On a bus journey in Transylvania last summer, I got talking to a young Romanian man who works in Yorkshire and who had been back home visiting his relatives. He told me how hard it had become for Romanians, particularly elderly people like his grandmother, to make ends meet with inflation so high. He blamed the war in Ukraine for the massive spike in energy prices and said that the conflict ‘needs to end soon’. With times so hard, he told me that some people were becoming resentful of handouts to Ukrainian refugees. I thought of my bus conversation when I saw the BBC report that a ‘Far-right, pro-Russian candidate’ had taken a ‘surprise lead in Romania’s presidential election’.
Georgescu wasn’t even the most fancied ‘nationalist’ candidate
The reaction in western liberal-elite circles to the success of the ‘ultranationalist’ Calin Georgescu in the first round of voting this weekend has been one of shock and horror, with much clutching of pearls.
For a start, Georgescu – who won almost 23 per cent of the vote – wasn’t even the most fancied ‘nationalist’ candidate; that was George Simion of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians. But Simion only got 13.8 per cent.
Georgescu left Simion’s Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) in 2022 after controversial comments he made about the two leaders of the Romanian Iron Guard, and stood as an independent this time. He was given little, or no chance. Polls in October put Georgescu on 0.4 per cent of the vote; even in November, he was predicted to get only 5.4 per cent. But the ‘man from nowhere’, who fought his campaign mainly on TikTok, stunned everyone. Cue the inevitable calls that somehow Russia fixed the election, which always occur when someone who’s not approved by the liberal elite wins an election. Georgescu has indeed hailed Vladimir Putin as a ‘man who loves his country’ and campaigned on a Nato and EU-sceptic platform. He has called, like Trump, for the Ukraine war to end swiftly, and opposes any more military aid to Kiev. But until any hard evidence comes to light, claims that the Kremlin was behind his success, should be dismissed as just sour grapes.
What Georgescu did, and did brilliantly, was to directly address the concerns of ordinary Romanians and that’s why he won. Unlike other candidates, he was bold enough to make the link between the continuance of the war on its borders and Romania’s economic hardships. Although inflation has fallen, from a peak of 16.76 per cent in November 2022, to around 5 per cent today, it is still the highest in the EU. The at-risk-of-poverty rate is the highest in the EU too.
It’s all very well to be dismissive of calls for a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine when you’re a well-off Eurocrat flying across the continent to various think-tank conferences and can cope easily with the ‘collateral damage’ of sky-high energy bills, which you can probably claim on expenses. But when you’re an elderly pensioner in a country where winters can be incredibly severe, it’s a different story altogether.
Georgescu tapped into this disconnect. He said he was standing ‘for those who feel they do not matter, and actually matter the most’. Romania’s farmers are among that number. They’ve had a particularly hard time of it of late, with a terrible drought this summer. They’ve also been hit badly by cheap Ukrainian grain imports coming through the Black Sea port of Constanta. A key part of Georgescu’s plan is to reduce imports and give more support to agriculture.
While other politicians seem focused primarily on Ukraine, and pledging loyalty to supra-national organisations like the EU and Nato, Georgescu made it clear that his sole concern was Romania. Does that make him ‘far right’? If so, what a strange world we live in.
The more one looks behind the shock/horror headlines the more understandable his success becomes. As has been the trend throughout 2024, candidates of the incumbent parties fared poorly. Since 2021, Romania has been governed by a ‘grand coalition’ of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL). Neither of their candidates made it through to the second-round. In one sense, the eclipse of the PSD and PNL candidates was predictable as it follows continental trends, but a protest vote against the governing parties could have ended up going elsewhere and not necessarily with Georgescu. But what he did was speak, unapologetically, the language of the country’s forgotten millions. That language is Christianity. Romania is the most religious country I have ever visited in Europe. There are churches – usually beautiful ones – everywhere. More than 80 per cent of its population identify as Orthodox Christians, and around 5 per cent as Roman Catholics.
What he did was speak, unapologetically, the language of the country’s forgotten millions
Family ties are perhaps stronger here than anywhere else in the EU. Parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren come before everything else. Georgescu, a devout Orthodox Christian himself, recognises this, which explains why he did so well. In his book ‘Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European football‘ Jonathan Wilson tells the moving story of what happened when a 27-year-old footballer called Florin Piturca died suddenly in 1978. His father, a cobbler named Maximilian, was so distraught he spent nearly all the money he had building a tomb where he could sleep next to his son in the cemetery. He slept there every night until his death in 1994, even defying a demolition order from the Ceausescus. As he lay dying he said: ‘I have waited for this day for a long time. I am very happy that soon I will see my son again’.
Sophisticated western liberals of a certain stamp would no doubt scoff at such a tale of simple devotion, but the hysterical over-reaction to Georgescu’s win only shows the cultural differences that now exist between elite voices in western discourse and the more devout, family-orientated eastern half of Europe.
Straight away after it was confirmed that Georgescu had topped the poll, we were informed, in an echo of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comment, that it was ‘uneducated’ Romanians who had voted for him. Again, behold the irony, those who claim the loudest their support for ‘democracy’ are the ones who reach for the insult book whenever a democratic result goes the wrong way. It is clear that, in the name of ‘democratic values’, the naughty Romanians weren’t meant to vote the way they did.
In the second round, due to take place on 8 December, expect ‘democratic forces’ to come out strongly in support of the neo-liberal ‘reformist’ second-placed candidate Elena Lasconi, a former television presenter and a strong supporter of the EU and Nato. Lasconi herself has said that Romania now faces an ‘existential fight’ for its democracy. But she could have a hard job stopping her opponent. Left-wing supporters of the PSD, particularly elderly ones, are more likely to vote for Georgescu with his populist economic message. And Georgescu is also likely to get most of the votes of those who voted for George Simion (13.86 per cent) in the first round.
Combine social conservatism, patriotism and love of country with economic populism and prioritise on cost of living, bread and butter issues over ‘political correctness’ and ultra-woke identity politics, and you’re on to a winning formula. It has worked well for Viktor Orban in Hungary and for Robert Fico in Slovakia, both of whom also want the Ukraine war to end swiftly, and it has worked well for Georgescu in Romania.
‘There’s no East or West, there’s only Romania’, he said on Monday. ‘We remain committed to European values, but we need to be committed to us and our families, to our children, to our ancestors’. ‘Insular Christian nationalism’ as it has been called in a Guardian editorial, isn’t a threat to democracy. It’s actually democracy in practice.
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