“Simion, Georgescu same! Number one!” says my taxi driver animatedly, turning back to me and away from the busy traffic ahead, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis, as we speed down the tree-lined boulevard into central Bucharest. His pithy analysis is precisely what’s alarming Brussels and Romania’s centre-left political establishment. Following December’s last-minute annulment of Romania’s presidential elections, purportedly but unprovenly on the grounds of Russian interference, the wave of populist support for the Right-wing candidate, Călin Georgescu, has been transferred to the national-populist George Simion, whose AUR party was only founded in 2019. Riding popular anger at both the perceived election interference by Romania’s political establishment, and the sense that the post-communist economic boom has stalled, the country’s populist wave seems to echo trends across Europe and the wider West.

Cited by JD Vance as an example of the centrist antipathy towards democracy, Romania’s dramatic election seems, at first, to echo narratives across the collapsing liberal order. On the one hand, an increasingly unpopular centre-left establishment invokes the spectre of Kremlin meddling to maintain its faltering grip on power; on the other, a dissatisfied electorate swings sharply to the Right for change — like it has across Europe. As a country with the EU’s longest borders with Ukraine, both Kyiv’s supporters and opponents in the West have divined in Romania’s electoral tumult fodder for their Manichaean worldviews. Yet in Bucharest itself, what emerges from talking to political insiders is something subtler, more uniquely Romanian, yet which also highlights under-emphasised aspects of the populist wave more generally: a Rightward swing driven not just by the dissatisfied masses, but also by elites increasingly willing to gamble on a dramatic shake-up of the country’s political order.

On the steps of Romania’s Senate, part of the vast and gaudy palace complex left unfinished by Ceaușescu at his overthrow, George Simion is giving an impromptu press conference to the assembled international and local media, as the first-round voting draws to a close. A dark, energetic man, derided as a gypsy hooligan by his bourgeois liberal opponents, Simion is a former football ultra barred from entering Moldova and Ukraine for his irredentist activism in the cause of a greater Romania. Now he glowers at the cameras as he accuses Romania’s political establishment of cooking the electoral books by registering long-dead citizens as active voters. “We were humiliated by annulling the elections,” he says. “It is against human nature to annul elections in a normal country. Nothing changed in Romania after 1989, we are still run by the security services.”

Much of Simion’s discourse derives from a popular belief that Romania’s post-Communist transition was only partial, and that behind the scenes, the country’s powerful intelligence services play an outsized role in politics. Romanian political figures speak more expansively off the record than on, regarding this claim: some suggest the security services prefer Simion to his opponent, the reclusive mathematics professor, Nicușor Dan, simply because they have more dirt on him. But in any case, they add defensively, is politics in the West really any different? Trump’s grappling with the FBI is well-known here: fighting the “deep state”, true or not, is a Romanian narrative that may yet play well with Washington’s new regime.