George Simion, the leader of the nationalist AUR, Romania’s largest opposition party, which is currently leading the polls, has announced that he will submit his candidacy for the upcoming rerun of last year’s presidential elections. With the deadline for final submissions merely days away, the populist party was forced to make the last-minute decision after electoral authorities and the constitutional court banned its original candidate, Călin Georgescu, from re-entering the race.
The initial strategy of the party was to stick with Georgescu and pressure the government and the courts to change their position. They announced a parliamentary strike on behalf of all nationalist opposition parties to achieve this. However, after consulting with Georgescu and taking into account the approaching deadline, Simion decided that he needed to step up to avoid leaving the right-wing opposition without a viable candidate.
In addition, Anamaria Gavrilă, the leader of the smaller nationalist party POT, which also supports Georgescu, will also submit her candidacy in case Simion is also disqualified. If both of their submissions are validated, then one of them (likely Gavrilă) will drop out in favor of the other.
The threat is real, as there have already been calls from the voices on the establishment’s side to disqualify both Simion and Gavrilă due to their “unconstitutional” politics. However, eliminating all candidates who would represent nearly half of the electorate would instantly delegitimize the election result and could cause such unprecedented social unrest that would be nearly impossible to manage.
Simion especially will have no problem collecting the required 200,000 signatures by Saturday, as polls have consistently put him in first place in the event that Georgescu is not allowed to run. The latest study, published just before Georgescu was banned, gives Simion 28% of the total vote, followed by socialist ex-PM Victor Ponta with 22%, and liberal Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan with 19%. Simion’s support is likely much higher now, after all that transpired in the past few days.
On Sunday evening, the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC) decided by 10 votes against four—all coming from opposition parties from both Left and Right—that Georgescu cannot participate in the rerun of last year’s election. That election was annulled over claims that Russian interference helped Georgescu win the first round, but no solid proof of this has been presented yet.
On Monday, the Constitutional Court (CCR)—the same body that decided on the initial annulment—upheld the ban by unanimously rejecting Georgescu’s appeal, despite the tens of thousands of protesters gathering outside the court.
Apart from calling out the Constitutional Court’s blatant violation of democratic principles, Simion also condemned the oppressive “intimidation” tactics employed by prosecutors on behalf of the government against the dozens of protesters who were arrested and charged following Sunday’s clashes with riot police. He called for an investigation into police brutality instead of the abuse of the justice system to suppress dissent.
Moreover, Simion added that the country’s democratic backsliding in the past few months made it clear that the government, led by a grand coalition between left-wing PSD (S&D) and the centre-right PNL (EPP), can no longer be considered legitimate. “It is time for the Romanian people to wake up and stand up to the abuses of a corrupt and illegitimate government.”
Earlier, Simion also called for international pressure from his Western allies within and outside ECR. On Monday, following Georgescu’s disqualification, the European Parliament’s ECR group, together with the AfD-led ESN, requested a debate on the issue. The mainstream parties immediately rejected the request, arguing that they do not want the “extremists” and “friends of Russia” to create the “false impression that the rule of law in Romania is in danger.”