Romanian
wild card George Simion sets Brussels' nerves on edge
The
presidential front-runner’s hostility to Ukraine is creating a rift with fellow
European conservatives.
By MAX
GRIERA, NICHOLAS VINOCUR
and CSONGOR
KÖRÖMI
https://www.politico.eu/article/george-simion-romania-presidential-election-profile-ukraine/
Illustration
by Aistė Stancikaitė for POLITICO
Is Europe
about to have another clamorous disruptor at the leaders’ top table?
That’s
certainly the fear in Brussels, as the hard-right ultranationalist George
Simion stands a strong chance of winning the Romanian presidency on Sunday.
European
officials are particularly worried the 38-year-old firebrand will join the
current duo of wreckers — Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico —
in seeking to scupper aid to Ukraine just as the EU wants to dial up pressure
on Russia to end the war.
If Bucharest
does lurch over to the saboteur camp, it would be a bitter blow as Romania
carries greater geostrategic heft than Hungary or Slovakia. The Black Sea
nation of 19 million has, until now, been a rock-solid stalwart of the EU and
the NATO alliance.
Simion is
rapidly trying to allay those fears that he will rock the boat. He insists he
will be a pro-EU and pro-NATO leader, who is more directly aligned with Italy’s
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — a pro-Ukraine right-winger — than Orbán or
Fico. He styles his alliance with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as a way to keep
U.S. troops committed to Romania.
“We are a
Eurorealist group, not Euroskeptic,” Simion told POLITICO, adding that he
embraced the EU’s single market as a driver of wealth for Romanians.
It is,
admittedly, hard to imagine Simion as a natural bedfellow for Orbán, the EU’s
most tenacious internal rebel. While Simion acknowledges Orbán has served as a
“model” for him, there is little love lost between the Romanian and Hungarian
nationalist camps, who are fiercely at odds over the Hungarian minority in
Transylvania in northern Romania.
But those
tensions with Orbán don’t mean everyone is breathing a sigh of relief in
Brussels. Officials and experts who have observed Simion’s rise to prominence —
and tracked his sometimes contradictory statements — are skeptical he can be as
successful as Meloni in hitching his right-wing agenda to the EU mainstream.
They point
to his pledges to stop the EU imposing a new “globalist” order, his territorial
claims on Moldova, an EU candidate nation facing Russian destabilization, as
well as his blanket opposition to any further support for Ukraine as proof that
Simion will be, at best, an unpredictable leader and, at worst, a source of
division within the bloc.
“I think he
would certainly be a disruptive figure around the EU Council table and
potentially also around the NATO table,” said Oana Lungescu, a former
spokesperson for NATO and currently a distinguished fellow at the Royal United
Services Institute.
“His
position seems very clear that in terms of Russia’s war of aggression against
Ukraine, he proposes neutrality for Romania — which is of course incompatible
with Romania’s position both as an EU member state and as a NATO ally.”
Simion
adamantly denies he is pro-Russian, but he is a banned “persona non grata” in
Ukraine for promoting a “unionist ideology that denies the legitimacy of the
state border of Ukraine.” Simion’s party, the Alliance for the Union of
Romanians, is associated with an irredentist vision of a greater Romania that
risks triggering territorial disputes and potential conflict with Ukraine,
Moldova and Bulgaria.
At the helm
in Bucharest, he would have ample opportunity to stir up trouble by pulling out
of NATO training operations for Ukrainians, obstructing border crossings and
the flow of arms into Ukraine, and rowing back on Romania’s pivotal role in
helping Black Sea grain exports.
For his
part, Simion insists he is pressuring Kyiv to defend the rights of
Romanian-speakers inside Ukraine — a subject that the government of President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has, in reality, been very willing to address.
Manfred
Weber, head of the center-right umbrella European People’s Party, whose
Romanian affiliate opposes Simion, echoed Lungescu’s concerns and said Simion
represented a “risk for what I believe in.”
The EPP
leader dismissed any comparison between Simion and Meloni, who remains in the
European mainstream despite her hard-right policies at home, arguing the
Romanian was “definitely” not like the Italian.
Weber also
accused Simion of having “worked together with the Russian [security
services].” Simion denies allegations he met with Russian spies in Ukraine over
a decade ago.
Such
concerns don’t seem to have dissuaded Romanian voters, who gave Simion 41
percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. That said,
the populist candidate last week floundered in his debate against centrist
rival Nicușor Dan, and opinion polls suggest his lead is beginning to ebb.
POLITICO’s Poll of Polls put him only 3 percentage points clear of Dan as the
race heads into the final straight.
Transylvanian
tensions
On the face
of it, Simion and Europe’s disruptor-in-chief, Orbán, look to be cut from the
same political cloth. Both are ultranationalists who tout a pro-family,
Christian vision for their countries. Both hail from Eastern bloc countries,
have compared the EU with the USSR and both venerate Donald Trump’s MAGA
movement.
But there’s
a clear limit to how close they can get. Simion and Orbán have been at odds for
years over Orbán’s claims that Hungarian minorities in Romania are being
mistreated.
Members of
Simion’s AUR party suspect Orbán blocked its bid to join the European
Conservatives and Reformists grouping. Indeed, they were only accepted within
the bloc’s premier right-wing alliance after the Hungarian leader’s Fidesz
party bailed to found the far-right Patriots group.
AUR — and
particularly Simion — gained notoriety in 2019 during heated disputes over
military graves in the village of Valea Uzului in Romania, where many Hungarian
soldiers are buried. “Hungarians were beaten, and graves were desecrated …
Since then, they have been attacking our people, our region, and our schools on
a weekly basis,” Botond Csoma, spokesperson and parliamentary group leader of
Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, told POLITICO.
Orbán relies
on support from the Hungarian minority in Romania, to whom his government
granted citizenship. They accounted for more than 250,000 votes in the last
general election in Hungary and are seen as a bastion of support for the
strongman. He will need their backing to take on his rival, Péter Magyar, whose
Tisza party is polling ahead of him in the run-up to next year’s parliamentary
elections.
Despite
those underlying tensions, Simion is keen to extend an olive branch to Orbán
and forge an alliance in Brussels.
“The
relation with Mr. Orbán at the moment doesn’t exist, but as previously stated,
to some extent, Viktor Orbán is a model for me and in many issues, I will
collaborate with him,” Simion told POLITICO.
Last week,
Orbán spoke out about the Romanian elections for the first time, saying that
“one of the candidates, Mr. Simion, said … that both Hungary and Romania should
be able to rely on each other … We fully agree.”
Simion
thanked Orbán for his support after the statement — but that caused disarray in
the Hungarian minority party. To ease the turmoil, Orbán backtracked slightly a
day later and stated that he fully aligned with the Hungarian minority party’s
opinion.
Meloni man
Rather than
Orbán, Simion routinely cites Meloni as his main source of inspiration. The
Italian prime minister occupies a political zone between the far-right camps
and the EU’s center-right mainstream, and is accepted as a partner by both
Weber’s EPP and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
For
Brussels, however, Simion is no Meloni. The populist’s hostile relationship
with Ukraine is a major problem, and was considered another impediment to the
group’s adhesion to the ECR family in the past. To gain admission to the party,
the ECR obliged AUR to sign a written declaration, seen by POLITICO, condemning
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and vaguely committing to preserving the rule of
law.
Since then,
Simion has claimed to be a staunch critic of the Kremlin and recently said
Putin should be arrested for war crimes in Ukraine. But he has declined to
commit to military aid to Ukraine and has doubled down on his promise to oppose
those measures within the European Council.
It remains
to be seen whether Meloni and the ECR can ultimately make the populist
palatable in Brussels. “I will be open to collaborate,” Simion said. “Of
course, I will be the new kid on the block, so I will have to learn a lot from
Madame Meloni and other experienced leaders.”
Simion told
POLITICO he also looked up to other conservative politicians like the Flemish
nationalist Prime Minister of Belgium Bart De Wever and Czech Prime Minister
Petr Fiala.
Shape-shifter
Romanian
experts, with a longer memory, have a message: Do not trust what Simion or his
party program says. This is, after all, a man who has moved from comparing the
EU to the Soviet Union, and has then claimed not to be Euroskeptic.
“Don’t take
anything from whatever they wrote in that program,” said Expert Forum’s Ana
Otilia Nuţu, who argued Simion has learned from Trump’s campaign. She said
that, just like Trump, Simion was “creating a cult” around himself. “People are
going to vote for you even if you lie to them in the face,” she said.
Simion is
now moderating his speech to reach a wider audience, Nuţu said, but warned that
“he is going to act like Orbán in favor of Putin” if he gets elected.
Romanian
political expert Radu Magdin also said Simion was unreliable and was
overpromising to win the election, but reckoned that economic constraints would
ultimately force him to fall into step. Romania receives highly significant EU
funds in sectors ranging from farming to digitalization, and Simion won’t want
Bucharest to suffer Hungary’s fate and have its funding cut.
“The
political legitimacy here is stronger with Simion, but the economic leverage is
stronger with von der Leyen because, you know, you campaign in poetry and you
govern in prose,” he said, citing the economic fragility of Romania over
deficit levels. “This is an element of weakness that any Romanian leader has in
their relationship with Brussels.”
“The
pressure to normalize on any Romanian president … is huge and is driven simply
by economic considerations,” Magdin added.
Claudiu
Năsui, former Romanian economy minister, and a current member of parliament
with the liberal Save Romania Union party, was even less equivocal and
predicted Simion’s victory would be an “absolute disaster.”
“What’s
going to happen with the Simion presidency is that people will expect a lot
more uncertainty of Romania and a lot of more problems, so they’re going to
withdraw funds,” he predicted.
“So at best,
we should expect a Meloni or PiS-style president,” he said, referring to
Poland’s nationalist, socially conservative Law and Justice party. “That will
be the absolute best-case scenario. I think it’s not going to be the best-case
scenario, I think it’s going to be worse than Viktor Orbán if he gets elected.”
Seb
Starcevic contributed to this report.
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