No to the System and Yes to Stability: Romania Votes for Change

In a surprise turnaround, Romania has overwhelmingly chosen independent candidate, Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan over the often controversial nationalist AUR leader, George Simion, in the country’s historic repeat presidential elections.

Despite Simion winning the first round with a landslide on May 4th, Dan managed to unite Romania’s fractured political scene behind him and mobilize an unprecedented number of new voters—resulting in a record turnout of nearly 65%, the highest since 1996.

The results of the Sunday, May 18th watershed election were clear: Nicușor Dan won with 53.6%, while Simion bagged the remaining 46.4%, forcing him to concede by the morning, albeit reluctantly.

As soon as the first exit polls were published, predicting the results relatively accurately, the first thing Simion did was to declare victory. “I am the new president of [Romania],” he stated on X in a since-deleted post.

Later, as the results were rolling in, Simion maintained his position, called the election rigged, and invited his supporters to a massive protest the next day. However, seeing that Dan was leading with over 800,000 votes, at 1:30 a.m., he finally conceded that there was no “significant” tampering with the ballots, recognizing Dan’s victory.

This marks the end of a period of unprecedented political instability in the country, which the ruling establishment parties brought upon themselves by canceling the election back in December. 

The official reason was (still unproven) allegations of Russian interference, but it was largely accepted that the ruling parties simply could not stand a situation where only anti-establishment opposition candidates advanced to the second round, and none of theirs. The same situation repeated six months later, but thankfully, no one dared to cancel the election again.

Nicușor Dan, in turn, focused on healing the divided nation in his victory speech, promising to represent every citizen equally. “From tomorrow, we’ll start rebuilding Romania—a united, honest Romania, based on respect for the law and for all its people,” he said.

Originally a mathematician with a PhD from the Sorbonne, Dan was the co-founder of the Save Romania Union (USR) party, which grew out of anti-corruption protests and defined itself as a centrist anti-establishment outfit open to all political ideologies.

He later quit USR in 2017 because he believed the party had deviated from its intended course by leaning toward the Left and opposing a referendum on a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. He instead advocated for neutrality and for understanding more conservative voters whose religious identity might conflict with the practice.

With Dan’s departure, USR was indeed perceived as a “progressive,” or liberal party for a time, but under the leadership of Elena Lasconi—the predicted winner of the annulled election in December—it shifted back to the center-right while keeping its anti-corruption and anti-system platform.

As the first president in three decades who does not come from either of the two big establishment parties—the centre-right PNL (EPP) and the left-wing PSD (S&D)—Dan represents the same hope and energy on which he founded USR: a chance to break away from decades of political stagnation under an utterly corrupt two-party system, and start healing a divided nation.

Simion brought a similar anti-establishment sentiment into the race, consciously building on his explicitly ‘Trumpist’ brand that propelled his relatively new party (founded in 2019) to become the largest opposition bloc last year. AUR was not even a thing during the last presidential election, so Simion’s achievement of 46% can rightly be called impressive.

However, his attempt to frame his opponent as a puppet of both the EU and the domestic establishment might have worked if he were against anyone else, but not with Dan, whose political career fundamentally refuted such black-and-white characterization.

What’s more, Simion’s unorthodox campaign strategy of skipping all but the first debate in the last two weeks did not help him either, allowing Dan to easily bag multiple wins on live TV while standing next to empty chairs reserved for the AUR leader, who was widely seen as not brave enough to face him. Also, his reputation suffered a major blow right after the first round, when he admitted that his promise to provide Romanians with unrealistically cheap housing was nothing more than a ‘marketing’ strategy.

And perhaps all of this could not have been enough if it weren’t for the one million-strong ethnic Hungarian community, who overwhelmingly came out in support of Dan, or rather, against Simion. No surprises there: Simion partly founded his party on anti-Hungarian rhetoric, and made a name for himself by insulting Hungarians and advocating for rolling back their hard-won minority rights.

In any case, Dan is now president with high hopes and a nearly unprecedented mandate for implementing broad reforms, but his job is not going to be easy. 

First, he will have to appoint a prime minister who will attempt to forge a new government, but the establishment parties are still expected to take the lead in the negotiations. And if no government is formed after two attempts, then new parliamentary elections will be held, with no telling who will come out on top.