Romanian wild card George Simion sets Brussels' nerves on edge

 

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.