Pro-European candidate wins presidential election in Romania

BucharestRomania is betting on the European Union, and Brussels is breathing a sigh of relief. Pro-Western candidate Nicusor Dan, mayor of Bucharest since 2020, will be the country's new president after securing 53.99% of the vote in the second round of elections held this Sunday. The far-right candidate, populist George Simion, finished far behind, almost 900,000 votes behind: he obtained 46.01% of the vote. Turnout in this second round rose to 64.5%, while in the first it only reached 53%.

Dan's first words, when only polling data were available, were realistic, offering dialogue throughout the country: "Today, a Romanian community that wants profound change has won, a community that wants to reduce corruption, a society of dialogue and not of hate. We must fight for one Romania."

As happened two weeks ago, the Romanian community living in Spain overwhelmingly voted for Simion. But it was to no avail, as these results were offset by other diaspora groups, who embraced Dan's pro-European ideology. However, the total number of expatriates (more than 1.2 million voters) once again gave the majority of the votes to the populist Simion, who led by more than 124,000 votes, making him the winner at the end of the night.

In any case, the mayor of Bucharest has managed, in the last two weeks, to overturn results that had raised fears of the worst in Brussels, as Simion—a Trumpist candidate in the style of Viktor Orbán— obtained 40.96% of the votes in the first round, while Dan only had 20.99%. His growth has been spectacular, and the enthusiasm of his supporters, waving Romanian and EU flags, was evident in the streets of the capital, when the virtual president, now assured of victory by official data, stepped out onto the balcony of his headquarters as an independent, the Cismigiu Hotel.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, congratulated Nicolas Dan tonight, saying that Dan's victory is a triumph for Brussels Europe. The official results confirmed quite precisely the data from the two exit polls released at 9:00 p.m. local time (one less in Catalonia), when the polling stations closed. However, the extremist candidate, George Simion, initially rejected these data in an impassioned speech, claiming that his opinion polls placed him ahead. In fact, he insisted, publishing a statement on X in which he said: "I am the new president of Romania."

In central Bucharest, however, Dan's supporters had already begun to celebrate the European candidate's victory, which the official data later confirmed.

Nicusor Dan, a mathematician by profession, was a co-founder of the Save Romania Union (USR) and is the current mayor of Bucharest. He is running as a pro-European candidate supported by a coalition of centrist and liberal parties that want to keep Romania on the path to EU integration. Dan emerged in public in 2006 at demonstrations against urban corruption in the country's capital. Since then, he has steadily gained support, eventually becoming the mayor of Bucharest.

His campaign has focused on the fight against corruption and state reform. He advocates for institutional transparency and strengthening the rule of law, with the aim of extending the principles applied in Bucharest throughout the country. Voting in his hometown of Fagaras, he declared: "I voted to maintain Romania's European orientation and for strong cooperation with our European partners, rather than a path that leads us to isolation."

Basing the electoral campaign on social media, as George Simion did, was also Calin Georgescu's strategy in last November's elections. And it helped him achieve victory, although The country's Constitutional Court annulled itAccording to intelligence reports and court evidence, Georgescu's candidacy was promoted through illegal channels and concealed campaign expenses. The far-right has been focusing its campaigns on trying to capture the younger generation's vote through social media platforms like TikTok for half a dozen years. In fact, nearly 90% of young people in Romania use this platform between three and four hours a day.

Simion, who had supported Georgescu, said that if he won, he would like to have him in his cabinet. The AUR candidate –gold means gold In Romanian, he championed an agenda based on radical, Eurosceptic nationalism, with a deep conservatism. He had positioned himself against progressive policies on issues such as LGBTI rights and sex education, and had strongly supported Trumpism. He had also declared that he wanted to implement an "Orbán-style" model in Romania.