Romania’s seven million-strong diaspora, one of the biggest in Europe, was once considered a source of votes for reformist parties and candidates. Yet in the country’s recent presidential, parliamentary and euro-parliamentary elections, many Romanians abroad opted for hard-right populists, continuing a trend that started in 2020. While almost a third of Romanians remaining in the country voted for extremist parties on 1 December, more than half of the diaspora opted for the far right.
The Romanian diaspora in Britain has followed this trend. On the Facebook group “Romanians in the UK”, the first post I come across is a demeaning caricature portraying pro-European, reformist presidential candidate Elena Lasconi, mayor of Câmpulung Muscel, a former journalist and MasterChef winner, throwing her ballot into the box; the text is: “I voted. From tomorrow onwards, boys will wear skirts and heels to vote for me. Slava marijuana.”
Further down the group’s newsfeed, an AI-generated illustration portrays the hard-right presidential candidate Călin Georgescu in a suit, surrounded by wolves; the words say: “Whenever an intelligent person comes, you recognise him by the fact that all idiots ally against him.” The reference is probably to the mainstream press, which has been digging into Georgescu’s past since his win in the first round of presidential elections on 24 November, revealing his ties to the political establishment, as well as his anti-EU and anti-Nato views, and conspiracy theories about, say, water not being H2O. Lasconi and Georgescu will be facing each other in a tight presidential run-off on 8 December.
On a national level, Georgescu was voted for by 23 per cent of voters and Lasconi by 19 per cent. In the UK, just under half of Romanians cast their ballots for Georgescu and almost a quarter voted for Lasconi. The percentage is similar across all of the diaspora. One exception is Romania’s smaller neighbour, the Republic of Moldova, where an astounding 56 per cent voted for Lasconi and Georgescu came sixth with a mere three per cent.
Portraying himself as a “pro-peace” anti-system figure with big dreams for Romanian greatness, exasperated by the corrupt and remote national political class, “globalists” and the attention for the war in Ukraine, Georgescu inspired many who have been disenchanted with the elites that have ruled Romania for the past 35 years since the 1989 revolution. He has also spoken to young Romanians fearing they might be conscripted to fight in Ukraine.
The vote for Georgescu came as a shock to a large part of society, as he scored low in opinion polls and was mostly absent from televised debates. Declaring zero spending on his campaign, he fell under the radar of the media and the authorities, more concerned with other hard-right leaders such as George Simion from the AUR party, or SOS party MEP Diana Șoșoacă, who was controversially banned from the presidential race by the Constitutional Court for her lack of adherence to “democratic values, rule of law, and respect for the Constitution correlated with the political and military guarantees, and belonging to the EU and Nato”.
In parliamentary elections on 1 December, AUR, SOS and POT, a new party supporting Georgescu, garnered 56 per cent of the diaspora votes and almost a third of the votes inside the country. Overall, pro-Europeans gathered just about 70 per cent of the votes (although 13 per cent of these have gone to parties that have not crossed the 5 per cent threshold).
“We were expecting the diaspora to vote for the far right, but we thought they would go for AUR and Simion or Șoșoacă rather than Georgescu,” says Romanian journalist Elena Stancu, who has been documenting the growing Romanian diaspora with photographer Cosmin Bumbuț, travelling in a camper van, for five years. Stancu blames Georgescu’s rise on his TikTok campaign. Several media and think tank analyses have shown that Georgescu relied on troll farms, fake accounts and payments to influencers. Throughout the campaign, the Western Romanian diaspora was targeted with content promoting Călin Georgescu on social networks.
Romania’s Supreme National Defence Council also said the election involved TikTok manipulation and malign foreign influence from Russia. And yet security institutions failed to prevent any such manipulation. TikTok, which has nine million users in Romania, denied any wrongdoing.
“We saw how big the diaspora’s frustrations were,” Stancu says. She talks of two different Romanian groups abroad, “the educated Romanian diaspora in search of better work opportunities or the experience of a different culture” and “the diaspora that was forced to leave by the poverty of their villages and to do the jobs that Westerners do not want to do anymore”. While the former often integrates easily, the latter does not learn the language of their new country, living in isolated Romanian bubbles in poor conditions and concerned with making money to build a house and provide for the family remaining at home thousands of kilometres away.
“Nationalist rhetoric counters the feeling of humiliation these people have on a daily basis,” says Stancu, although she argues that the vote for Georgescu is anti-system more than a sign of radicalisation. “Romania is guilty for failing these people, but so are Western countries where these people are treated as inferiors and as [a] mere workforce.”
Cornel Ban, an international political economy professor at the Copenhagen Business School, agrees that Romanians working abroad often lead isolated lives. “The two sources of culture working migrants have are their phones and the Orthodox and neo-protestant churches they go to,” both of which have proven key factors in Georgescu’s success. “These channels transmit and mediate a message of frustration against the ‘thieves’ that lead us, as well as a protest against the decadent European future.” More specifically, the far right echoes Russian anti-LGBTQ+ messages.
But Ban says that the main reasons for the anti-system vote of the diaspora, as well as a large part of Romanian society at home, are material rather than cultural. “This [vote] is the receipt for [Romania’s policy of] heavily taxing labour and lightly taxing capital for decades.” Ban comes from a family of working class migrants from Bistrița Năsăud, the northern region that heavily-supported Georgescu. While he acknowledges that Bistrița Năsăud is doing far better than ten or 20 years ago, thanks in part to EU investments in infrastructure and social services, he says inflation across Western Europe has hardened migrants’ lives. “Romania comes with an enormous social deficit from communism and the transition to capitalism. We were given a [EU] cheque that we haven’t used enough” to tackle poverty, he adds. In his view, greater unionisation and real left-wing representation of the working class on the overwhelmingly neo-liberal Romanian political spectrum could reduce the appeal of the hard right.
“In interwar Europe, resentment was mobilised into social democracy in Sweden and into Nazism in Germany,” Ban says. With a split new parliament, Romania still has the chance to take the first route — if it does not vote for Georgescu for president in the run-off on 8 December. With the parliamentary results, a pro-European coalition government can easily be formed. But even so, it will have to tackle great political, economic and security challenges, to avoid the country’s slide into extremism in the next elections.
[See also: After Kamala Harris’s defeat, progressives must regain the people’s trust]
Content from our partners
Related
