Romania’s election extravaganza awakens ghosts of fascist past

Romania is gearing up for presidential and parliamentary elections that have pulled back the curtain on the uglier sides of its politics, as a penchant for bitter introspection dominates over critical regional issues.
The electoral outcome may keep Romania on its mostly pro-European, centrist path — or tip it toward more nativist policies that would sound alarm bells in Brussels because of the country’s strategic proximity to Ukraine and its role as a key southeast European economy.
From a candidate who recently served as NATO’s deputy head but is accused of having ties to a Kremlin propagandist, to another who openly praises a fascist leader, Romanian voters face a starkly polarized political landscape.
With a month left until the first round of the presidential election, there is no clear front-runner. Traditional heavyweights like the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the liberal-nationalist PNL struggle to forge ahead, plagued by the long-term public perception they are corrupt and vulnerable to clientelism.
Security issues — such as Romania facing stray Russian drones and attacks on grain-carrying vessels off its coast — are only a minor topic of discussion as the campaign heats up.
However, nationalist themes that play up the population’s fears that their country is powerless and irrelevant on the international stage — or, even worse, forgotten — are a recurring feature of Romanian politics.
An identity based on a peculiar blend of Eastern Orthodox faith and a Romance language has historically reinforced the country’s perceived outsider status in the Balkan region, prompting both World War II fascists and then Nicolae Ceaușescu’s postwar communist regime to heavily emphasize ethnocentric rhetoric.
“The single topic of debate that permeates the elections — but not just the elections — is nationalism or the fabrication of non-issues to distract from the real problems in the country,” said Rufin Zamfir, an expert on radicalism and security issues at the GlobalFocus Center, a think tank.
 “People have grown up with this, and grown to expect it in politics,” he added.
Leading the charge is the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), a far-right party that burst into Romania’s legislature in 2020 on its very first attempt as a single-issue group pushing for unification with Moldova.
Since then it has oscillated between moderating some of its radical views — even being discussed as a potential governing coalition partner with the PSD — to commenting that the Holocaust was a “minor issue” in a country that lost most of its Jewish population in World War II to death camps and pogroms.
AUR founder George Simion, a far-right activist turned party chief, is polling at 20 percent in the presidential race, trailing PSD Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu at 26 percent and just ahead of PNL candidate Nicolae Ciucă, the head of the Romanian senate, at 17 percent, according to Socipol consulting.
Simion, who recently called himself “a president of the many” who refuses to “kneel before the traitors of the nation” and claims he wants peace in Europe, “just like Donald Trump,” has also maintained that the Holocaust was “a minor issue” that children do not need to learn about in school.
Before entering politics he was a member of the far-right football hooligan group Honor et Patria.
For all Simion’s prominence, the major scandal that rocked the campaign so far came via AUR splinter party S.O.S. România and its antisemitic, pro-Russia leader Diana Șoșoacă.
Soșoacă, who currently serves as an MEP after being elected in June, filed to run for president in the upcoming elections. The first round will be held in late November, before the second round on Dec. 8, a week after the parliamentary general elections on Dec. 1.
But Romania’s Constitutional Court declared her candidacy invalid earlier this month, due to both eligibility reasons — including questions over the veracity of the signatures presented with her application — and suspicions that she would not uphold the constitution and the country’s democratic system, citing dozens of examples where she sided with Russian foreign policy and shunned domestic institutions.
Șoșoacă said that pro-PSD members of the court had sabotaged her presidential bid — before going on to make one of the campaign’s most controversial statements yet during a TikTok live session.
“Long live the Legion and the Captain, who were slain by the same Jewish power that has acted now. Marshal Antonescu was a hero. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, a hero,” she said.
The Romanian Legionnaires, one of Europe’s most violent fascist movements, combined hardline Orthodox Christian beliefs with an ideology of racial purity, forming notorious death squads and leading to the killings of more than 300,000 Jews and tens of thousands of Roma people.
Her statements underscore the trend among some Romanian politicians to turn to historical and nationalist themes when backed into a corner.
Vlad Gheorghe, an independent candidate for the DREPT party and a popular former MEP, said that while no Romanian politician “in their right mind would glorify the Nazi-aligned government,” far-right parties such as S.O.S. România and AUR latch onto controversial historical debates to deliver simplistic answers to real problems faced by average citizens.
“There are a lot of people in the country who are frustrated and have legitimate problems, so when someone like this comes along and says that another group is to blame for their problems, they start believing it,” he told POLITICO.
Now, Șoșoacă — who had been polling around 10 percent in the presidential race — is standing in the parliamentary election, to return to an institution she left mere months ago to join the European Parliament.
The move follows calls from antisemitism monitoring groups to suspend her European Parliament immunity following her fascist outburst, and a previous seven-day suspension from the Brussels institution.
Gheorghe also filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court over her recent antisemitic remarks and included another S.O.S. România MEP, former TV personality Luis-Vicențiu Lazarus, in it as well.
“The prosecutor general announced that they started a preliminary investigation after I filed the complaint, but they can continue the investigation only if her EP immunity is lifted,” he said.
Should the scandals and narratives become a fixture of Romanian politics rather than a blip, the country will certainly garner more international attention — for all the wrong reasons.