Romania braces for heated presidential vote after controversial annulment

Romania is heading towards its most polarised presidential election in the country’s democratic history, with voters braced for the battle between a right-wing populist and a centrist technocrat on Sunday.

Recent polls show the race is close, with only a few percentage points separating the two candidates – George Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and Nicusor Dan, an independent and the current mayor of Bucharest, where 25 percent of the country’s 19 million citizens live.Simion aligns himself with populist leaders such as the United States’s Donald Trump and Hungary’s anti-immigrant leader Viktor Orban.

The vote comes at a critical time for Romania, a member of the European Union and NATO that borders Ukraine.The 38-year-old Simion secured 40 percent of the vote in a first round on May 4. Dan, a former mathematician, followed with about 20 percent.

The first round came in the wake of the controversial annulment of Romania’s October 2024 presidential election, in which ultranationalist underdog candidate Calin Georgescu advanced to the final. The constitutional court cited reasons of irregular financing and suspected foreign interference.

Simion has promised to redo the second round of the 2024 election if the Romanian public so desires.

A supporter of banned candidate Georgescu, Simion is likely to have swept up much of his base in the first round and has spoken of promoting Georgescu to the role of prime minister.A divisive figure, he is banned from entering Ukraine and Moldova. He has previously called to restore Romania’s old borders. He is also sceptical about sending more military aid to Ukraine. He has organised nationalist rallies in the past, as well as demonstrations against corruption. He founded AUR in 2020.

“I have promised that the first thing I will do as president is to unseal the files on the annulment of the elections. To do justice, we must know the truth,” said Simion.

Romania’s 2024 election fallout earned the nation criticism from high-profile populists who claimed free speech was being threatened. US Vice President JD Vance condemned the annulment at the Munich Security Conference, saying the ruling was based on the “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency”.Political analyst Anamaria-Nicoleta Ciobanu defined Simion as a “chameleonic leader” who began his career as a moderate, but has since shifted towards the hard right.

“Most of Simion’s voters are not extremists; they are only disappointed in how the Romanian political and economic space looks”, she said.

Simion maintains an official stance of neutrality on the Ukraine war, but voters tend to be drawn to his anti-establishment message.

“The establishment, made by old socialist and liberal parties, which have been in power for 35 years, has always talked about ensuring stability. This stability has turned out to be not just an illusion, but a huge lie. Romania has been recently downgraded to a hybrid regime,” Simion told Al Jazeera.

In 2024, Romania was moved down 12 places to number 72 in a Democracy Index published by The Economist, falling out of the category “flawed democracy” and into “hybrid regime”, a mixture of authoritarianism and democracy.

Despite committing to staying in both the EU and NATO, Simion is critical of Europe.

“The federalist super-state that the globalist left is creating is not what European citizens want,” he said.

Last week, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu from the Party of European Socialists (PSD) resigned following his government coalition’s failure to secure their candidate, Crin Antonescu, in the run-off. The failure was something of a political earthquake – the first time in the country’s 35-year post-revolutionary history that a leading party has not reached the final.