By Cristian Preda, University of Bucharest.

This article was first published in the review Comunitatea liberală 1848 on the 19th May 2025. Link to the original article in Romanian: Mândri că suntem europeni. MAGA ar face bine să nu mai mizeze în UE pe marionetele lui Putin – Comunitatea Liberala.

Nicușor Dan secured a clear victory in the May 18th election after running a strong campaign in which his opponent made numerous missteps.

Truth be told, G. Simion wasn’t up to the fight. He ran off after a first face-to-face debate in which he was clearly outmatched by the mayor of Bucharest. He acted arrogantly, claiming it was his opponent who had to chase after him. From there, he came up with all kinds of excuses to dodge further debates. He traveled to several countries to meet with fellow populist leaders, hoping to look like part of a broader European revolt against EU institutions. Reckless statements complemented his disappearance from the public eye, along with photos taken alongside other far-right extremists. When he wasn’t announcing plans to fire 500,000 public servants or halt all aid to Ukraine, Simion embarrassed himself by telling Parisian journalists that France is a dictatorship like Iran and that the country might vanish in 20–30 years because the French apparently have nothing better to do than change children’s genders.

Simion’s detachment from reality was stunning. The AUR candidate stuck to his line that he would “bring justice” so that Georgescu could become president. Even as polls closed, he insisted that it wasn’t him or N. Dan who had won — but Georgescu. We leave behind a campaign in which irrationality was applauded.

Fortunately, most of the public remained clear-headed. Some woke up only in the second round — that’s the best explanation for the extraordinary turnout among the diaspora. Yesterday, no fewer than 1.64 million out of the total 11.6 million voters cast their ballots at nearly a thousand polling stations abroad. As this trend emerged, it wasn’t clear whether Simion had any fresh supporters abroad, or whether he’d already burned through them in the first round, where he captured 60% of the vote. Ultimately, most of those who voted only in the second round were people determined to block the ultra-nationalist drift. A special mention goes to the voters in the Republic of Moldova: nearly 160,000 Moldovans holding Romanian citizenship cast their votes and overwhelmingly backed N. Dan. For them, it was easy to spot Simion for what he is — a Kremlin puppet.

It’s also worth noting that political parties played a minor role in this campaign. That should give both the old guard and the newcomers something to think about. Nicușor Dan is the first independent to win the most complex political contest in the country. He is also the third mayor — after Traian Băsescu and Klaus Iohannis — to reach the presidency. This confirms that the public tends to favor local political figures over prime ministers or parliamentarians — people who can’t hide behind their mandates, and must either deliver or fail publicly.

There’s much to be said about campaign financing, how the media and electoral institutions managed the elections, and so on — but there will be time for such analysis.

What matters now is a return to rational governance.

The first priority is forming an executive. The new president will be the architect of the governing majority. It’s highly likely that the PNL, USR, and UDMR will cooperate. It’s less clear whether the PSD will want to stay in power without naming the prime minister. The internal crisis brewing in that party — made worse by Ciolacu’s ostrich-like strategy in the final round — threatens to trigger political tremors. Let’s hope they don’t lead to early elections. That’s the last thing we need right now.

There’s also a need for a budget that takes into account the deficit caused by Ciolacu’s recklessness, the constraints of international financial markets, confidence in the national currency, the urgency of tapping into what’s left of the EU recovery funds (PNRR), and the decisions set to come from next month’s NATO summit regarding defense spending for the next 2–3 years.

Third, the new president carries a heavy burden: reconciliation. The societal tension generated by nationalist outbursts, an excessively long electoral period, the near-total abandonment of the anti-corruption fight, and the political involvement of gangsters, mercenaries, and Russian operatives must be defused—with tact, patience, and dialogue.

Finally, N. Dan’s victory is yet another failure for MAGA’s European forays — this time, backing a candidate openly aligned with the Kremlin. The naïveté of the American president and the ignorance of his advisers regarding European affairs have led to the paradoxical situation where the Republican administration supported far-right parties in Europe during the early months of Trump’s second term. The failure of their support for AfD in Germany should’ve served as a wake-up call in Washington. It didn’t. So here we are, in Bucharest, with Trump’s envoy to Greenland and the Greenlandic bricklayer who leads the movement to sell that Danish territory to the U.S.

MAGA would do well to stop betting in Europe on figures who understand democratic politics about as well as I understand the Greenlandic language.

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Cristian Preda is a professor in political science at the University of Bucharest and a former MEP (2009-2019). His research areas are large, from political regimes, to political history, elections and party politics.