No matter who wins Sunday’s first round of the Romanian presidential election, it is a crisis for the country, for the European Union and for the relations of both with the United States.

This is the second attempt to hold the election. The regularly scheduled one was annulled last December amid accusations of candidate and government corruption. Cǎlin Georgescu, a Romanian nationalist, populist admirer of Donald Trump, mystical Christian and opponent of the Ukraine war, came seemingly out of nowhere to win the first round. He took 23% of the vote on the strength of a charismatic TikTok campaign, advancing to the second round against the centrist Elena Lasconi. For the first time since Communism, the country’s invincible-looking political establishment seemed to have been shut out of the presidency.

That’s not so odd: Romania today is (by European standards) poor, unequal, corrupt and war-weary. Its population peaked in the last years of communism at almost 25 million. Today, through a combination of emigration and lost mojo, it is just 19. Sharing a longer border with Ukraine than either Poland or Hungary, it has become a hub for the Nato war effort. And for Ukrainian refugees, 180,000 of whom can claim temporary protections. These, of course, include housing, employment and social programmes for which natives aren’t eligible.

Like all members of the EU, Romania is prone to bitter clashes between Europhiles and so-called “sovereigntists”. The EU confers the prestigious status of being “Western”, along with membership in profitable trading networks. Big majorities of Romanians still back it. But the 1992 Maastricht treaty, which commits all member-states to an “ever closer union”, turned the EU into a machine for grinding up systems of national self-rule, whether newly regained (as in the case of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union) or ancient and hallowed (as in the case of the pre-Brexit United Kingdom). Sovereigntists tend to thrive where the responsibility for solving desperately important problems — like mass immigration — is taken out of national hands, and those problems go unsolved.