The political center, eroded by nationalist forces aligned with President Trump, held in the end. But only just.
Presidential elections on Sunday in Romania and Poland — the two most populous countries on Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe — halted, or at least slowed, a hard-right breakthrough that many liberals had feared.
But they also pointed to growing discontent with established political parties, no matter their ideological tilt, a trend that is likely to generate future turbulence as old and predictable loyalties fade.
In Romania, a centrist mayor who campaigned as an independent untainted by close ties to two long-dominant mainstream parties — widely viewed as corrupt — defeated another outsider, a hard-line nationalist who aligned himself with Mr. Trump and had been seen as the front-runner.
Nicusor Dan, the mayor of Romania’s capital, Bucharest, won a decisive victory over George Simion in a runoff for Romania’s presidency, confounding expectations of a sharp turn to the right. He won 54 percent of the vote, boosted by an unusually high turnout of 64 percent. That turnout was nearly 10 percent more than in the first round, in which Mr. Simeon trounced Mr. Dan and nine other candidates.
The result Sunday delighted mainstream political leaders across Europe and also the European Union’s executive arm in Brussels, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, congratulated voters for having “chosen the promise of an open, prosperous Romania in a strong Europe.”
Mr. Simion, who on Sunday responded to early results that showed him losing with cries of fraud and Trump-like vows to “stop the steal,” curbed his fury early Monday, conceding defeat and dropping complaints of irregularities in a somber video address.
“We may have lost a battle, but we will certainly not lose the war,” he said on X. Presenting himself as part of an invincible global movement, he added: “We will continue our fight for freedom and our great values along with other patriots, sovereigntists and conservatives all over the world.”
In a sign of how fragmented that movement is, however, ethnic Hungarian voters in Romania, many of whom support Hungary’s nationalist prime minister Viktor Orban, appear to have voted overwhelming against Mr. Simion.
Poland delivered a far less emphatic rebuff to E.U.-skeptic nationalism, with hard-right candidates, including a pugnacious anti-Semite, taking second, third and fourth places in the first round of a closely watched presidential race.
Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw and an ally of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, still came in first. That secured him a slot in a runoff on June 1 against the second-place finisher, Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist historian backed by Poland’s previous governing party, Law and Justice.
But the margin of his victory — 31.3 percent of the vote to Mr. Nawrocki’s 29.5 percent, according to the official count — was so small and support for hard-right candidates so strong that a repeat win for Mr. Trzaskowski in the runoff is far from certain.
Like Mr. Simion in Romania, Mr. Nawrocki positioned himself during the campaign as part of an unstoppable global movement, visiting Washington in early May for a meeting in the White House with President Trump, who gave him a thumbs up. Mr. Tusk and other members of his government have yet to be received by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Nawrocki also joined forces with Mr. Simion, receiving the Romanian nationalist candidate at a campaign event this month in the Polish town of Zabrze.
“When we win on 18 May, we will together build a Europe of values, a Europe of homelands, in which we will not allow the EU to centralize and turn Poland and Romania into provinces,” Mr. Nawrocki said at the event.
In contrast to Mr. Simion, who lost on Sunday, Mr. Nawrocki still could win the second round.
In a measure of the liberal camp’s concern, Mr. Trzaskowski’s supporters gathered at 7 a.m. on Monday outside a central Warsaw subway station to rally their forces.
“We know we have a very difficult fight ahead of us and we want to show that we are starting work on the second round early,” Marcin Kierwinski, a minister in Mr. Tusk’s government and the head of the Warsaw arm of Mr. Trzaskowski’s Civic Platform party.
The big shock of the Polish vote was the 6.3 percent won by Grzegorz Braun, a nationalist firebrand who has opposed admitting Ukrainian refugees, railed against the European Union and been involved in a number of anti-Semitic stunts. In December 2023, he used a fire extinguisher to extinguish candles lit in the Polish Parliament building to mark Hanukkah.
Mr. Braun finished in fourth place, behind another far-right candidate, Slawomir Mentzen of Confederation, who garnered nearly 15 percent of the vote. Two leftist candidates among 13 in the race won a total of only 10 percent.
The outcome of the runoff will depend largely on which candidate far-right voters decide to support. They would appear to be closer ideologically to Mr. Nawrocki than Mr. Trzaskowski, but many voters use the first round to register a protest, and often gravitate to the center in the final ballot.
Like in Romania, where the two candidates in Sunday’s vote kept their distance from well-established parties, Poland is also moving away from the duopoly of Civic Platform and Law and Justice that has dominated politics for decades.
Poland’s two main parties secured slots in the runoff but their share of the vote — around 60 percent — was unusually small.
Antoni Dudek, a professor of history at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University, said that Mr. Trzaskowski and Mr. Nawrocki had only received support from their core electorates.
“This is the worst result ever” for the two leading parties, he said.
Anatol Magdziarz in Warsaw and Andrada Lautaru in Bucharest 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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