Even in a year when we’ve come to expect electoral surprises from resurgent nationalist populists, the bizarre results of the first round of the Romanian presidential elections, which took place last weekend, stand out. On Nov. 28, the Romanian Constitutional Court ordered a recount of the first-round votes, deepening the confusion. And on Nov. 29, Romania’s top court decided to wait until Dec. 2 to decide whether to order a new presidential election, raising the possibility of an unprecedented democratic crisis if the results are overturned.
What just happened to prompt these extraordinary measures? The unexpected winner of the first round, Călin Georgescu, is a dark horse pro-Russian candidate with odd Putin copycat tendencies. Pre-electoral surveys largely missed his political rise and – even more surprisingly – all the exit polls underestimated his support. These polls had put him in third place, 7-9% behind the expected winner, current Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu of the ex-communist Social Democratic Party (PSD), and 2% behind Union Save Romania (USR) candidate Elena Lasconi.
But by Monday, Georgescu ranked first with just under 23% of the vote, while Lasconi dramatically edged out Ciolacu by fewer than 3,000 votes – with both receiving just over 19% of the vote. Both Georgescu and Lasconi benefited from the record turnout in the diaspora (821,000 votes, up 175,000 from 2019), where both candidates received significantly higher support than in Romania (40% and 26%, respectively.) While the two candidates differ significantly in their appeals – especially on foreign policy – I will argue that their unexpected success was driven to a large extent by their outsider status amid widespread protest voting against the political status quo.
Background and campaign
In the run-up to the elections, the main question for most analysts was who would join Ciolacu in the Dec. 8 second-round runoff – Romania’s electoral system requires a runoff election between the top two candidates if no candidate gets over 50% in the first round. Pre-electoral surveys, many of which had been commissioned by political parties, had identified several potentially viable contenders.
The most controversial of these was George Simion, leader of the extreme nationalist populist Alliance for the Unity of Romania (AUR), a Eurosceptic fan of President Donald Trump and a critic of Western support for Ukraine. Simion’s chances had been boosted by the fact that the Romanian Constitutional Court had disqualified Diana Şoşoacă, another high-profile nationalist populist and European Parliament member for an even more extremist party, from running in the election due to her anti-democratic political statements.
Meanwhile, three potentially viable candidates were competing for the centrist electorate: Nicolae Ciucă, a former prime minister and leader of the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL), the second-largest party in the Romanian Parliament; Mircea Geoană, a former PSD presidential candidate running as an independent, who had recently finished serving as NATO deputy secretary general; and Lasconi, a small-town mayor who had been recently elected as the leader for the centrist Union Save Romania (USR), the third-largest party in the Romanian Parliament after the 2020 elections.
A number of minor candidates were also on the ballot, including Kelemen Hunor, the representative of the Hungarian minority party (UDMR); and the eventual first-place finisher. Georgescu’s main claim to fame before this week was that the extreme nationalist AUR had nominated him unsuccessfully to serve as prime minister, then excluded him from the party for being too extreme – after an interview in which he defended Romania’s fascist dictator, Ion Antonescu, and the leader of the Iron Guard, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
The packed field made vote splitting a concern
Many analysts exhorted at least some of the centrist candidates to withdraw from the race to avoid a repeat of the 2000 presidential elections, when two centrist candidates (Mugur Isarescu and Theodor Stolojan) split the centrist vote and propelled the extreme nationalist Corneliu Vadim Tudor into the second round. However, the only candidate to heed that call was a relatively minor candidate, former PNL Prime Minister Ludovic Orban. He endorsed Lasconi six days before the election (but his name remained on the ballot and he received over 20,000 votes).
The electoral campaign was predictably chaotic, dominated by personal attacks between candidates rather than serious policy debates. The only televised debate between multiple candidates took place on Nov. 19, but included a subset of the main candidates (Lasconi, Geoană, Simion, Hunor and Diaconescu). The debate did not feature the two major party candidates (Ciolacu and Ciucă) or the eventual winner (Georgescu). One of the poignant moments of the debate occurred when the moderator asked about potential territorial concessions by Ukraine as part of a peace deal, and Lasconi was the only candidate to oppose this option clearly. By contrast, in an interview on the same TV station (Digi24), Georgescu had repeatedly refused to answer the question whether he admired Russian president Vladimir Putin. In an earlier interview in 2022, shortly after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, he described Putin as someone who loves his country.
Georgescu’s unexpected last-minute surge
Given his image as an obscure outsider who largely campaigned on TikTok and barely broke into the double digits in any of the pre-electoral surveys, Georgescu’s last-minute surge surprised the betting markets as well as political analysts. The upset win was compounded by the fact that Georgescu’s electoral results also exceeded the exit polls by a significant margin. While his outsized support among diaspora voters, who were not included in either preelection or exit poll surveys, explains part of this discrepancy, it is not enough to explain the full magnitude of the shift. Feverish discussions over the past few days have raised a few potential explanations for this surge.
A study by the Romanian think-tank Expert Forum highlights the role of TikTok in fueling Georgescu’s last-minute rise through the use of influencers. Georgescu’s success closely resembles the campaign tactics of Alexandr Stoianoglo, the pro-Russian candidate in the recent Moldovan elections. TikTok posts probably also influenced the outcome once the voting started. Starting on Friday, Nov. 21, when early voting in the diaspora began, multiple posts showed pictures of ballots with votes for Georgescu, which may have boosted his image as the most viable protest vote candidate.
Georgescu has long used rhetoric imbued with religious messages, calling on Romanians to prepare for the coming of Christ. His campaign may have benefited from the support of many Romanian Orthodox priests, who reportedly promoted his campaign both in Romania and within the diaspora. While the pro-European patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church warned priests against abandoning the political neutrality mandated by the church, others in the church hierarchy have more pro-Russian views. One priest, recently returned from a trip to Russia, publicly exhorted his flock to support Georgescu in the elections. Here, again, there are significant similarities to the Russian playbook used in the recent Moldovan election.
A third last-moment political development may have also helped shift the vote towards Georgescu. On Nov. 21, one day before diaspora voting started, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau (BEC) announced that Georgescu would be required to remove all online campaign propaganda materials for failing to comply with a technical aspect of the campaign rules. While the decision, which was virtually impossible to enforce, did little to restrict his online presence, the order provided him with clear legitimation as a victim of the “deep state.” Georgescu told his supporters: “We are having our best moment. We have achieved the impossible. This is proof from God. They are afraid of us. We have achieved something incredible.”
Interpreting the results
Assessing the relative importance of these factors requires more systematic analysis. But it’s important to place the first-round vote into a broader context. In doing so, I will rely in part on preliminary findings from an online national survey of 2,100 respondents that I fielded in Romania from Nov. 15-21, 2024. To address the well-known limitations of online surveys (which tend to oversample young, educated, and urban respondents), the data below uses demographic weighting to correct for sampling bias.
Despite the lack of policy debates and the high degree of uncertainty about Georgescu’s policy positions, the survey reveals several clear differences between the preferences of Georgescu and Lasconi voters and the supporters of other candidates. In Romania’s semi-presidential system, foreign policy is one of the key areas where presidents play an active role, which means voters’ foreign policy preferences are particularly salient.
Not surprisingly, Georgescu’s supporters were significantly more willing to express anti-Ukrainian views in the war against Russia, including greater support for territorial concessions to Russia, a higher willingness to blame Ukraine and the West for the war, and stronger opposition to Western sanctions against Russia and to military, economic, and even humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Furthermore, Georgescu voters were significantly less supportive of Romania’s membership in the European Union and NATO, and more likely to blame Romania’s problems on other countries. In contrast, Lasconi’s voters were significantly more pro-Ukraine and more pro-Western across all these issues, not only compared to Georgescu’s supporters but even compared to the rest of the electorate.
This survey showed that supporters of the two candidates who ended up at the top last weekend also differed quite significantly along several domestic political issues. Georgescu voters, for instance, were less likely to consider democracy as the best form of government and – ironically – were less convinced of the importance of criticizing those in power. These respondents also placed less importance on minority rights and were significantly less willing to have Hungarians or Jews as neighbors. Somewhat surprisingly, given Georgescu’s religious rhetoric, his supporters were generally not significantly more socially conservative than the average voter. Lasconi voters stood out by being significantly more socially liberal (e.g., on LGBTQ+ rights), in line with Lasconi’s own positions.
But whereas Georgescu and Lasconi supporters could not be more different on many policy issues, the survey revealed one crucial dimension in which they were quite similar: rejecting Romania’s political status quo. Even compared to the lukewarm appraisals of the rest of the electorate, supporters of both Lasconi and Georgescu were significantly less satisfied with the Romanian economy and democracy, as well as with anti-corruption efforts. Furthermore, they expressed significantly lower trust towards a range of political institutions, including parliament, political parties, and mayors. While the magnitude of this rejection of the political system was markedly higher for Georgescu’s supporters, it nevertheless underscores the extent to which these election results were likely fueled by protest voting, a phenomenon that has a long history in both Romania and in the region more broadly.
What happens now?
The two top candidates from the first round – Lasconi and Georgescu – were supposed to square off in a Dec. 8 runoff election. But given the recount currently underway, it is possible that the elections will be postponed or even that the first round will be repeated, which will deepen the confusion and can trigger an unprecedented democratic crisis.
Even if the runoff goes ahead as planned, it’s difficult to predict who will win. Georgescu has the momentum of his unexpected first-round success in his favor, as well as the more credible anti-systemic credentials, which may help him attract additional protest voters. He can count on the support of most of Simion’s voters, and may also benefit from the chaos unleashed by the first-round electoral surprise, which resulted in the resignations of the leaders of both governing parties (Ciolacu from PSD and Ciuca from PNL).
On the other hand, Lasconi should be able to attract a majority of the voters from the other centrist candidates, as well as from the Hungarian minority. Furthermore, in a country that remains solidly pro-E.U. and pro-NATO in the face of the Russian military threat, Georgescu’s embrace of Putin will likely come at a greater political cost now that public attention is focused squarely on him.
But ultimately there are still too many unknowns to make a confident prediction. Not only is it difficult to predict the dynamics of social media in the next ten days (especially in the context of Russian manipulation) but the parliamentary elections scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 1 could well create additional complicated dynamics, as the distribution of seats in the new parliament could set off unpredictable conflicts and alliances can shape the vote in the runoff presidential elections.
Grigore Pop-Eleches is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.
