A hardline anti-Nato nationalist has unexpectedly won the initial round of Romania’s presidential election, sowing uncertainty about the political future of a pivotal state on the alliance’s eastern flank.
With more than 99.9 per cent of the ballots counted, Calin Georgescu, 62, who has praised President Putin’s regime and argued that the “imperialist” military-industrial complex is behind the war in Ukraine, had won about 22.9 per cent of the vote.
That put him more than three points ahead of two pro-western candidates, Elena-Valerica Lasconi and Ion-Marcel Ciolacu, who were tied on roughly 19 per cent.
Elena-Valerica Lasconi casts her vote in the first round
ROBERT GHEMENT/EPA
If the result is confirmed it will constitute a significant upset after polls suggested that Ciolacu, the country’s Social Democratic prime minister, had been on course for a relatively straightforward victory, with Georgescu trailing a long distance behind him.
Romania, a nation of 19 million people that shares a 380-mile border with Ukraine, hosts a French-led Nato multinational battlegroup and a US missile defence installation, which Georgescu has described as a “shame of diplomacy”.
In recent years it has been a highly committed Nato ally, raising its defence budget to almost 2.5 per cent of GDP. Klaus Iohannis, the current president, even made an unsuccessful campaign to become the alliance’s secretary-general earlier this year.
Were Georgescu to win the second round of the election on December 8, it would cause considerable unease among Romania’s western partners. The president exercises considerable powers over foreign and security policy and the approval of judges.
Having qualified as an agronomist under the communist Ceausescu regime in the late 1980s, Georgescu made a career as an expert on sustainable development policy — leading a United Nations institute and a European research centre based in western Germany.
• Inside Nato’s biggest European base in eastern Romania
After several attempts to become prime minister he ran for the presidency as an independent on a stridently anti-establishment ticket. On Sunday, after casting his vote, Georgescu said on Facebook said that he stood “for the unjust, for the humiliated, for those who feel they do not matter and actually matter the most”.
He promoted himself heavily through TikTok, a video-sharing app popular with young people, where he has 250,000 followers and some of his clips have been viewed more than 3 million times.
While he has been coy about the extent to which he supports Putin’s Russia, he has previously said in interviews that Nato would not come to Romania’s defence and that its best hope lay in following “Russian wisdom”.
On Monday, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters that while Moscow did not know that much about Georgescu’s views on international affairs it clearly understood the stance of the current Romanian leadership, which he said was hostile to Russia.
An anti-Nato victory could affect the enhanced military presence to deter aggression from Russia. Pictured is a tank from the US army 101 airborne division at Mihail Kogalniceanu air base in Romania
DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Georgescu has also declared his admiration for Ion Antonescu, Romania’s dictator during the Second World War, who was executed in 1946 for war crimes including overseeing the deaths of as many as 400,000 Jews.
In 2022, he left the right-wing populist Alliance for the Romanian Union party after some of its leading members said his penchant for Moscow and anti-western rhetoric were damaging its reputation with the electorate.
The surge in support for his candidacy caught political experts unawares. Georgescu had previously been polling at lower than 5 per cent of the vote.
Some analysts suggested the election may have been subjected to Russian interference, as was seen during the presidential elections in neighbouring Moldova several weeks ago.
While possible, any meddling in Romania does not seem to have been as intense as it was in Moldova. The Romanian national intelligence service told local media a fortnight ago that it was investigating apparent Russian efforts to influence the campaign, including through networks of social media “bots”.
However, Cristian Andrei, a Romanian political consultant, said it also appeared that Georgescu had effectively harnessed a “large protest or revolt against the establishment”.
“The mainstream political parties have lost the connection with regular Romanians,” he said. “You don’t have strong candidates or strong leaders … there are weak candidates, weak leaders, and the parties in general are pretty much disconnected.”