The only thing standing between hard-right nationalist George Simion and the Romanian presidency is a mathematician who can see the odds aren’t great.
The numbers whizz is Nicușor Dan, now the independent centrist mayor of Bucharest, who goes into the May 18 second round of the presidential election as the underdog against a self-declared “Trumpist” who wants to cut military aid to Ukraine.
Simion, from the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), secured a comfortable win in Sunday’s first round, bagging a provisional 41 percent of the vote. The electoral map shows him coming first in an astonishing geographical sweep across Romania. He also secured the support of a whopping 61 percent of people voting abroad.
While Simion was propelled to victory by long-standing frustration with the corruption and ineffectiveness of the old-order parties — the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and National Liberal Party (PNL) — the more urbanite Dan managed to score wins largely in big cities such as Bucharest, Brașov and Cluj, where he has more appeal.
Dan ultimately only squeaked into the second round with 21 percent support, edging out Crin Antonescu, the candidate from the governing coalition, which includes the PSD and PNL, who scored 20 percent.
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The campaign ahead of the second round will to some extent reset the clock, as candidates attempt to poach voter support from other first-round candidates. Dan is already signaling he will use the next two weeks to cast himself as the sole alternative to a hard-right leader who could destabilize Romania, an EU and NATO country of 19 million people.
Turnout in the first round was 53 percent.
Dan said on Monday that the runoff vote will give Romanians the choice “between a democratic, stable and respected Romania in Europe — and a dangerous path of isolation, populism and defiance of the rule of law.”
He asked for the support of “all those who believe in the law, in truth, in education, in a modern economy, in strong partnerships with the free world.”
But as the first round showed, he has a lot of ground to claw back.
Simion styled himself as the successor of ultranationalist firebrand Călin Georgescu, whose shock victory in November led the election to be annulled over allegations of illegal campaigning and potential Russian interference.
Sunday’s first round showed that strategy was successful. Simion not only outperformed Georgescu’s November result, but did even better than Georgescu’s November vote share and his own combined.
That leaves Dan with a mountain to climb.
Analysts have previously noted that Dan’s support is concentrated among well-educated and well-off people in larger cities. Sunday’s election results showed that remains the case.
His biggest challenge is that many of the more traditional voters who supported Antonescu in the first round could gravitate to Simion rather than to him.
Speaking before the vote, MEP Siegfried Mureșan from the PNL predicted that Antonescu voters were less likely to switch behind Dan in a second round than to back Simion.
“Some of these voters are liberal, some are conservative, some very conservative — and some, particularly the voters of the socialist party, are partly also elderly, less educated, partly also from the rural areas,” he said of the Antonescu voters that Dan now needs.
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Beating Simion will require the independent Dan, who founded the centrist Save Romania Union (USR), to win over not only regular PNL and PSD supporters, but also those who voted for the leftist-turned-nationalist former Prime Minister Victor Ponta.
Dan will also have to rebuild bridges with supporters of the centrist-reformist Elena Lasconi, who campaigned hard against Dan after USR party leaders abandoned her in his favor. Lasconi resigned as USR president on Monday.
Establishment candidate Antonescu also conspicuously failed to give his supporters clear guidance to rally behind Dan, telling them only to “consider for themselves which of the candidates the ideas I presented are compatible with” in admitting defeat Sunday night.
By contrast, Hunor Kelemen, chairman of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, part of the governing coalition, said his party would support Dan over the Romanian nationalist.
Then Dan has the problem of Romania’s diaspora.
Of the 9.4 million voters in Sunday’s first round, nearly 1 million voted abroad; Simion won 61 percent of those latter votes while Dan came second with 25.4 percent.
The bulk of Simion’s foreign support came from northern and western Europe, where a majority of diaspora voters supported the far-right leader. Dan came out on top in most non-European countries, including the U.S. and Canada.
Crucially, just 14 percent of diaspora voters didn’t support either of the runoff candidates in the first round. That means there isn’t a big pool of voters abroad for him to play for.
To win, Dan has to convince the home crowd.
Carmen Paun contributed reporting.
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