The Romanian election scenarios scaring Brussels

All eyes are on Romania.

The country goes to the polls on May 4 in the first round of a controversial presidential election, after concerns over Russian interference triggered an annulment of the original vote last November.

Now that the Moscow-backed ultranationalist Călin Georgescu has been disqualified from the do-over election, George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), has vaulted into the polling lead ahead of a vote that threatens to shake the EU and NATO if Bucharest pivots off its pro-European path.

For now there are four candidates — per the polls, which (important caveat!) failed to predict Georgescu’s stunning rise last year — who appear to have a legitimate shot at reaching the critical second round on May 18: Simion; the governing parties’ candidate Crin Antonescu; the centrist independent Nicușor Dan; and the leftist-turned-nationalist Victor Ponta, each of whom have polled in second position in separate recent surveys.

Here’s what could happen in each of the runoff scenarios between the four men … including the options that would leave Brussels watching from behind the sofa.

Simion vs. Dan

With Georgescu barred from running, Simion has presented himself as the go-to candidate for nationalist voters — with apparent success. His 30 percent support in recent polls is about the sum of the votes Georgescu won in November, plus his own.

A self-professed fan of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Simion has pitched himself as an agent of change and his AUR party, which has gone from an anti-vaccination movement to a major political force, as a Trumpist platform. He’s promised to push back against Brussels and suspend military aid to Ukraine.

Simion gets backing in small and medium-sized cities and rural areas, as well as among voters younger than 45 with a low income and low to medium levels of education, said Remus Ștefureac, a political analyst and director of polling company Inscop Research. Like Georgescu, who won major support from voters outside of Romania, Simion is also angling for the diaspora vote, which isn’t typically included in Romanian polls.

The voter base belonging to Dan, a mathematician who founded the Save Romania Union (USR) party but is now running as an independent, is vastly different: He has strong support in Bucharest, where he is mayor, and in other large urban areas, but less in smaller towns and rural settings.

While Dan is also well placed to collect support from Romanians abroad, he’s not yet well known outside Bucharest, which is in fact his Achilles’ heel. Across Romania, “10 percent of the population don’t know who Nicușor Dan is,” and that could cost him victory in a tight second-round runoff against Simion, according to Ștefureac.

A poll published Monday by Curs, a polling company based in Bucharest, concluded the same, giving Simion (54 percent) an 8 percentage-point advantage over Dan (46 percent) in a hypothetical runoff.

Ștefureac stressed that it’s early days with the election still weeks away, and that a second-round campaign with “emotional traction” and an appeal to a broader coalition of voters could be highly unpredictable.

Simion vs. Antonescu

Antonescu, the husband of Romania’s former European commissioner Adina Vălean, is running with the backing of Bucharest’s governing parties: the center-left Social Democratic Party (PSD), the center-right National Liberal Party and the country’s Hungarian minority party, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania.

In this scenario, the establishment support is a clear advantage for Antonescu, as winning the second round in a presidential election is all about the ability of candidates to collect support beyond their base. But he’s at a disadvantage in the diaspora vote: Between 5 percent and 7 percent of total ballots are cast by Romanians abroad — who tend to vote “against the system,” Ștefureac said.

Romanians abroad previously supported liberal former President Klaus Iohannis in vast numbers as a protest against the once-powerful PSD. In November, Ștefureac recalled, Georgescu won diaspora votes by telling people that “You are there [abroad] because of the failed government that wasn’t able to gain enough prosperity in Romania, and you had to leave your families.”

For the time being, his analysis puts Simion and Antonescu neck-and-neck in a hypothetical runoff. The Curs poll gave Antonescu a slight 52 percent to 48 percent advantage.

In his campaign to reach the second round, Antonescu has dismissed a poll that showed Ponta in second place in the first round as a “campaign trick” to rally voters who oppose both Simion and Ponta behind Dan.

Simion vs. Ponta 

This is the matchup that terrifies Romania’s mainstream and Europe more widely.

A former prime minister and former president of the PSD, Ponta was forced to step down following a deadly nightclub blaze in 2015, which protesters blamed on corruption.

He’s running on a sovereigntist “Romania first” platform, promising to halt Ukrainian grain exports through Romanian ports (a key route for the war-ravaged country) to protect local farmers. But Ponta drew fire with the admission that he’d allowed four Romanian villages on the Danube River to be flooded to save the Serbian capital Belgrade back in 2014.

Ponta tends to garner support from older voters from smaller urban and rural areas. Like Simion, he’s also trying to rally the support of Georgescu’s former voters.

Last week, USR leaders threw their support behind Dan instead of their own candidate, Elena Lasconi, in a bid to keep Ponta from snatching second place. A runoff between Simion and Ponta would be a “toxic” scenario, they warned.

While both present a nationalist and anti-EU image, Ponta would likely “be perceived, compared to Simion, as a more pro-European” candidate, Ștefureac said. 

Simion has faced accusations (which he’s repeatedly denied) of meeting with Russian spies. He is banned from entering Moldova and Ukraine over past calls to reclaim land, and opposes further military aid to Ukraine. In the run-up to the election, however, he has labeled Putin’s Russia as a great threat, instead cozying up to Trump’s MAGA movement.

His reputation as a pro-Russian candidate could ultimately cost him, Ștefureac said: According to a recent survey, nearly 90 percent of Romanians are in favor of EU and NATO membership.

Romania is one of the EU’s largest countries by population, a key nation on the eastern flank of Europe and NATO and a serious military power. A victory by a politician skeptical of both the EU and NATO would deal a blow to the bloc’s plans to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

If the two faced each other in a runoff, it would be a close race, according to Ștefureac.

Ponta vs. Antonescu

With recent polls putting Simion above 30 percent of the vote, he currently seems a shoo-in for the second round. That makes runoff scenarios without him little more than a thought experiment, but Georgescu’s last-minute surge in November proved nothing is set in stone.

Ponta led the PSD before starting his own party, Pro Romania. That’s left him with his own personal following, but also with a good chunk of leftover support among PSD voters. 

Both Antonescu and Ponta appeal to a wide range of voters, which puts them in good position to attract support in a second round, but Ponta’s larger appeal among backers of Georgescu and Simion could give him the edge over Antonescu if it came to a race between the two, according to Ștefureac.

Ponta vs. Dan

Ponta’s broader backing could also give him the advantage over Dan, although a runoff between the two currently looks like a long shot.

Dan’s support base, for the time being, is fairly limited. The USR party’s decision to rally behind him could even backfire, as a close connection with the centrist party risks limiting his ability to collect broader support, Ștefureac said. 

All that aside, a Curs poll gave them both a 50-50 chance of defeating the other.

Dan vs. Antonescu

If Dan and Antonescu faced each other in a (currently unlikely) runoff, they’d end up fishing in the same voter pool.

Dan draws support from the USR and from highly educated and affluent Romanians in larger cities; Antonescu from the supporters of the governing parties across the country. Both would be on a mission to sway new voters, and neither appeal much to nationalist voters.

The Curs poll gave Antonescu a slight 52 percent to 48 percent advantage, while Stefureac said they might be neck-and-neck.