George Simion: Romania’s MAGA candidate

A photo from a school celebration in the early 1990s shows a skinny, shy boy in a checkered shirt with a wreath of flowers on his head, flanked by his sister and a preppy, stern-looking mother with a classic ’80s perm. The wreath, reserved for top students, is the sign of an academic achiever. By his own account, Simion was a geek. He attended one of Bucharest’s elite high schools, then studied business and administration, earning a master’s in contemporary history from the University of Iași in 2010.

But his public persona doesn’t match that educational background. His speech can sound clumsy, unpolished. He’s not eloquent – that’s part of his appeal in a country where elites are distrusted. But Simion has shown that he prefers action to words. He’s also a bit of a showman.

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The man vying to become Romania’s next president never seems to have held a regular job, but he has been active in all sorts of civic movements. All of these groups were politically nationalist. It bothered him less that a project, say, threatened to wreck the environment. Simion only cared if the capital behind it was foreign. Briefly he found himself on the same barricades as Nicușor Dan, the other contender for the presidency. Dan recalls him fondly. He says that, since those days, his former comrade has changed. A lot.

The idea of reunification won him fans in Romania, but also got him banned from Moldova and Ukraine

Simion’s political character began to shift when he began campaigning for the unification of Romania and Moldova. He embedded himself in groups of football ultras, helping them sharpen their nationalist slogans, and was among the first to understand that politics today is about the visual. His graffiti campaigns with the slogan “Basarabia e România” sprayed on thousands of walls made him known nationwide as the youngster obsessed with the lost territories Romania ceded in the 1940s. 

The idea of reunification won him fans in Romania, but also got him banned from Moldova and Ukraine, after he was allegedly spotted meeting Russian FSB agents. Those suspicions of pro-Moscow sympathies have been stoked by his criticism of Ukraine’s treatment of its Romanian minority. Throughout this, Simion has claimed that he is not pro-Russian – he just wants Romanian politicians to focus on Romanians, no matter where they happen to be.

Mainstream politicians initially dismissed him as a harmless eccentric, even when he accosted judges and officials at their homes and live-streamed the encounters online, a stunt he called grassroots democracy. Many viewed him as a crank rather than a threat. He embraced populism unashamedly: organising caravans of dentists for neglected rural areas, or turning his wedding into a mass public event. 

The wedding day was an extraordinary event. Unlike other politicians who hide their private lives, Simion issued an open invitation to his ceremony. As he and Ilinca Munteanu were married, the couple wore folk costumes instead of designer outfits. The couple received €400,000 in wedding gifts which, Simion said, was spent on food and drinks for his guests.

Critics noted an unsettling historical echo in this grand gesture. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of the Iron Guard, the fascist, highly religious revolutionary order of the 1930s, once staged a similar open wedding. The association with that barbarous, anti-Semitic organisation is highly damaging, and Simion dislikes being called far-right. In April, he stormed out of an interview when an Austrian journalist told him that’s exactly how political scientists label his party.

But the political class made a mistake by underestimating Simion. In 2020, AUR shocked the country by winning nearly 10% in the parliamentary elections, having campaigned almost entirely on social media. Since then, Simion has created a winning mix of anti-EU conservatism (opposing the Green Deal and “woke” policies), economic nationalism (wanting to nationalise foreign agribusiness and energy assets), and promises of social protection, such as giving people money to buy apartments. 

But in the 2024 presidential campaign, he made a rare misstep: he posed as a political moderate, and courted European conservatives like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. They took him in, after initially disapproving of his blunt style. But behind the scenes, a more radical figure was ready to reap the benefits of nationalist voters primed by Simion, then abandoned: Călin Georgescu, the mystic extremist with alleged Kremlin ties. 

In the aftermath of the botched elections, Georgescu was barred from running again, so Simion rode the wave of his popularity. Simion pledged to make Georgescu prime minister if he wins, but whether he’ll actually do that, or whether he will ditch him once in power, is unclear.

George Simion is now in a very strong position – but the problem is that his words and actions rarely align. He says what people want to hear, then moves on. In this, he mirrors an idol of his: Donald Trump. Simion wears Maga hats, parrots Trump’s slogans, and has flipped from anti-American rhetoric to calling for more US troops in Romania. 

What will he do if he wins? Will he throw out foreign investors? Will he take Romania out of the EU and Nato? Will he sabotage European support for Ukraine? He has hinted that he will do all of this and then, in a move straight out of the populist playbook, has denied saying any of it at all. 

People are under no illusion. The chances that Simion will lose this election are slim. Voters fear the chaos he might bring. The only hope is that he turns out to be a typical, cynical politician: that he says what it takes to win power, and then does whatever it takes to hold on to it.