Election of the weekend II: Romanian Presidential election
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Keeping this one brief as Romania will demand a second and likely third post in the coming weeks. Sunday 11/24 is the first round of the Romanian presidential election, with a run-off on December 8th, and parliamentary elections on December 1st. A runoff is likely to be needed, as the leading candidate, Marcel Ciolacu, is hovering just under 30% in the polls.
If Romanian polling isn’t completely borked, Ciolacu’s ticket to the second round will almost certainly be punched tomorrow. Ciolacu, a pastry shop owner and consultant, came onto the political scene as deputy prime minister in 2018. He is the candidate of the Social Democratic party, which appears to be a fairly standard pro-EU center left party, albeit with a bit more Euroscepticism than is typical for social democratic parties, but not so much of it as to alarm Brussels, especially given the alternatives.
The question of who his opponent will be is considerably less certain. Second place in the polls is currently occupied by George Simion, the leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, a transnational (Romania+Moldova) right wing nationalist party. Simion is bad news in all the ways you probably already assumed he’s bad news:
Simion has pledged to take a more assertive stance in Brussels and defend Romania’s national interest — even if it means eschewing EU law.
If elected, he would join a growing chorus of hard-right leaders in the bloc, further tilting the balance away from mainstream parties and centrist policymaking in the EU’s highest decision-making body.
The AUR party chief has said he sees Trump, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Polish hard-right kingmaker Jarosław Kaczyński as role models.
At the same time, Romania’s relations with Ukraine and Moldova may also sour, with Simion currently banned from both countries.
Ukrainian authorities said they had blocked Simion because of his “systematic anti-Ukrainian activities” that are contrary to Ukraine’s national interests and “encroach on its state sovereignty and territorial integrity,” according to a document made public by the Romanian government in mid-November.
Simion’s ban from Moldova may well be due in no small part to he and his party’s conviction that Moldova should not exist; his particular version of the Romanian nationalist project is irredentist with respect to their small troubled neighbor. If we trust wikipedia, he has been banned from or expelled from Moldova on no fewer than six occasions, which I have to think might make him the world’s record-holder on that front. (If you know anyone who has been banned from entering Moldova on more than six occasions, for the love of God please tell their story in comments.) His ban from Ukraine is related to suspicions that he is collaborating with Russian authorities, which he denies. Others within shouting distance of second place in the polls include Elena Lasconi, of the ideologically confusing but apparently vaguely neoliberal/center-right “Save Romania Union” and Nicolae Ionel Ciunca, the candidate for the center-right establishment National Liberal Party. He is currently prime minister in an alliance with the social democrats. Klaus Werner Iohannis, the current president, represents this party
Rooting interests for the official LGM political line: Ciolacu with as large a vote share as possible, and either Ciunca or Lasconi pulling off the mild upset for second and blocking the reactionaries. A naive read of the polls suggests Simion could fall short, but coverage seems to be assuming he’ll make it through to the general.