Another Fico and Orban on their way to power?
Voter support for illiberal AUR is growing ahead of elections next year
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Anti-Ukraine party gathers strength in Romania
Voter support for illiberal AUR is growing ahead of elections next year
George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for Unity in Romanians party, which has capitalised on anti-Ukraine sentiment © EPA-EFE
A few days into the Israel-Hamas war, a social media post went viral in Romania, claiming that the government in Bucharest had funded the evacuation of 3,000 Ukrainians from Israel, while doing nothing for Romanians trapped in the conflict. None of it was true. The post was written by George Simion, chair of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), which has emerged as the country’s main opposition force.
Its rise has sparked concern in European capitals about the risk that Romania could become another EU and Nato country reluctant to support Kyiv in its defensive war against Russian aggression. AUR, which translates as “gold” in Romanian, has capitalised on simmering anti-Ukrainian sentiment, promoting disinformation and lies to double its support among voters since the 2019 elections to about 20 per cent — just behind the ruling Social Democrats.
Simion himself is ranking third in voters’ preferences for the presidential elections, at abut 18 per cent, behind Nato deputy secretary-general Mircea Geoană and Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu. “For a state that stands with Romanians: AUR,” Simion wrote on Facebook, showing that his party is already in campaign mode ahead of parliamentary, presidential and European elections next year.
He has since also confronted Ciolacu about the government’s alleged failure to extract Romanians from the Middle East. Romanian authorities have disputed Simion’s claims, adding that only a few hundred Ukrainians were extracted and they, not Bucharest, paid for their transport. Simion’s performance is part of a growing trend of disruptive far-right parties stoking fear and xenophobia in Europe, and questioning their countries’ continued support for Kyiv in its defence against Russian aggression. Once a fringe irredentist party that vilified the ethnic Hungarian minority and peddled anti-vaccine theories during the Covid-19 pandemic, AUR has shifted gears and focused on Ukraine, declaring that the war is “not ours” and urging the government to stop aiding Kyiv and rethink its relationships with Washington and Brussels. Like Poland’s Confederation party, which has lambasted the government in Warsaw for allowing cheap Ukrainian grain imports, AUR is opposing the transit through Romania of agricultural products from Ukraine.
The party is also against Bucharest continuing its arms supplies to Kyiv and hosting Ukrainian pilots who train on F-16 fighter jets. The failings of Romania’s ruling grand coalition, which consists of the largest mainstream parties — the centre-left Social Democrats and the centre-right National Liberal party — has fostered a political climate of discontent in which AUR has thrived. “The grand coalition, as earlier in Germany or Austria, has led to growing extremism,” said Costin Ciobanu, a researcher at the University of London.
“The coalition has appeared as a political cartel . . . while the global illiberal wave has arrived in Romania.” A first indicator of voters’ actual support for AUR will come in the EU elections in June. If the far-right party were to come out on top, it would “upend calculations for the other elections as well”, Ciobanu said, with mainstream parties likely to co-ordinate more closely in the ensuing parliamentary and presidential votes. AUR’s rise mirrors the ascent of the Alternative for Germany party, which recently broke out of its eastern German stronghold and performed well in regional elections. The Romanian far right likens itself to ruling parties in Hungary and Italy and large opposition parties in Spain and France. Like his fellow European far-right leaders, Simion, 37, claims his country is being “exploited” by the west and that any dissenting voices are “automatically cast as Putinists”. Claudiu Târziu, a leading AUR member, insists that his party is not pro-Russia.
“Romanians have suffered both from Ukrainians and from Russians and we don’t actually like either of them much,” he told the Financial Times.
Simion has recently been banned from entering Ukraine and Moldova, though Târziu denied a Ukrainian newspaper report citing intelligence sources and alleging that Simion had ties to Moscow. Simion, said Târziu, was persona non grata in Chisinau and Kyiv because of his irredentism on uniting all Romanian speakers into a “Greater Romania”. When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Bucharest last month, Simion claimed he lacked “courage” because he cancelled a speech he was due to hold in parliament. Former AUR member Diana Șoșoacă, currently an independent senator, had vowed to disrupt the Zelenskyy speech, calling him a “Nazi” — a line used by the Kremlin. Zelenskyy said he had not prepared a speech and promised to address the Romanian parliament during a future visit. As it aligns its views with Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán — the closest to an ally Putin has within the EU and Nato — AUR has also dropped some of its anti-Hungarian talking points. Instead, its politicians praise the Hungarian premier as a role model on anti-LGBTQ issues and standing up to Brussels “diktats”. Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary.
The AUR has praised him as a role model on some issues © Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/ Getty Images “We have the same opinions as Viktor Orbán, [Italian premier] Giorgia Meloni, [Spain’s hard-right Vox leader] Santiago Abascal, or other conservative leaders about family, sovereignty, faith and traditions, and freedom,” Târziu said. Despite billions in EU funding for the country, he claimed Romanians were being “robbed by the EU” and forced to adopt an “ideology” that “endangers the traditional lifestyle of Romanians” — a recurring theme for nativist parties in Europe. Romania’s ethnic Hungarian UMDR party has called for a political cordon sanitaire around the AUR that would commit other parties to refuse to go into government with the party, much as centrist parties in France have refused alliances with the far-right Rassemblement National. Recommended FT MagazineSimon Kuper How Lithuanians are preparing to stop Putin “This party was borne out of anti-Hungarian hatred, and continues to feed on it,” said UMDR spokesman Botond Csoma. “AUR repeats [illiberal] elements only to draw a veil over its extremism and chauvinism.
” AUR voters say they are attracted by its novelty. At the party headquarters in Bucharest, sandwiched between a veterinary hospital, a pastry shop and a police precinct, 30-year-old Cezar said he prefers AUR because it “represents a change”. “It’s the same people up there [in government] spinning the money for 30 years. At least AUR is something new.” Additional reporting by Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv