Romania’s Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu offered to resign and pull his party out of the country’s ruling coalition, after failing to get a candidate into the final run-off in the country’s presidential election.
After Sunday’s first-round vote, the country now faces a stark choice between a Maga-style Eurosceptic opposed to aid for Ukraine and a centrist candidate who has vowed to keep the country in the EU and Nato.
Far-right leader George Simion will face Nicușor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest, in the second round on May 18. Analysts expect it to be an uphill battle for Dan, who secured just 21 per cent of the vote in the first round compared with Simion’s 41 per cent — more than any far-right candidate has polled in Romania since the fall of communism.
“This was more than a landslide,” said independent analyst and historian Ion Ioniță. “It was a shift in the way Romanians see their future. A sort of revolution towards isolation, hard nationalism [and] anti-European conservative politics.”
Ciolacu said the ruling coalition “did not meet its objective and therefore has no credibility”.
Simion lacks a clear foreign policy and economic platform. Instead, his Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) party programme focuses on Christian-conservative values and is critical of Brussels, which it sees as eroding nations’ sovereignty. He remains opposed to aid for Ukraine — a country where he is banned on security grounds — even though he has more recently described Russia as a threat and pledged not to push for Romania’s exit from the EU and Nato.
But Simion has also pledged to appoint as premier Călin Georgescu, a pro-Putin ultranationalist who topped last year’s presidential vote, which was later annulled due to alleged Russian interference. Georgescu was barred from running again and his voter base transferred to Simion.
Dan, who ran as an independent and had no large party campaigning for him, has promised economic reforms and to keep the country firmly anchored within the EU and Nato. But he will have to broaden his appeal to rural voters who are attracted by Simion’s ultranationalist, religious discourse, analysts say.
“Dan is the underdog, there is no doubt about that,” Ioniță said. “His base is in cities so his chances are slim because Simion is a clear favourite among rural voters and diaspora voters. It is almost mission impossible.”
Simion has the bigger potential to lure the voters who had backed other candidates, most notably another self-styled Maga nationalist, the former premier Victor Ponta, who received 13 per cent of the vote in the first round. If just 10 per cent of voters swap from Ponta to Simion, then “it’s game over for Dan”, Ioniță said.
The court-ordered election rerun has deepened a political crisis in Romania and sparked criticism from both Europe’s far-right movement and the Trump administration. US vice-president JD Vance cited the annulled vote as an example of what he labelled as a crackdown on rightwing voices in Europe.
If elected president, Simion said he would find a way to bring Georgescu back into power. He may also trigger snap parliamentary elections, which he said, could be needed to reflect voters’ preferences.
“All the government parties . . . barely take 20 per cent of the votes,” Simion told the Financial Times on Sunday. “Do they still have popular support? No. So we can think about snap elections. We can think about a new majority in parliament . . . We can think of having [Georgescu] as prime minister.”
Georgescu told journalists after voting together with Simion on Sunday that last year’s vote cancellation was a “fraud” and that “the time has come to take our country back”.
Despite Georgescu’s open admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Simion said Bucharest would not drift away from the west. “I am the guarantee the free world has, I will not change the course,” Simion said.
“The course is [remaining] part of [the] EU and Nato,” he said.
A vocal supporter of US President Donald Trump, Simion said he was confident Washington would stand by Nato and was only tactically softening its stance on Russia to get Putin to the negotiating table.
Simion, whose party still seeks to unite with Romanian-speaking Moldova and has voiced claims for Ukrainian territory in the past, is banned from both of those countries for his subversive politics. But he claims he would not consider annexing any territory without referendums in all countries involved.
European far-right leaders rejoiced over Simion’s strong showing. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s hard-right Rassemblement National, said the result was a warning to Brussels, posting on X that “Romania has just given [EU Commission president Ursula] von der Leyen a very nice boomerang”.
The Kremlin on Monday criticised Sunday’s first-round rerun.
“One of the favourites was kicked out of the running completely arbitrarily,” said Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, according to state television. “Romanian voters were deprived of the right to cast their vote for whom they want.”
Italy’s deputy prime minister and far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini also congratulated Simion. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party are in the same European parliament group as AUR, did not comment on the first-round result. However, Carlo Fidanza, who leads the European parliament delegation for Brothers of Italy, called Simion’s win “a victory for democracy.”
Polish rightwing presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki, who hopes to win his country’s upcoming election, also praised the first-round result in Romania.
Additional reporting by Amy Kazmin in Rome
