Another far-right winner in a European election: who is Călin Georgescu?

An independent candidate has rocketed from nowhere to win the first round of Romania’s presidential election. Support for Călin Georgescu did not even register in the polls ahead of Sunday’s vote. And yet the provisional results suggest the UN official turned populist politician is heading to the run-off second round.

Călin Georgescu doesn’t even have a political party. Ahead of the election result, Romanian media had mainly been focused on another far-right, pro-Trump candidate. Georgescu was largely under the radar.

And his ideology is equally opaque. In one of his books, published in 2022, entitled “The Great Renaissance – Trust, Freedom, Sovereignty”, he talks about “Christianity applied in the real economy”. In an interview last year, he said climate change was invented “to impose a fear on the people”. Asked about the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and global warming, he agreed with the interviewer that they are all conspiracies designed to “control the people”.

Georgescu has also previously criticised Nato. He reportedly called a Nato missile programme in Romania a “shame of diplomacy”.

So how did he manage to win the election?

About a month ago, students alerted a popular Romanian news site, G4Media, to something strange happening on TikTok. Thousands of people were suddenly liking and tagging videos for a little-known candidate, Călin Georgescu, local journalist, Cristian Andrei Leonte, told Radio France International.

Many of the accounts were from real people, others appeared to be bots, according to Leonte.

His surprise win has given rise to questions over possible Russian interference.

In neighbouring Moldova, the incumbent pro-EU president, Maia Sandu, said her re-election last month was hampered by “massive interference” from Russia, something that Moscow denied.

Asked about the Romanian election result this morning, a spokesperson for the Kremlin said they “cannot say that we are that familiar with the world view of this candidate”.

After a career working for United Nations agencies, Georgescu joined the far-right Alliance for Uniting Romanians party, but eventually left, standing as an independent in the presidential elections.

His success comes off the back of a wave of support for far-right parties across Europe including national elections in the Netherlands and Austria and regional elections in Germany.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s populist National Rally party is now the main de facto opposition. She is expected to stand again in the French presidential election in 2027.

Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, was once a lone voice as the sole populist leader in the European Union. Now there is Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Robert Fico in Slovakia. It is not yet clear whether Georgescu would fit a similar mold.

Romanians will head back to the polls for the run-off vote next month. It is expected that mainstream parties will gather around the centre-right’s candidate, Elena Lasconi, to try and keep Georgescu out of power.