Vladimir Mitev, Mediapool, 26 November 2026
The big news from the first round of Romania’s presidential election is not that Putin or Soros are pulling the strings behind the scenes in our neighbor to the north and are ready to take control of the presidential establishment while the population watches helplessly. Despite the fact that the entire election night of November 24, 2024 was marked by surprises and even shocks for those following the results, in the Romanian elections, Romanian citizens are electing Romanian candidates who also have Romanian content. And the real news, at least at this stage – a few days before the December 1, 2024 parliamentary elections and the second round of the presidential elections – is that Romanians are saying “goodbye” to the ruling regime and the seemingly unshakeable coalition of the two big parties of the Romanian transition – the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party.
Political stagnation
The Ciucă-Ciolacu duo (the leaders of the two parties were prime ministers by rotation in what some say was a “Romanian assembly”) was created with the political intervention of President Klaus Iohannis. It has been a symbol of Romanian stability, but also of the corruption and political mediocrity associated with it, generating frustration and anger – especially at the master of the Cotroceni palace for the past ten years. Iohannis was elected in 2014 with high hopes for “a different kind of politician” and the expectation that he would create a German-style “Romania of things well done” (the phrases in quotation marks were slogans from his campaign 10 years ago). But he ends his second term with extremely low approval ratings and with many feeling that he has disappointed and deserves scorn.
In recent years, Romania has been in a period of political stagnation. The civic energy and ambitions of the new political elites to replace the frameworks and governing philosophy of the old clientelist parties that dominated the Romanian transition have faded or have been significantly weakened. In the context of the war in Ukraine, Romania has found a stability in which the two major parties allocate European and state budget funds, have a much reduced appetite for reform, have bought media calm by generously funding TV stations with money from their party subsidies, and there has been a certain timelessness in the country. It was the same when Boiko Borisov ruled Bulgaria with his party-state. Roads were being built at breakneck speed, TV shows and political talk shows were running, and elites close to both parties were rolling in the big money, while discontent was building up in the nationalist and civil society segments.
Mediocrity and corruption
Unlike in Bulgaria, however, investigative journalists in Romania managed to cut through the media fog and expose mediocrity and corruption at the highest level. Nicolae Ciucă, leader of the National Liberal Party and former rotating prime minister, has been accused of plagiarizing his doctorate and undeservedly calling himself the first Romanian military commander to command the Romanian army in combat after World War II – in Iraq in 2003. It has been revealed that in 2022 the current prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, traveled on luxury flights paid for by the owner of the construction company Nordis, which again investigative journalists have proven to have defrauded hundreds of Romanians who wanted to buy property as an investment. The investigations also hit President Iohannis – for flying on expensive private jets on state visits, the costs of which he has classified; for the “palace” he is renovating with state money and where he plans to live after leaving the Cotroceni Palace, etc.
Romanians have a sense of justice. And having accumulated anger, the “mamaliga exploded” in a logical but legal way. The political status quo was attacked in the elections, on the one hand, by voters in small towns (the so-called “deep Romania” less familiar to foreigners, but also to residents of the country’s big cities – religious, conservative, traditionalist, but also with a sense of honor and pride in its identity) and the diaspora (where many Romanian immigrants have a traditional resentment of the “system”), who voted for the sovereignist candidates Călin Georgescu (former UN expert in sustainable development projects, who has been reinventing himself for years as a sort of prophet-conspiracy conspiracy theorist, promoting on the one hand a mystical discourse and on the other an original model of development of Romanian society based on its own resources) and George Simion (who before becoming a politician was a militant for the reunification of Romania with the Republic of Moldova). And from the other direction, the urban middle class and the NGO sector, which is particularly influential in Romania, attacked the corruption and clientelism of the Ciucă-Ciolacu regime (installed by Iohannis).
Saying goodbye to this duo is the real novelty of the first round of the Romanian presidential elections. The country returns to political competition less than two months before the start of Donald Trump’s second term. And Romanian society is showing that it is capable of renewal and that its citizens have the power to bring about change – through the ballot box, but not only.
Călin Georgescu
The international media’s focus for this first round is on the front-runner candidate, Călin Georgescu, who is being labeled (not without reason) with all sorts of labels (Russophile, legionary, etc.) designed to cancel him out and mobilize the vote against him, but which may also create an aura of a true fighter against the system, which it is not very clear that he really is or can be. Nevertheless, Călin Georgescu is, first and foremost, one of the key figures of the Club of Rome in Romania, a society of the Romanian elite of the elite, schooled in the socialist period, when there was great competition for university places and when degrees really had value. Other prominent public members of the Club of Rome in Romania include Sergiu Celac, Ceaușescu’s translator from English and Russian, who is treated with great respect in Romanian diplomatic circles and is honorary president of the New Strategy Center, the most prestigious think tank of Romanian security experts. Georgescu himself was a department director in the Romanian Foreign Ministry in the early 21st century. Celac and Georgescu are also close in terms of their interest in sustainable development, Georgescu being involved in the elaboration of a national strategy in this field during his time as head of the National Center for Sustainable Development.
The other important member of the Club of Rome is Mugur Isărescu, the world’s longest-serving central bank governor. From 1990 until today, for a period of just one year, Isărescu was not at the helm of the National Bank of Romania, a highly influential institution in Romania. For that single year, he was temporarily “demoted” to prime minister and then returned to the helm of the National Bank.
Georgescu was out of the spotlight in these elections. Just days before, polls had him at 8%. He was expected to finish first, attracting 23% of the vote. Then, his surprise victory in the first round was attributed to propaganda made by bots on TikTok, which went under the radar of the media and citizens. It sounds anecdotal, but on election night there were massive Google and Dex online dictionary searches on Georgescu’s positions and the labels with which he was associated – for example, that he was a supporter of the fascist legionary movement in the interwar period. There were Romanians who were genuinely and deeply surprised by his result and wondered where he came from.
Georgescu achieved his performance without it being clear what exactly he proposed, how and above all with which personnel he would implement it. He was simply recognized as an anti-system candidate and received the appropriate objectively existing vote. If the other sovereignist candidate, George Simion, had the chance to become president, it would create an international scandal, because Simion is banned from entering Moldova and Ukraine, two key countries for Romanian diplomacy. Georgescu, on the other hand, has so far spoken rather general phrases and that helped him in the first round. In the second round, if he wants to win, he needs to step into the limelight and take positions. And that may disappoint some of his supporters.
The timing of RIA Novosti’s election-night description of Călin Georgescu as “aligned by Russia” is also likely to play an important role in the second round of the presidential election on December 8, 2024. For pro-Western Romanians, it is a matter of national honor not to allow a man with such a label to become president of their country.
Elena Lasconi
At the same time, Elena Lasconi, who has until now been mayor of Câmpulung, a town in Argeș county near the Carpathian Mountains, one of the birthplaces of Romanian identity, is seen even by her own voters as unprepared in international politics. The expectation seems to be to surround herself with good advisers. Her positive qualities are considered to be “sincerity” and “authenticity”. While Ciucă and Ciolacu seemed typical political products of the transition, including qualities such as cheekiness and mythomania, Lasconi, at least so far, seems to be playing herself.
The important thing about Lasconi is that he has the backing of Romania’s NGO sector, which is far more influential than Bulgaria’s. As Mediapool reported earlier this year, an NGO in Romania received donations totaling more than €50 million and built a children’s hospital, which it then transferred to the state. It is a sign of confidence in the NGO sector and its ability to act on a large scale.
The NGO sector launched the careers of the current mayors of Bucharest and Timisoara, who were re-elected in this year’s local elections. In Romania, the NGO sector has its own media, as well as its own TED talk show, The People of Justice, which tells the stories of citizens and professionals who are successfully changing society, have social causes and reject the negative manifestations and backward thinking of the old elites.
I.e. in the battle for the Cotroceni Palace on December 8, individuals and teams who have the school of socialism (and in the new conditions identify with traditions and nationalism, independent, even if they had ties to the UN and “globalism” – like Georgescu) or claim to the new times (Lasconi has simultaneously messages of support for the traditional family and orthodoxy and defense of LGBT people, and recently published a photo of his daughter, who wrapped herself in a Palestinian kufi).
Romanian students and activists gathered for a spontaneous protest at University Square in downtown Bucharest after the surprise victory of far-right independent candidate Calin Georgescu in the first round of the presidential election (auto-generated subtitles in English can be activated)
The parliamentary elections of 1 December 2024
It matters what the results of the December 1, 2024 general election will be, because whoever is president will need parliamentary support. In the age of Trump, the culture wars between conservative and liberal citizens are likely to intensify in Romanian society. Trump himself is often described as unpredictable. But there are sentiments both for and against him in Romanian society. And Romania will likely need both tendencies to navigate regional and international relations in the Romanian president’s second term.
There is unlikely to be a significant change in relations with Bulgaria, but it may be important to highlight some peculiarities of the candidates. About a month ago, Elena Lasconi announced on her website that she supports a “mini Schengen” with Bulgaria. This is not directly important as Bulgaria and Romania are expected to join Schengen with their land borders in 2025. But it is interesting that someone on Lasconi’s team is interested in Romanian-Bulgarian initiatives and the development of bilateral relations, even if these initiatives are unpopular in Bulgaria itself.
On the other hand, Călin Georgescu has not declared his ambitions to get Romania out of NATO and the EU. And such ambitions would hardly be recognized as a Romanian interest. But he gives the impression that he has a positive attitude towards Hungary, a country which has a particular policy towards Russia and China, but which is rarely sanctioned for its “specific” foreign policy. It is logical to assume that, if he becomes president, Georgescu will not try to turn Romania into a new Belarus by wiping out substantial Western investment, the Eurocentrism of Romanian elites and security cooperation with NATO and the EU. It seems logical that Georgescu would rather try to move Romania in Hungary’s direction. And this is likely to make all the difference for a Hungarianphile society like Bulgaria.
Positive sign
The results of the first round of Romania’s presidential elections surprised and perhaps even puzzled Romanians and observers. But they should be seen positively – as a sign that Romanian society and politics are capable of change. There are already signs that the Romanian political class understands the signal that has been sent. Marcel Ciolacu has resigned from the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. We wait to see how the National Liberal Party will react to Ciucă’s poor result. But Ciucă’s resignation himself is basically certain – after the poor result in the presidential elections, he has no political future.
The parliamentary elections on December 1, 2024 will clearly show how big the sovereignist turn in Romanian society is. Georgescu has no party and his supporters should probably support Geprge Simion’s AUR party, but it is not certain that all those who voted for him as a presidential candidate would support the party. Mobilizing sovereignists usually serves to replace people at the top. But this current does not have very good experts, and governing in the EU usually requires technocratic knowledge.
Romania is indeed capable of surprises and political innovation. But will we see Romania’s first woman president? Or will it turn out, most unexpectedly, that the Romanian head of state may be “a Russophile”? Over the next two weeks, Romania will prepare for the second coming of Donald Trump. At this stage, the political realignment is off to a good start and has the chance of a happy ending.
Photo: Ciucă-Ciolacu duo’s ironic logo circulating on the internet (source: HauBau)
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