The News
A pro-Russia candidate with no party backing and who campaigned largely over TikTok won the first round of Romania’s presidential election, stunning political observers.
Calin Georgescu’s surprise victory means the pre-election favorite, the pro-West prime minister, will not make it to an election runoff. Georgescu will most likely face the center-right reformist Elena Lasconi on Dec. 8, the BBC reported.
Georgescu, a university professor who consulted on sustainability for several UN bodies, holds nationalistic and religious views. He’s also spoken out against the EU and NATO, claiming they don’t represent Romania’s interests, and said the war in Ukraine is “manipulated by American military companies,” Politico reported.
SIGNALS
Georgescu capitalized on Romanians’ frustrations
High living costs, corruption, and the war in Ukraine were top of voters’ minds ahead of the election, which may have boosted the far-right’s victory chances. Georgescu’s campaign focused on reducing the country’s reliance on imports and upping domestic production of food and energy, Politico reported. “He managed to convince them by a combination of messianic speech, delivered in an elegant way, so as to capitalize on people’s frustrations,” an analyst told the outlet. But it’s also possible that Russia conducted an influence campaign to sway the outcome, a commentator told Reuters, especially because of the mismatch between pre-election polling and the actual result.
Georgescu’s win could bring major consequences for Ukraine
Though Romania’s presidency is largely titular, the office holds some sway over foreign policy, and Georgescu’s anti-NATO views could have major implications for Ukraine, with which Romania shares a 400-mile (650-kilometer) border. Bucharest is seen abroad as playing “a key strategic role,” The Guardian wrote, as potentially providing a route for Ukrainian grain and hosting a NATO base. After the US reelected Donald Trump — who had pledged to end the war in Ukraine swiftly and professed his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin — countries such as Hungary, which oppose military support for Ukraine, are feeling emboldened, and the pushback against continued support for Kyiv could intensify, Al Jazeera noted.
Incumbent parties are being replaced around the world
Georgescu’s rise (and that of his opponent Lasconi) is the latest example of a global “anti-incumbent sentiment”, Vox noted, with perhaps the most glaring being Trump’s return in the US. “This is pretty consistent across different situations, different countries, different elections — incumbents are getting a crack on the shins,” a professor told Fortune. In a year with the largest number of elections in history, voters have shown diminished confidence in the parties in power, most recently in Uruguay, which followed a trend across Latin America that saw incumbent parties lose 20 elections in a row. The exact reasons are hard to pin down, experts said, but the long-term effects of the pandemic, rising inflation, and discontent with political elites are among them.