Romania cracks the door open to surprise ultranationalist presidential candidate

(CN) — Romanian voters on Sunday quietly dealt a major shock to European politics by giving an underdog 62-year-old independent ultranationalist with anti-NATO, anti-European Union and conspiracy-laden views a first-round win in the country’s presidential elections.

Even longtime observers of Romanian politics were caught off guard following the stunning electoral win with about 23% of the vote by Călin Georgescu, a former mid-level United Nations bureaucrat who teaches agriculture at a polytechnical college in Bucharest. He has no party affiliation, no history in electoral politics and ran his campaign largely via TikTok and Facebook.

“Literally, this guy was unknown,” said Kamil Całus, a Romania expert at the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies think tank, in a telephone interview. “If you had asked a regular Romanian a month ago who Mr. Georgescu was, I think around 80% of people would have told you: ‘I don’t know, I’ve never heard about him.’ And now he has a chance to actually win the elections.”

His potential ascendancy to the presidency made for difficult digestion in Brussels because Romania is a key NATO member with its 18 million people, vast landscapes and pivotal location on the European map, hugging the Black Sea and bordering Ukraine.

Making matters worse for pro-EU forces, Romanian presidents wield a lot of power — unlike many other European political systems — including the ability to veto legislation, in a fashion similar to France’s semi-presidential form of democracy. Romanian presidents also have clout over foreign affairs, intelligence agencies and the military while also representing the country at international institutions and events.

“Nobody really mentioned this as an option before the election,” said Sorina Cristina Soare, an expert on Romanian politics at the University of Florence in Italy, speaking by telephone. His support went unnoticed by pollsters.

Georgescu’s underdog win serves as a potential opening shot in a new era for EU politics after Donald Trump’s surprise landslide win in the United States ushered in a disorienting rebalancing of world politics, one where anti-liberal and hard-right forces are taking the levers of command.

Georgescu, an immaculately groomed black belt in judo, checks all the boxes for this new era of wild illiberal far-right politics.

He doubts the 1969 Apollo moon landing took place and questions the official narrative about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack. He’s an apologist for Romania’s World War II fascist leaders, calling them national heroes. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he scorned vaccines and said he preferred to rely on his own immune system.

He calls the EU a misguided and destructive colonial project that hasn’t been good for a majority of Romanians. He sees NATO as serving American and not Romanian interests. He doesn’t condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and instead talks about the need for a new understanding with the Kremlin. He sounds off against global elites and international bankers.

All his seemingly disparate views are then wrapped in a religious shroud where the Romanian Orthodox Church plays a stabilizing role to ward off the perceived insidious invasion of liberal ideas where gender is flexible, homosexuality is welcomed and friendliness toward refugees is exalted.

As “individual elements [his views] do not tell a strong story; however, put together there is an efficient story of defending the national community against those political elites sold to foreign interests,” Soare said.

And there’s a very good chance Georgescu may become the face of Romania on the world stage.

“I would say his chances are 50-50,” Całus said.

His opponent in the runoff is another unusual candidate, Elena Lasconi, a 52-year-old former news anchor for a national television channel. She hails from the center-right Save Romania Union, a party with a moderate number of seats in the Romanian parliament. She serves as the mayor of Câmpulung, a small city of 27,000 inhabitants. In this election, she has positioned herself as a pro-EU liberal centrist.

This election was extraordinary for Romania not only for the rise of Georgescu but also for the collapse of the country’s political heavyweight, the Social Democrats, an offshoot from the old communist system. This is the first time since the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1989 that a Social Democrat will not be in a presidential runoff.

“They have always been there, though they have failed since 2000 to win the election,” Soare said.

Georgescu was buoyed to victory by many disaffected, first-time, rural and working-class voters, an electorate mirroring the forces that drove Trump to his second presidential win earlier this month. He also picked up swaths of Romanian expatriates in Western Europe, many of them stuck in low-paid jobs and treated with disinterest in their adopted EU homelands.

Soare said his simple delivery style and dignified presence coupled with his status as an independent candidate expressing anti-establishment and anti-corruption messages appealed to many voters with conservative views who are skeptical of the benefits of membership in the EU and NATO.

Całus echoed that assessment.

“He calls European integration a failed project and he’s at the same time anti-globalist,” he said. “He is also very careful when it comes to the Ukrainian-Russian war. He’s definitely not supporting Ukraine in this conflict; he’s not supporting Russia as well. But when he was asked, he said that he believes that this conflict is basically in the interests of the American military industry.”

This election, he said, highlighted the failure of Romania’s mainstream centrist parties to pay attention to discontent among Romanians despite many economic gains following the country’s inclusion into the EU in 2007. Brussels, too, bears some responsibility for his win because it rejected until only recently Romania’s entry into the border-free Schengen compact, he added.

“Romanians are pro-European in general, but if you dig a bit deeper into the opinion polls, you will see they feel underappreciated, that they feel as second- or even third-class citizens of the European Union because they are not a member of Schengen,” Całus said. “They perceive themselves as a nation of labor migrants who are welcomed in the Western part of the European Union and are not being treated in the proper way even though they are very proud of their nation and their country is getting richer.”

Besides the presidential race, this promises to be a raucous period for Romanian politics with parliamentary elections happening next Sunday, a week before the presidential runoff.

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.