The judo-loving TikTok campaigner won the most votes in the first round of the presidential election. Here’s why this matters.
An independent candidate who until two years ago was part of Romania’s main far-right party has emerged as the surprising winner of the first round of the Eastern European nation’s presidential election on Sunday.
Calin Georgescu will now head into a run-off against the second-placed candidate in the election.
But who is Georgescu, how did he gain votes and what is next for Romania?
What was the result of the Romanian election?
In all, 52.4 percent of eligible voters in Romania, or 9.4 million voters cast their ballot, according to the Central Electoral Bureau.
After 98 percent of the ballots were counted, Georgescu defied opinion polls and emerged in first place with 23 percent of the votes, according to partial election results.
In November, pollster Inscop projected he would win 5.4 percent of the vote — a significant bloc but nowhere close to what he won.
In second place was Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu with about 20 percent of the vote. Ciolacu is the leader of Romania’s Social Democratic Party (PSD).
In third place is Elena Lasconi of the centre-right Save Romania Union (USR) party with approximately 19 percent of the votes. George Simion of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) is in fourth place with 14 percent of the vote.
The outgoing president, Klaus Iohannis of the centre-right National Liberal Party (PNL), has been in office since 2014, and this is his second term. The PNL and the PSD are currently governing Romania in an uneasy coalition.
Who is Calin Georgescu?
Georgescu, 62, is an independent, right-wing candidate. He ran his campaign primarily on social media, particularly TikTok.
According to his website, he holds a doctorate in soil science and has worked for Romania’s Ministry of Environment. A university professor, he also worked with the United Nations as a special rapporteur in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights between 2010 and 2012, and as the executive director of the Global Sustainable Index Institute between 2015 and 2016.
He is a former member of the far-right opposition alliance AUR and was its PM pick before he left in 2022 amid tensions with senior members of the coalition over his views on Russia and NATO.
While he has not explicitly admitted that he supports Russia, he said in an interview that Romania ought to abide by “Russian wisdom”.
In a 2022 interview, Georgescu called Russian President Vladimir Putin one of the few true leaders in the world.
During an interview in 2021, he described NATO’s ballistic missile defence shield in the Romanian military base Deveselu as a “shame of diplomacy”. He also said NATO would not protect any of its members if Russia were to attack them. Romania has been a NATO member since 2004.
Romania shares a 650km (400-mile) border with Ukraine. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters, has used Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta to export millions of tonnes of grain.
Russia has also reportedly violated Romanian airspace in villages that border Ukraine, but casualties have not been reported.
In 2020, Georgescu made statements supporting the 20th-century fascist Legionary Movement.
How did Georgescu manage to win so many votes?
Experts caution against misreading the verdict as driven by mass support for Georgescu.
“The reality is that the votes that Georgescu got were protest votes against [the] current political class,” Claudiu Pandaru, a journalist and co-founder of Romanian news website Republica, told Al Jazeera.
He added that the majority of Georgescu voters are unaware of his “pro-Russia” comments, which he said did not find wide resonance within Romania’s population.
“Georgescu won the anti-establishment vote,” Philipp Lausberg, a senior policy analyst at Belgium-based research institute European Policy Centre, told Al Jazeera. “Many are tired of the existing party system, some don’t feel represented by them.”
Lausberg added that because of Georgescu’s softer stance on Russia, “some trust him to be able to make peace with Russia, but it is illusionary to think that Romania can make an impact there”.
Additionally, Lausberg said, Georgescu won the diaspora vote, likely from “labour migrants in Western Europe” because the independent candidate “gave them the idea that he would offer them a Romania that is worth returning home”.
Pandaru explained that Romanian voters did not want current PM Ciolacu or his coalition partners from the PNL to rise to the top job. Ciolacu’s popularity has been falling amid allegations of corruption against him and of plagiarism against a coalition partner.
Meanwhile, Georgescu’s popularity soared on TikTok, where he posts videos addressing the plight of average Romanians — such as economic perils and inflation. On TikTok, he is also seen talking on podcasts, attending church and practising judo. His videos have amassed 3.6 million likes.
Lausberg said Georgescu used his TikTok presence to send strong, simple and emotional messages, showing he is a “simple man who can stand up to the elites”. He said this was similar to United States President-elect Donald Trump, who was able to garner the working class vote to win the election earlier this month.
According to the Romanian Institute of Statistics, inflation has fallen from 13.8 percent in 2022 to just above 5 percent in 2024. However, it remains one of the highest in the European Union. In October, Romania had the highest inflation rate of 5 percent within the bloc, according to the EU’s statistical office, Eurostat.
Pandaru said several anonymous TikTok accounts also boost Georgescu’s content on the platform — and it is unclear whether they belong to real people or are bots.
He said the voter discontent with the current government’s handling of the economy drove them to seek an alternative candidate to vote out the incumbents.
“Georgescu was in the right place, at the swipe of their fingers on TikTok.”
When is the run-off election?
The run-off election is scheduled for December 8.
Ciolacu and Lasconi are neck-and-neck in the race for second place, and Georgescu could face one of them in the run-off.
But Pandaru said winning the run-off would prove difficult for Georgescu because of the lack of a proper presidential campaign behind him, beyond his TikTok content and appearances on podcasts. “Romanian people don’t know who he is in reality.”
He added that Georgescu’s TikTok videos have mostly been about him talking about problems, not solutions and his actual policy proposals are vague.
Former journalist Lasconi — whom Pandaru expects will clinch second place and face-off against Georgescu in the run-off — is a proponent for increased defence spending and continued aid to Ukraine.
Lausberg predicted that if Lasconi runs against him in the run-off, “she would be the weaker one”, drawing parallels to the recent US election where Trump, a “populist masculine leader” like Georgescu, faced off Democrat Kamala Harris, a woman like Lasconi. He added that this is because “Romania is still traditional in terms of gender roles”.
If Ciolacu advances to the run-off, he stands a better chance at beating Georgescu, said Lausberg. Ciolacu would likely receive backing from most major parties, while Georgescu is likely to receive support from only AUR. Simion, the leader of AUR, said on Sunday that he would support Georgescu in the run-off vote.
Does Romania also have parliamentary elections coming up?
Yes, the parliamentary elections will be held on December 1, the country’s National Day.
According to pollster Inscop, as of October, PSD is leading the parliamentary polls with 30.2 percent, followed by PNL with 13.2 percent and Lasconi’s USR with 12.7 percent.
What does this mean for Europe?
A broader far-right surge is being observed in Europe.
For example, Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) won the country’s parliamentary election in September this year. Earlier in the same month, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the state election in Thuringia, marking the first time a far-right party won a state election in Germany since World War II.
Dorit Geva, a professor at the University of Vienna, told Al Jazeera earlier that right-wing wins in Europe could “further legitimise Viktor Orban’s vision for the future of Europe, which means limiting the power of Brussels, securitising European borders against migration, and is certainly bad news for Ukraine.”
Orban, who has been Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, is the head of the right-wing populist Fidesz party in the country. Orban has been critical of unfettered European aid to Ukraine, and a proponent of tougher borders.