Romania is an EU member state whose budget deficit topped 9% of GDP in 2024, the highest in the union. Its credit rating is BBB-, just above junk status. Inflation stood at 5.1% in 2025. Romania has a diaspora of over 4m citizens, compared with 19m inside the country.
On December 21st 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's communist despot, was addressing a large crowd, many of whom were state employees bused in to wave pro-regime flags. Someone jeered; the jeers spread until the whole crowd joined in. The censors hastily cut the live television feed, but the country realised that practically everyone hated the dictator. Four days later Ceausescu was executed by firing squad. During his rule Ceausescu had sunk 30% of Romania's national budget into the construction of the "People's Palace", designed by the architect Anca Petrescu, who built full-scale plaster models of the palace interiors inside an aircraft hangar. A vast dummy cupola was lowered onto the roof by helicopter to help the dictator decide whether to order the same in pink-and-white Transylvanian marble.
Since 2021 the country has been governed by grand coalitions between the centre-left Social Democrats (PSD) and the centre-right National Liberals (PNL). Many voters saw the arrangement as denying them a real choice, while the government rolled back the anti-corruption campaign Romania had pursued in the 2010s.
Romania's first attempt at electing a new president in late 2024 was annulled by the constitutional court after it was unexpectedly won by Calin Georgescu, a hard-right populist, allegedly with Russian interference: bot networks had inflated Georgescu's reach on TikTok. The court specifically noted that AI was used in the electoral-interference campaign.
In the re-run first round on May 4th 2025, George Simion, leader of the hard-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), won 41% of the vote. The runner-up was Nicusor Dan, the corruption-fighting mayor of Bucharest and French-trained mathematician, with 21%. The government-backed PNL candidate, Crin Antonescu, finished just behind Dan. Following Antonescu's defeat, PSD prime minister Marcel Ciolacu resigned.
In the run-off on May 18th Dan won 54% to Simion's 46%, on record turnout for a presidential election. Dan was widely agreed to have won the sole head-to-head debate; Simion unwisely skipped several other debates. Romania's diaspora, which had overwhelmingly backed Simion in the first round, split more evenly in the second. Simion initially accepted the result but reversed himself on May 20th, alleging interference by France and Moldova; Romania's electoral authority quickly dismissed his challenge.
The Save Romania Union (USR) is a pro-European anti-corruption party that Dan once headed. Dan's new government is expected to include USR and the centre-right PNL, and possibly the PSD. In the 2010s Romania carried out one of Europe's most aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, jailing thousands of officials, but momentum ran out during the pandemic.
On May 5th 2026 Romania's liberal prime minister was forced out in a no-confidence motion backed by both the centre-left PSD and AUR, after PSD left the coalition over Dan's slimmed-down budget. Inflation was 6.8% in 2025; Romania's GDP fell 1.7% year on year in the first quarter of 2026. AUR is now Romania's most popular party, with support at 33% in polls (ten points ahead of PSD). Romania trains Ukrainian fighter pilots and is planning Ukrainian drone production on its soil.
Simion, who says his party is "almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the MAGA movement", got his political start campaigning for Romania to absorb neighbouring Moldova. He is banned from Moldova and from Ukraine, which he attacks for alleged mistreatment of ethnic Romanians. He has called for Romania to cease aid to Ukraine and compared Ursula von der Leyen unfavourably with Vladimir Putin. AUR belongs to Giorgia Meloni's group in the European Parliament, and Simion likens himself to the Italian prime minister. He says his economic model is Javier Milei, Argentina's libertarian president. He has said that if Russia refuses to end the war, the EU should confiscate frozen Russian assets and Romania might seize Russian-owned businesses.
Armor's Axiom: Virtue is the failure to achieve vice.