-funded military contractor. A raid on several dozen a properties, including an abandoned house said to be Potra’s, turned up grenades, high-powered weapons and gold ingots, and authorities accused him of conspiring to start a riot in Bucharest led by Georgescu’s supporters, styled, it seemed, in the model of America’s Jan. 6 insurrection. The riot never happened, but prosecutors said Potra and Georgescu met two weeks after the first-round vote at a horse ranch an hour north of Bucharest to draw up plans.
Six days later, Romanian authorities said they had uncovered a more lurid plot: a group of conspirators calling itself “Vlad the Impaler Command” — named after the brutal Romanian ruler who inspired the character Dracula — had “repeatedly contacted agents of a foreign power, located both on the territory of Romania and the Russian Federation,” to instigate the “removal of the current constitutional order.” They had detained six conspirators, including a 101-year-old retired Romanian general named Radu Theodoro, on charges of treason, and expelled two Russian diplomats. The Dracula plot appeared only to be in its planning stages, but the details that emerged in news reports were notably bold and ambitious: The group would spread disinformation online, infiltrate state structures, incite a mass rally (“minimum two million people”) that would culminate in a coup, “the removal of all employees from state institutions” and “the change of the country’s name, flag and anthem.”
It was hard to know how serious such machinations actually were. But Potra, for his part, was a mercenary with professional knowledge of how to overthrow a government, and his involvement signaled to Romanian authorities that Russian interference in Romanian politics was not limited to talk. “We saw a big, monstrous mechanism online, plus a violent organization ready to reach into the streets,” one top Romanian official told me. Potra had fled the country and couldn’t be arrested.
Georgescu, who seemed the next possible target for prosecutors, was now turning increasingly to MAGA media to defend himself. That month, he landed a big interview with Mario Nawfal, an Australian podcaster and cryptocurrency entrepreneur based in Dubai. Nawfal — who once landed a rare interview with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister — claims that his podcast is “the most popular show on X.” Beyond its immediate reach, it is regularly cited by Elon Musk, who at that moment was reaching the peak of his apparent influence within the White House.
Nawfal flew to Bucharest to interview Georgescu. “Deep down I want to address you as ‘Mr. President,’ because I think it’s the right thing to do,” Nawfal said. Soon, Musk was on the case as well — reposting Nawfal’s X posts on Romania. “The NGOs are trying to destroy democracy!” the billionaire wrote, reposting a message of Nawfal’s attacking, among other groups, the organization that tried to help TikTok combat disinformation in 2024. “This guy is a tyrant, not a judge,” Musk wrote on Feb. 20, in response to a picture, also posted by Nawfal, of the head of Romania’s Constitutional Court.
The American message machine appeared to be doing in the open what Russia had done in secret. Among those following Musk’s posts was Pavel Popescu, the deputy of Ancom, the Romanian equivalent to America’s Federal Communications Commission. In the German elections earlier that year, Musk campaigned for Germany’s AfD party, even appearing by video link at a rally where he said the party was “the best hope for Germany” and that there was “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”
Popescu felt the government had been too quiet to defend itself among MAGA supporters; the only way to get Musk’s attention, he reasoned, would be to engage him somehow.
On March 9, Romanian authorities banned Georgescu from the presidential race, saying he had “breached the very obligation” to “defend democracy.” “This is crazy!” Musk wrote on X. Popescu had no direct line to Musk, but he did see that Nawfal was holding an online gathering on X’s Spaces platform in support of Georgescu, featuring several other Romanian officials and Georgescu supporters. Popescu asked if he could join the call and, with more than 300,000 people logged in and listening, he tried to walk through the facts of what his agency was and what it had done in recent months, with little success.
“You!” interrupted a nationalist Romanian lawmaker on the call. “You yourself decided, together with the crooked guys surrounding you, that you should ban TikTok in Romania only because Georgescu is the most popular guy.”
Popescu protested that he was for free speech and against censorship. He also mentioned Musk by name, saying Romania had worked with his businesses in the past and wanted a good relationship. Popescu said he just wanted to see “more facts online” than lies about the election. A conservative Romanian journalist interrupted him again, saying: “Shut up! Please, Pavel.”
If Popescu meant his appearance to sway Musk, it did the opposite. That same day, the billionaire posted a picture of Popescu in front of an E.U. flag, and wrote: “You can tell who the bad guys are by who is demanding censorship.”
In the halls of power in Bucharest, morale continued to sink. Hurezeanu, the foreign minister, told me that he had to deflect “some intentions to remove me, at least from the track of doing official business in Washington” and replace him informally with a businessman named Dragos Sprinceana, who owned a general contracting company among other business ventures and, most important, was a member of Mar-a-Lago. (Hurezeanu remained in his post.) One official told me that Bucharest had ordered its diplomats not to mention Russia in statements about the 2024 election, to avoid angering Trump.
On April 28, six days before the election, Bucharest received another prominent American visitor. It was Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son.
Trump Jr. had arrived to give a paid talk that was organized, once again, by Adrian Thiess, the Romanian businessman who was friends with Brad Parscale. The Trump event even had a corporate sponsor: Romania TV, a 24-hour conservative news network owned by Sebastian Ghita, a fugitive Romanian politician who was on Europe’s “Most Wanted” list for corruption and money-laundering charges. I had read that the talk would take place at a hotel called Athénée Palace in the center of Bucharest. When I asked a woman at the front desk where to go, she said she knew nothing about any such event. But walking down the hall, I could see the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation queued up in a ballroom with the president’s son’s face and the words “Trump Business Vision.”
I waited for Trump Jr. in the hall with several dozen men and a handful of women in business attire, and I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Romanian man wearing a MAGA hat. He told me his name was Daniel. When I asked him where he got the hat, he smiled and said he had asked a friend of his who had visited Mar-a-Lago to swipe some silverware for him as a souvenir — but the friend didn’t want to get caught, so he bought Daniel the hat at the gift shop instead. In Daniel’s view, Trump had been “chosen by God” to lead America.
Around 7 p.m., Trump Jr. appeared, flanked by Thiess and Brad Parscale — reuniting the political-consulting duo who were texting the night that Trump Jr. first tuned into the Romanian race on X. Trump Jr. greeted the fans outside the ballroom, then headed inside.
The presidential front-runner was now Simion, the nationalist who met Trump Jr. months before at the inauguration. Some polls showed him followed by Nicusor Dan, who left a mathematics career to become mayor of Bucharest. Like Dan, Simion also had a life before politics, known first to Romanians as a founder of “Uniti sub Tricolor,” a group of hard-right soccer “ultras” — fans known for their violent clashes with the police and, sometimes, one another. Simion eventually joined the nationalist party Alliance for the Union of Romanians. But the clashes followed him there: Both neighboring Moldova and Ukraine imposed travel bans on Simion after he raised the idea of expanding Romania’s borders to include their territory.
I met Simion for lunch the day before the vote, near a lake in Bucharest. The group included a conservative American foreign-policy analyst from Washington and Callum Smiles, a far-right content creator from England who told us about a meeting he’d had with a “Jan. 6 hostage,” a photographer who he said was innocent. Simion was in a good mood at lunch. His last trip to Washington had landed him interviews on Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” and another with Jack Posobiec, the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist. Bannon had texted Simion recently to wish him luck in the vote, he told me. And while Georgescu hadn’t endorsed him by name, he had joined Simion at an event for Orthodox Easter in which Georgescu lit Simion’s candle before cameras, in what many took as a symbolic passing of the torch.
Now, Simion told me, he would be returning the favor. If elected, he said, he planned to bring Georgescu into government, perhaps as the prime minister. “He should be in power, he should lead the nation,” Simion said, adding that as president, he would be interested in holding a snap election to make it happen.
The next day, Romanians headed to cast their votes. No candidate won a majority, and the race would head to a runoff. In second place, with 21 percent, was Dan, the Bucharest mayor. He was a down-the-line pro-E.U. centrist known for fighting corruption, the kind of politician favored in Brussels but less known outside of the capital. In first place was Simion, with 40 percent.
The difference between the options in the two-way race now couldn’t be more stark. It also made another thing clear: The movement to put Georgescu in power had doubled its votes since the election he won was overturned.
In the days before the runoff that would decide the election, Simion held a commanding 10-point lead over Dan in the polls. The nationalist certainly wasn’t president yet, but he was already behaving like a leader to be reckoned with — making a trip abroad to France, where he was greeted by a coterie of French right-wing politicians and then gave an interview chastising France’s president for his “dictatorial tendencies.” Simion skipped most of the televised debates, leaving his rival Dan on the stage alone to defend NATO and the European Union, which he sometimes described haltingly. Simion later told a reporter that Dan was “autistic.”
On May 18, 175 days after they were first asked to choose a president, Romanians headed to the polls for what all concerned hoped would be the election’s final vote. It was a clear spring day, and Bucharest was in bloom. Those at Dan’s headquarters, in an event space festooned with poster portraits of the mathematician’s face, were on edge — invigorated but wary: While the polls now showed the race had tightened to a near tie, supporters worried that a close victory might tear apart the country more than a loss would. Cosette Chichirau, a former lawmaker who worked with Dan, told me she lived in the United States during the aftermath of the Bush vs. Gore election and feared something similar. “If it’s 100,000 votes between them tonight, that’s not good,” she said.
As night settled, I went to see Simion’s supporters, who had gathered at the People’s House, Romania’s sprawling Capitol building. As I walked up the hill to the party, a D.J. was playing traditional Romanian folk melodies. Then someone let out a yelp, and I could hear the music change to “Y.M.C.A.,” by the Village People, the song that the Trump campaign transformed into a MAGA anthem.
A big crowd had gathered on the steps as television crews set up their equipment and the guests mingled in what was a kind of right-wing debutante ball for Simion on his big night: On the invitation list were not only were Romania’s top nationalists but also a panoply of international provocateurs and politicians including Thierry Mariani, a top leader in Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in France; William Branson Donahue, president of the College Republicans of America; and Jorgen Boassen, a Greenlandic bricklayer-turned-political-activist who helped coordinate Trump Jr.’s visit to Greenland this year.
At 9 p.m., the first exit polls appeared. Simion stepped out to a lectern, his wife behind him. He was beaming with the look of victory.
“I am the new president of Romania,” he declared to the crowd.
The crowd, however, started to become distracted as the speech continued, and one by one, people were checking their phones. They were bringing up the exit polls — which were telling a different story. Simion was not the new president; in fact, he was trailing well behind Dan. An upset was underway.
From the lectern, however, Simion continued his speech, digging deeper into a reality of his own making. “This is the victory of Calin Georgescu,” Simion continued. “He is the president of Romania.” Simion kissed his wife and headed into the Parliament, blocking journalists, including me, from following him.
The night continued, and another round of exit polls arrived showing Dan with 54.1 percent to Simion’s 45.9 percent. Simion, now holed up in the Parliament building, still refused to concede. “I won!!!” he wrote on Facebook, saying he was “giving back the power to the Romanians!” (The post has since been deleted.) On X, Simion called himself “the New President,” and then deleted that post too. (The tweet also mistakenly used an emoji of the flag of Chad, which looks similar to Romania’s flag.) Simion then conceded the race to Dan, but eventually took back the concession too. But the final count was clear: Dan had won by 7 percent. Not since 1996 had turnout been so high.
I headed back to Dan’s headquarters. Outside the restaurant, a crowd was amassing as the reality of the upset spread throughout Bucharest. A week before, Simion’s victory felt inevitable. Now someone had unfurled a circular European Union flag, and a group of young people chanted: “Russia, don’t forget Romania is not yours.” Dan appeared on the balcony in a dark blue suit and waved to his well-wishers.
Simion’s MAGA allies, however, would not admit that he had lost, and were immediately joined by the Russians in casting doubt on Dan’s victory. Pavel Durov, the Russian-born chief executive of Telegram, published a post on X insinuating that French officials had called on his company to censor Romanian conservatives. Grenell, Trump’s envoy for special missions, reposted Durov’s tweet: “Your courage is inspiring,” he wrote. Next came Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser in Trump’s first term. “I’ll say it,” he wrote on X. “There is massive voter fraud in the Romanian elections just like there has been massive fraud in the U.S. elections, especially the RIGGED 2020 elections.”
Yet Romania of 2025 was not the United States in 2020. In the days that followed, Simion’s claims that he won fell flat, and his supporters never took to the streets or surrounded the Capitol. When Simion contested the results in court — himself alleging “irrefutable evidence of meddling by France, Moldova and other actors,” but offering no evidence — the judges turned him down and certified Dan’s win later that week.
When I sat down with Dan three days after the vote, the somewhat rumpled future president of Romania still seemed to be digesting his victory. The delayed election meant he would be given only a week to manage his transition to power, and he had been camped out in a temporary office near the presidential palace.
I asked Dan if he thought MAGA’s efforts to influence the Romanian election had backfired. He said that while Simion’s list of backers had been extensive, many of his patrons — figures like Flynn, Bannon and Trump Jr. — had limited name recognition among Romanians, if they were even known to them at all. (The following week Trump broke his silence with Romania and called Dan to congratulate him. “God bless the enduring Romania-U.S. friendship,” Dan afterward wrote on X.)
Dan said that he had of course been doing a lot of thinking about Georgescu — not just his fall but also his rise. He paused. Like a lot of countries, he said eventually, Romania enjoyed an explosion of wealth after the fall of Communism and the rise of free trade. But while most Romanians were living better than they did 20 years ago, they couldn’t help seeing — namely among the richest Romanians and those who left for Western Europe — people who lived far better than they did. The inequality was fueled by successive corrupt governments that left “people feeling like their vote meant nothing. And it only made sense that voters tried to have their revenge, and this is what happened last November.”
It wasn’t because of Russia that Georgescu had emerged, or because of America. Georgescu was only explained by populist anger among voters that was already there. Voters “felt they had reached their limit,” he said. “They would trust anyone, and any argument, against the people they held responsible.”
Romanian authorities may have taken the only measure they believed they had to save their democracy by ordering a new election, Dan said. But by canceling the millions of votes that were cast last year, they walked into a different trap, leaving many Romanians with suspicions that will linger for many years. “Canceling an election was a sign of the weakness of the Romanian authorities,” Dan told me. They were right to cancel it, he said. Their mistake was that they didn’t explain why.
Russia’s foreign-influence campaigns are not always about trying to get a friendly government elected; just as often, they can be about sowing doubts about democracy and getting people to believe that their system is rigged. In this sense, if the Kremlin was indeed interfering in Romania’s last election, it has succeeded for now.
And perhaps MAGA was still succeeding, too. In the days that followed Romania’s election, Poland would swing the other direction, voting in Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who had been endorsed by Trump, as president. It was a reminder that the threat remained for centrists like Dan.
Back at his desk, Romania’s future president looked up, indicating it was time to get to work. “If the people begin to trust the authorities, they will not go to the populist alternative,” Dan told me. But he would need time in Romania. “It will take years to convince people that the state authorities are working for them.”
Read by Malcolm Hillgartner
Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Alec K. Redfearn
Nicholas Casey is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has spent a decade as a foreign correspondent in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East and wrote about national politics during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign.
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