Romanian wild card George Simion sets Brussels’ nerves on edge

European officials are particularly worried the 38-year-old firebrand will join the current duo of wreckers — Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico — in seeking to scupper aid to Ukraine just as the EU wants to dial up pressure on Russia to end the war.

(ER: Sure, the EU wants to ‘end the war’, said nobody ever.)

If Bucharest does lurch over to the saboteur camp (LOL, this is mild for Politico), it would be a bitter blow as Romania carries greater geostrategic heft than Hungary or Slovakia. The Black Sea nation of 19 million has, until now, been a rock-solid stalwart of the EU and the NATO alliance.

Simion is rapidly trying to allay those fears that he will rock the boat. He insists he will be a pro-EU and pro-NATO leader, who is more directly aligned with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — a pro-Ukraine right-winger — than Orbán or Fico. He styles his alliance with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as a way to keep U.S. troops committed to Romania.

“We are a Eurorealist group, not Euroskeptic,” Simion told POLITICO, adding that he embraced the EU’s single market as a driver of wealth for Romanians.

It is, admittedly, hard to imagine Simion as a natural bedfellow for Orbán, the EU’s most tenacious internal rebel (affectionate language?). While Simion acknowledges Orbán has served as a “model” for him, there is little love lost between the Romanian and Hungarian nationalist camps, who are fiercely at odds over the Hungarian minority in Transylvania in northern Romania.

But those tensions with Orbán don’t mean everyone is breathing a sigh of relief in Brussels. Officials and experts who have observed Simion’s rise to prominence — and tracked his sometimes contradictory statements — are skeptical he can be as successful as Meloni in hitching his right-wing agenda to the EU mainstream.

They point to his pledges to stop the EU imposing a new “globalist” order, his territorial claims on Moldova, an EU candidate nation facing Russian destabilization (eh?), as well as his blanket opposition to any further support for Ukraine as proof that Simion will be, at best, an unpredictable leader and, at worst, a source of division within the bloc.

“I think he would certainly be a disruptive figure around the EU Council table and potentially also around the NATO table,” said Oana Lungescu, a former spokesperson for NATO and currently a distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

“His position seems very clear that in terms of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, he proposes neutrality for Romania — which is of course incompatible with Romania’s position both as an EU member state and as a NATO ally.”

Simion adamantly denies he is pro-Russian, but he is a banned “persona non grata” in Ukraine for promoting a “unionist ideology that denies the legitimacy of the state border of Ukraine.” Simion’s party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, is associated with an irredentist vision of a greater Romania that risks triggering territorial disputes and potential conflict with Ukraine, Moldova and Bulgaria.

At the helm in Bucharest, he would have ample opportunity to stir up trouble by pulling out of NATO training operations for Ukrainians, obstructing border crossings and the flow of arms into Ukraine, and rowing back on Romania’s pivotal role in helping Black Sea grain exports.

For his part, Simion insists he is pressuring Kyiv to defend the rights of Romanian-speakers inside Ukraine — a subject that the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has, in reality, been very willing to address.

Manfred Weber, head of the center-right umbrella European People’s Party, whose Romanian affiliate opposes Simion, echoed Lungescu’s concerns and said Simion represented a “risk for what I believe in.” (Brilliant)

The EPP leader dismissed any comparison between Simion and Meloni, who remains in the European mainstream despite her hard-right policies at home, arguing the Romanian was “definitely” not like the Italian.

Weber also accused Simion of having “worked together with the Russian [security services].” Simion denies allegations he met with Russian spies in Ukraine over a decade ago.

Such concerns don’t seem to have dissuaded Romanian voters, who gave Simion 41 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. That said, the populist candidate last week floundered in his debate against centrist rival Nicușor Dan, and opinion polls suggest his lead is beginning to ebb. POLITICO’s Poll of Polls put him only 3 percentage points clear of Dan as the race heads into the final straight. (After Covid, does anybody trust official polls anymore?)

Transylvanian tensions

On the face of it, Simion and Europe’s disruptor-in-chief, Orbán, look to be cut from the same political cloth. Both are ultranationalists who tout a pro-family, Christian vision for their countries. Both hail from Eastern bloc countries, have compared the EU with the USSR and both venerate Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

But there’s a clear limit to how close they can get. Simion and Orbán have been at odds for years over Orbán’s claims that Hungarian minorities in Romania are being mistreated.

Members of Simion’s AUR party suspect Orbán blocked its bid to join the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping. Indeed, they were only accepted within the bloc’s premier right-wing alliance after the Hungarian leader’s Fidesz party bailed to found the far-right Patriots group.

AUR — and particularly Simion — gained notoriety in 2019 during heated disputes over military graves in the village of Valea Uzului in Romania, where many Hungarian soldiers are buried. “Hungarians were beaten, and graves were desecrated … Since then, they have been attacking our people, our region, and our schools on a weekly basis,” Botond Csoma, spokesperson and parliamentary group leader of Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, told POLITICO.

Orbán relies on support from the Hungarian minority in Romania, to whom his government granted citizenship. They accounted for more than 250,000 votes in the last general election in Hungary and are seen as a bastion of support for the strongman. He will need their backing to take on his rival, Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party is polling ahead of him in the run-up to next year’s parliamentary elections.

Despite those underlying tensions, Simion is keen to extend an olive branch to Orbán and forge an alliance in Brussels.

“The relation with Mr. Orbán at the moment doesn’t exist, but as previously stated, to some extent, Viktor Orbán is a model for me and in many issues, I will collaborate with him,” Simion told POLITICO.

Last week, Orbán spoke out about the Romanian elections for the first time, saying that “one of the candidates, Mr. Simion, said … that both Hungary and Romania should be able to rely on each other … We fully agree.”

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Seb Starcevic contributed to this report.

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