Independent hard-right politician Călin Georgescu, 62, won 22.94% of votes in Sunday’s voting, the electoral authority said. Centre-right contender Elena Lasconi, leader of the opposition Save Romania Union, lay second with 19.18%.
The outcome was a huge shock as pre-election opinion polls had made Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu the frontrunner. Ciolacu said he would resign as party leader following the result but would remain in the role of prime minister until a parliamentary election scheduled for December 1.
The candidate of the center-right Liberals, Ciolacu’s coalition partners, also failed to secure a place in the election run-off, which will be on December 8.
Campaigning focused largely on the soaring cost of living in Romania, which is a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance and has the EU’s biggest share of people at risk of poverty.
“I have voted for the wronged, the humiliated, those who feel they do not matter in this world,” Georgescu said on Sunday. “Today, the vote is a prayer for the nation.”
Georgescu had been polling in single digits before the vote and ran a Tik Tok-driven campaign.
“This most disturbing takeaway is that he came from nowhere, campaigning on one, non-transparent platform, TikTok,” Oana Popescu-Zamfir, the director of the Bucharest-based think tank the GlobalFocus Center, told TVP World.
“There is no explanation on how he has made it to this level of popularity. Even if you take into account possible sociological reasons such as growing disillusionment, it does not explain how he managed to get 22% in a country the size of Romania.”
Popescu-Zamfir added that mystery remains over who campaigned on Georgescu's behalf, how his campaign was financed and even where his campaign headquarters are.
Asked about the election outcome, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “I would not make any predictions yet. We probably cannot say that we are that familiar with the world view of this candidate as far as relations with our country are concerned.”
“For now, we understand very clearly the current leadership of Romania, which is not a friendly country to us. We will of course watch how the electoral processes develop and who wins.”
Georgescu’s win may boost far-right groups
Hard-right groupings are likely to receive an electoral boost from Georgescu’s success when the southeast European country of 19 million people votes in the December 1 parliamentary election.
Mainstream parties have not officially endorsed either candidate in the presidential run-off on December 8.
Georgescu is a former member of the hard-right opposition Alliance for Uniting Romanians who has praised Ion Antonescu, Romania’s de facto World War Two leader who was sentenced to death for his part in Romania’s Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of a pre-war violent anti-Semitic movement.
Georgescu has called a NATO ballistic missile defense shield in Romania a “shame of diplomacy” and questioned whether the Western military alliance would protect any of its members if they were attacked by Russia.
He said Romania’s best chance lay with “Russian wisdom,” but has refused to say explicitly whether he supports Russia.
Romania, which was under Communist rule for four decades until 1989, shares a 650 km border with Ukraine. Since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, Romania has enabled the export of millions of tons of grain through its Black Sea port of Constanta and provided military aid, including the donation of a Patriot air defense battery.
The president, who is limited to two five-year terms, has a semi-executive role which includes heading Romania’s armed forces and chairing the supreme defense council that decides on military aid.
The president represents Romania at EU and NATO summits and appoints the prime minister, chief judges, prosecutors and secret service heads. The current head of state, Klaus Iohannis, won power in 2014 on a promise to bolster the fight against endemic corruption.
