In a truly shocking turn of events, independent candidate Călin Georgescu, called ‘ultranationalist’ by the establishment media, came out triumphant from the first round of Romania’s presidential elections with 23% of the vote, despite nearly all polls predicting a comfortable victory for the current socialist prime minister Marcel Ciolacu (PSD/S&D).
With 19.15%, Ciolacu did not even qualify for the runoffs scheduled in two weeks. Instead, Georgescu, arguably the most anti-West candidate of the lot, will face off against the most pro-West one, liberal former TV anchor Elena Lasconi (USR/Renew), who overtook the prime minister with just two thousand votes, finishing at 19.17%.
For the first time in the democratic history of the country—since the fall of Communism in 1989,—neither of the two giant mainstream parties will be present in the presidential runoffs. Both social democrat Ciolacu and the National Liberal’s (PNL/EPP) ex-PM Nicolae Ciucă—who finished in fifth place with less than 9%—are expected to resign from their respective party leaderships.
Politicians and commentators are divided about who to blame for the results: the mainstream parties who made mistake after mistake throughout the campaign; pollsters who failed miserably in predicting the outcome; the Western diaspora voters who disproportionately backed alternative candidates; TikTok, which seems to have become the most influential campaign platform overnight; or Russian intelligence agencies which are accused, although without sufficient evidence, of putting their fingers on the scales.
The reason for this confusion is that Georgescu seemingly came out of nowhere, even though he’s been on the sidelines of Romanian politics for years. He ran without a party, his candidacy wasn’t considered seriously by any media, he made few public appearances throughout the campaign, and the last polls put him somewhere closer to sixth place, not first. It turns out that his almost entirely TikTok-based campaign was way more efficient than anyone thought, especially among voters living abroad.
An unusual road to power
Until his entanglement with far-right politics in 2020, Georgescu had been a lifelong technocrat with various positions at home and abroad, mostly linked to environmentalism, human rights, and sustainable economic models.
Under several different governments, he led the National Center for Sustainable Development in Bucharest between 2000 and 2013, where he was responsible for coordinating the country’s sustainable economic development strategy in line with EU directives. As a former Senior Fellow of the UN Development Program, he had been appointed as Romania’s representative to the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) and assigned as UN Special Rapporteur on toxic waste. He worked as an advisor for the Ministry of Environment and was the head of the International Economic Organizations Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At one point, Georgescu had been the president of the Romanian chapter of the Club of Rome, an organization of business elites headquartered in Switzerland, similar to the World Economic Forum.
So how exactly does one go from having this globalist, technocratic background to within an inch of winning the Romanian presidential race on a profoundly anti-globalist platform infused with ‘ultranationalist’ and arguably antisemitic rhetorics?
‘Too extreme’ for the nationalist AUR
Romanian politics will never be the same after last night, but there’s little to be excited about for conservatives. Yes, the mainstream elite lost, but neither of the current options is much of an improvement.
Throughout the campaign, Georgescu was the most radically anti-EU, anti-NATO, and anti-globalist candidate with a clear sympathy toward Moscow—even more so than George Simion of the controversial, nationalist AUR party (ECR), which is often accused of being a Russian proxy due to the party leaders’ alleged ties with Russian intelligence agencies.
After AUR was established in late 2019, Simion picked Georgescu as his candidate for prime minister during the 2020 parliamentary elections. But the two men grew apart in the following years as AUR began to rebrand and distance itself from its more radical past and members who had been too enthusiastic about Romania’s fascist history—such as Georgescu, whose extremism was deemed by Simion ‘harmful’ to the party.
For instance, Georgescu praised both General Ion Antonescu and Corneliu Zele Cordeanu—the former being Romania’s war-time dictator, the other the leader of the Legion of Archangel Michael and its successor Iron Guard; the two men responsible for the murder of up to 400,000 Romanian Jews during World War II—as the great ‘heroes’ and ‘martyrs’ of Romania, through whom “speaks and spoke the national history and not through the service lackeys of the globalist powers that today lead Romania temporarily.”
As a testament to his admiration of Codreanu’s fascist legacy, Georgescu’s political movement is even named Pământul Strămoșesc (‘Ancestral Land’)—the title of the Legionaries’ interwar political journal which was later outlawed but continued to be published by exiled members from Argentina until the 1970s.
Before Sunday, even Simion said that Georgescu was too radical to side with and he would rather support the socialist Ciolacu in a hypothetical runoff between the two. Now that Georgescu will have to face off with the globalist Lasconi, however, the AUR leader threw his weight behind his former ally once more, saying that he was glad there was a “sovereigntist” option on the ballot in two weeks.
The ‘right-wing progressive’ challenger?
Indeed, in many ways, Lasconi is the direct opposite of Georgescu. At first glance, she’s firmly pro-EU, pro-NATO, and pro-Ukraine, and would hardly question any edicts coming out of transnational organizations. But her character is more layered than that.
In 2023, Lasconi became the center of a controversy after she admitted that she voted ‘Yes’ during the failed referendum on the constitutional prohibition of same-sex unions. The remark led the leftist factions of her party to accuse her of “promoting Kremlin propaganda” and even her own daughter publicly called her out as a ‘homophobe.’ Lasconi backtracked immediately and later repeatedly said she would vote differently today, stressing that her liberal USR remains open for all, “be they Christians, atheists, LGBTQ individuals, or heterosexuals.”
However, she still managed to significantly widen the electoral share of her party which ten years ago emerged as the country’s ‘only progressive’ choice but has lately begun to slowly shift toward the center-right. This shift became much more pronounced during Lasconi’s campaign which, apart from inclusivity, focused on national identity and religious traditions, balancing between what it means to be left and right-wing in Romania.
Two weeks of chaos
All that’s left is to see which candidate could foster a wider national alliance against their opponent come the runoff elections on December 8th.
The mainstream parties (PSD, PNL) will probably throw their lot behind Lasconi; the three of them would have achieved 47% this Sunday if they ran a joint campaign. On the other hand, Simion and AUR’s 14% will strengthen Georgescu, and there’s no telling how many additional new voters he can mobilize through TikTok in the next few weeks.
Then there’s also the parliamentary elections, scheduled between the two rounds this Sunday, December 1st, which can be just as unpredictable in the end. The political chaos is palpable, especially given that Romania’s ‘hybrid’ presidential system grants comparable executive power to both the president and the prime minister, who often negate each other’s decisions if they represent different political platforms.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from what’s happening in the EU’s sixth-largest country, it is that politics has become a lot more complicated and volatile and that anything that can happen will happen at some point.
