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A hard-right nationalist is favored to win Romania’s presidential election run-off on Sunday – a vote being held five months after the original election was annulled. George Simion won 41% of ballots cast in the first round of the re-run on May 4 – double the number of his rival, Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest. Many see him as taking up the mantle of Calin Georgescu, the obscure ultranationalist who came from nowhere to win the first round and was poised to become Romania’s next president – until authorities said his TikTok-fueled campaign had been aided by Moscow, and called the vote off. Georgescu was later banned from May’s re-run after being charged with various crimes, including founding a fascist group. Simion and Georgescu showed up to a polling station together to cast their ballots on May 4, giving credence to the adage: “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.” Simion’s commanding first-round lead meant Sunday’s run-off had looked set to be a coronation. But, after trouncing Simion in a televised debate, Dan may have closed the gap. An opinion poll on Tuesday put the two candidates neck-and-neck, on 48% each. The outcome could have profound consequences for Romania and the European Union, with Dan pledging to keep the Eastern European country on its pro-Western trajectory, while Simion wants to join a growing axis of hardline populists on Ukraine’s border. Alongside Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico – self-styled “sovereigntists” who resent being told what to do by Brussels, despite their economies being heavily reliant on EU funds – Simion could further slow EU decisions on aid for Kyiv and sanctions against Moscow. Last year’s canceled election has cast a huge shadow over the re-run, said Oana Popescu-Zamfir, director of the GlobalFocus Center, a think tank in Bucharest. “For the sovereigntist camp, it helped reinforce the narrative that the system is trying to rig elections. For the pro-democratic camp, it put the candidates on the defensive,” she told CNN. Extraordinary decisions require extraordinary explanations, but Romanian authorities did little to justify their canceling of the election. Into this information vacuum poured conspiracies, anger – and US Vice President JD Vance. In his blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance singled out Romania as the grossest case of Europe’s “threat from within,” which he described as the “retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” in terms of democracy and free speech. The Trump administration’s intense focus on Romania helped make a cause célèbre of Georgescu, who claimed he faced the same “lawfare” from the “deep state” as the US president. This provided fertile ground for Simion, who has continued to court the MAGA world. “Hello to all of our MAGA friends,” Simion said Thursday on the “War Room” podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and long-time cheerleader of international populists. “If all goes well,” Simion said, he would put Georgescu “back in the leadership of Romania,” without saying how. Courting the diaspora Since his first-round victory, Simion has spent a lot of time outside Romania, traveling to Austria, Italy, Poland, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. His strategy is twofold, according to Corneliu Bjola, professor of digital diplomacy at the University of Oxford, and an expert in Romanian politics. First, Simion wants to “establish a presidential profile,” and so has sought audiences with Orban, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and other prominent figures on Europe’s hard-right, Bjola told CNN. Second, he is attempting to mobilize the Romanian diaspora – one of the largest of any country in the world. Whereas mainstream parties have typically treated the millions of Romanians living abroad as an afterthought, Bjola said that Simion has made them a central part of his campaign. About 60% of the diaspora voted for Simion in the first round. Unlike in neighboring Moldova – where the pro-EU President Maia Sandu secured a second-round win thanks to the votes of the more liberal Moldovan diaspora in November – Romanians living abroad have tended to vote for “anti-system candidates,” said Bjola. Many Romanians who left the country after it joined the EU in 2007 to seek better-paying jobs abroad resent that they had to do so, he explained. Still, it’s “puzzling” given how antagonistic Simion is towards the EU, Bjola added. “If he managed to implement parts of his agenda, it would make life more difficult for the diaspora.” Dan, Simion’s opponent, is also something of an anti-system candidate. A quiet mathematician with a long history as a civic activist, Dan has run as an independent, pledging to end corruption in Romania’s institutions. His simple pledge to restore “competency” to government is seen by many as radical. While Simion has courted the diaspora, Dan has garnered huge backing in Romania’s cities, many of which have been filled with EU flags in recent nights in a show of support. Despite trailing heavily in the first-round vote, Dan’s campaign has picked up momentum in recent days while his rival’s has stuttered. Simion has backtracked on his pledge to build one million apartments and sell them for just €35,000 ($39,000) each, admitting it was a marketing ploy to “break the information blockade” on his party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians. Simion’s campaign suffered again in what turned out to be the only debate between the two candidates last week. Simion has since avoided squaring off against Dan in other scheduled TV debates, leaving Dan to make his pitch on Romanian television while Simion focuses on social media. “His team is trying to keep him away from the public eye as much as possible,” said Popescu-Zamfir. Simion prefers TikTok because it is “controlled communication, whereas in a debate, standing side-by-side, you get to see the contrast,” she said. A fork in the road Investors have grown jittery at the prospect of a Simion victory. After the first-round vote, authorities had to cancel a bond auction, and its central bank sold off foreign exchange reserves to slow the slide of the Romanian leu against the euro. Analysts have warned that victory for Simion this weekend could lead to a much more dramatic financial quake on Monday. Bjola says the economy is not the only concern. He says there is a “fear” in Bucharest that he hasn’t sensed in decades, since the fall of the bloody communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. After Georgescu was banned from running, Simion said the authorities who took the decision “should be skinned alive in the public square.” Georgescu’s supporters clashed with police in the capital that night. Simion has already begun to lay the ground for potential disorder if he does not win on Sunday, observers say. “We are winning by a landslide,” he told Jack Posobiec, an American far-right conspiracy theorist and podcast host. “The only thing that can stop us is some people interfering with the voting process,” he said.
