Authored by ȚepeȘ via Wallachian Gazette

The last 6 months of Romanian politics were the most tumultuous since the time period after the fall of the communist regime in late December 1989 and after the presidential elections of 1992 .

Those times were marked by a clash between pro-democracy/monarchy/nationalist intelligentsia and the communist security apparatus which was doing its hardest to block any meaningful change from occurring (see Timișoara Proclamation) while also making enough surface-level reforms in order to be accepted into the Western world.

The communist security apparatus represented at the time by Ion Iliescu, who came from a family of communists, his father having been imprisoned by the interwar Romanian authorities for traveling to the U.S.S.R. to participate at the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Iliescu's other relatives shared views of his father. Because he was only 5 years old when his father was arrested and imprisoned, the young Ion Iliescu was adopted by an aunt, Aristița, who happened to be a cook for the future communist foreign minister, Ana Rabinsohn-Pauker, who would play a key role in the torture of hundreds of anticommunists dissidents at the Pitești prison, who refused to abandon the Orthodox faith for the cult of state atheism promoted by Pauker and the new communist government.

This is the childhood Ion Iliescu had but in the 1990s and even today he is viewed as a "revolutionary", a "freedom fighter" for the freedom of the Romanian people and he was elected president, twice, in 1992 and 2000, even though no one forgot Iliescu's role in the June 1990 Mineriad when he called in the coal miners of the Jiu Valley to beat up the students and other residents of Bucharest because the police and gendarme units were being overwhelmed.

The miners had full logistical support from the Romanian state. Trains were sent to Motru and Petroșani to transport the miners to Bucharest and once they arrived at the presidential palace, Ion Iliescu appeared on the balcony, greeting them and telling them to "start the cleanup".

The June 1990 Mineriad would, officially, leave behind 7 dead (though the România Liberă newspaper wrote at the time that 128 were killed and secretly buried in a mass grave at the Străulești II cemetery) and over 1000 wounded, about a dozen women raped by the miners, 185 people were arrested, most of whom were set free after a few weeks, but others weren't so lucky, some ending up committing suicide in prison after, allegedly, being tortured by the guards with one case of a young man being freed in 1996 (!!) after being "forgotten" inside the prison system.

Just like in June 1990, the world was aware of the abuses happening at the hands of the "democratic" regime of Ion Iliescu and the National Salvation Front (FSN) yet they took no action. Liberal political commentators complain today that if it wasn't for Iliescu, Romania could have joined the EU by 2004 like Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia and joined NATO in 1999 like the aforementioned countries but I believe this is a cope and simply a failure on the part of Romanian leaders to make themselves, likeable, as we have seen with the rise of Syria's new leader, Ahmed "Abu Mohammad al-Jolani" al-Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda insurgent, who had a 10 million USD bounty on himself, as late as 5 months ago and now is a "respectable" statesman, meeting with Western and Arab leaders.

If the inaction at the time on behalf of foreign leaders who didn't place sanctions on Romania at the time, letting Iliescu and the FSN get away with beating students, today the inaction in the face of Romania blatantly violating the democratic principles of the sovereignty of the people is more understandable.

It is in the EU's and France's interest to see Romania not turn into a 2nd Hungary in terms of hostility towards Brussels but for Donald Trump's agenda, Romania is an afterthought. The only consolation is that some Republican commentators popular on X (Twitter) have taken an interest in Romanian politics after witnessing the crime against democracy committed last year and are continuing to keep the memory of that incident alive as the regime here wishes it to be forgotten. Their reasoning is different though, they don't *really* care about who's in charge in Romania, they just hate the EU and see what is happening in Romania as a battering ram to destroy the figurative walls of the European Fortress, which locked its doors to American products after the victory of Donald Trump last November.

While claiming the elections were "rigged" is funny in a way to troll the establishment the results were legitimate and AUR's defeat was deserved for a number of reasons which we will get into shortly, the only surprising thing being the fact that AUR lost by only a 4% difference. After we've dissected the causes for AUR's defeat, we will look into possible solutions so that the scenario isn't repeated in 2028 and 2030.

1. What is AUR and what does it stand for?

AUR is the Romanian and English acronym for the Alliance for the Union of Romanians. It was launched in December 2019 by George Simion, a nationalist activist who campaigned starting in the early 2000s for the union of Moldova and Romania, being credited with popularising the "Basarabia e România" slogan which is a key fixture of graffiti across the country and Claudiu Târziu, a career journalist.

The pillars of AUR are: faith, family, nation and liberty, AUR aims to build a "sovereign and reunited Romania", to build a "strong and competitive economy" where "all can prosper from the results of their work". AUR claims to be against the "anti-national" governments of the past who were self-serving and not serving the people like AUR wants.

AUR is for the union of Romania and Moldova, it cites the demographic collapse of Romania as one of its main concerns, but ironically, it says the youths, the young adults, are the most important for the country, even though the young adult demographic (18-30) voted against George Simion by a large margin compared to Poland where the youth voted for Konfederacja candidate, Slawomir Mentzen and the candidate of the Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP), Grzegorz Braun, who are 10 times more extremist than George Simion ever was at any point in his life.

AUR makes some interesting proposals like creating an organisation similar to the Commonwealth or the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie but for the Romanian language as a way to keep in touch with Romanians elsewhere, it promises an "eurorealist" approach in regards to Romania-EU relations (although since George Simion said he wants to be like Giorgia Meloni, the eurorealist promise falls flat as Meloni is quite a disappointment).

In terms of energy, AUR is pro-nuclear and wants to build at least 3 more nuclear power plants on the Siret, Mureș and Someș rivers, they would also want to reopen some of the coal power plants which were shut down by the EU.

AUR's political program, which can be read here, is fine in theory but we have seen very little of it put in practice, albeit it isn't entirely AUR's fault because they never won an entire county council nor had enough for a parliamentary majority but this is where the problems begin:

2. The poor performance at the parliamentary elections

After a surprise performance in the 2020 Parliamentary elections, George Simion, the other co-founder, Claudiu Târziu and AUR spent the next 4 years campaigning, marketing themselves as the ONLY conservative party in Romania, the only alternative to the PSD-PNL-UDMR coalition.

After 4 years of hard work, of battling with the press for the minds of the Romanian people, AUR indeed came 2nd, rising from 4th, but they won just 18%-18.3% from the 9% they had before. With the unpopular lockdowns of the COVID19 era, with the unpopular unconditional support for Ukraine, with the extreme dislike for the former-president, Klaus Johannis, for the former PNL president and premier (2021-2023), Nicolae Ciucă and the former president of PSD and premeir (2023-2025), Marcel Ciolacu, AUR only got 18.3% although, after the allocation of the seats, they ended up gaining 19% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 20% of the seats in the Senate. The last insult to injury was added when two other parties, S.O.S. România and The Young People's Party (POT) won 7.3%-7.7% and 6.4% respectively.

Both were started by former AUR members who were unhappy with the direction of AUR was going under George Simion who, by the time of the parliamentary elections, monopolised control over AUR and sidelined Claudiu Târziu (more on this later in the article). Both SOS România and POT spent a fraction of the resources AUR spent for the parliamentary campaign and won enough to pass the 5% threshold and gain 40 and 31 seats respectively. It is even more embarrassing in the case for POT as the party literally appeared on everyone's radar after the 1st round of the 2024 presidential elections with the party pledging full support to Călin Georgescu and based off only that show of support won 31 seats in the Parliament (they did lose 11 MPs later on)

AUR didn't have competition and we saw that during the presidential elections when Călin Georgescu managed to beat everyone including George Simion who campaigned for president since 2020 spending huge amounts of money and time for an effort which didn't amount to anything.

This should have rang an alarm bell for George Simion showing that AUR badly needed reforms. AUR lost 71 seats to two other smaller "parties" even though SOS and POT are complete jokes and lost much of the conservative/sovereignist electorate to Călin Georgescu in the presidential elections.

AUR's co-founder, Claudiu Târziu, called for changes back then, he wanted AUR to have a congress and discuss the next course of action because, at least in Târziu (and our eyes) the performance of George Simion and AUR at the parliamentary elections, wasn't all that good, but Simion resisted any changes and continues to do so to this day.

His word and his will are all that matter for AUR. AUR isn't a real conservative movement, its a personality cult for George Simion and Simion is very boring.

After being marginalised, Târziu didn't give up and continued to demand change, refusing to back Călin Georgescu even though George Simion pledged full support knowing full well he was going to be Georgescu's backup when he inevitably was going to get barred from running for president. Fed up with this marginalisation, in April Claudiu Târziu left AUR and went on to say that the reason he was marginalised was because he won't be able to replace George Simion as the AUR leader in the event that Simion would lose the presidential elections, which he did.

3. AUR's failure to win over the hearts and minds of the people:

George Simion's 46.4% score in the 2nd round wasn't *his* score, it was the sum of his supporters, supporters of Călin Georgescu who voted him in the hopes that he would make Georgescu prime-minister, the socially-conservative social-democrat voter base who disliked Nicușor Dan and his supporters and everyone else who not necessarily disliked Dan but hated the people who were rallying behind him and those people added up to nearly a little over 5.3 million votes.

Nicușor Dan meanwhile won largely thanks to the media who fearmongered continuously predicting literal doom if George Simion was elected but also due to George Simion's mistakes. Through my personal circle of friends and acquaintances, I know of three people who voted for Nicușor Dan after becoming disillusioned with Simion and AUR in general.

Conservatism is not popular, it is viewed as "low class", something only "uneducated" people from rural areas adhere to.

Simion performed poorly among the youth and the elderly and had a mediocre performance with Gen X-ers, winning just two age groups by a slight margin.

This is in stark contrast with other rightwing movements in Europe. In Poland, the youth, unlike in Romania, voted for extremists. The top contender for the youth was Konfederacja candidate, Slawomir Mentzen who came third and 2nd among the youth was Adrian Zandberg, a radical leftist, after which came the mainstream Rafal Trzaskowski and Karol Nawrocki who is George Simion's equivalent.

The turnout for 18-29 year olds in Poland was also very high, at over 72%. Anyway, overall, the 1st round of the Polish presidential elections saw rightwing candidates win a combined 53% of the vote with liberal candidates gaining 47%, most of it going to Rafal Trzaskowski.

Nawrocki has more room to grow support for himself in the 2nd round, unlike George Simion, but no doubt, the EU-funded liberal Polish media will do its hardest to scare Polish voters into voting for Trzaskowski under all sorts of unfounded fears and pretexts.

In Germany, the Alternative fur Deutschland party is very popular among the youths and is winning thanks to voters under 60 years old who are worried about the fact that the country they grew up in is becoming unrecognisable due to uncontrolled mass migration.

Some polls before the snap elections last February showed the AfD as the 2nd most popular party behind the communists at Die Linke.

In France, in the snap elections called by Emmanuel Macron in July 2024, the French zoomers voted for the anti-immigration Rassemblent Nationale of Marine Le Pen. Last July's snap elections were Le Pen and RN's best performance in an election in history.

In Poland, in Germany, in France, the younger the people are, the more they vote for fringe, "extremist" parties, rightwing and leftwing. While in Romania over 60+ year olds voted for the mainstream candidate backed by the televisions which largely played a role in shaping their opinions of Nicușor Dan, unlike in Poland, Germany and France, the youth is way more liberal than not only their parents but also their grandparents.

Figuring out why Romanian zoomers reject conservatism should be the key to AUR's long term success.

4. Did George Simion learn anything after his defeat in the 2024 and 2025 presidential elections?

The short answer is no, the longer answer is more complicated.

After the poor results of the 2024 presidential elections, George Simion, who attacked Călin Georgescu in the run-up to the election, now became "best friends" with him, he didn't waste any time to declare his support and this continued even after the elections were cancelled, with Simion promising to make Georgescu prime-minister which was odd because this meant sidelining his deputy and AUR's biggest financier, Marius Lulea.

Lulea has a construction company and he met George Simion through his company because Simion wanted a job and Lulea made him the marketing director. Lulea financed a lot of George Simion's activities including the "Action 2012" Platform, with which Simion was going to the Republic of Moldova and campaign for Romanian-Moldovan unionism.

Lulea has made a fortune by building apartment blocks and through public contracts, renovating state buildings and some foreign embassies. Due to his financial power he likely is the "shadow-leader" of AUR who directs the party's economic policy, which is very leftwing, (not a surprise since Lulea constantly lauds the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, even calling him a "sovereignist").

A long-standing presumption of mine was that if Simion had actually become president, he would have ditched Călin Georgescu at the first opportunity and go with Marius Lulea as prime-minister.

With all this being said, the Simion-Georgescu alliance was/is untenable and only made sense until Simion got elected president.

With the sudden interest of American-MAGA commentators in the Romanian elections, George Simion saw an opportunity to make some allies among Republican circles. Though he and Călin Georgescu have received moral support from them, they didn't get anything else out of the US, still George Simion is still trying by copying Donald Trump.

And by copying I mean that literally. Simion wants to run AUR the same way Trump runs the Republican Party. Trump has his own cult of personality inside the Republican Party and among American conservatives but Trump's cult of personality is at least, deserved. Trump is 78 years old, made his name first through his business ventures, reality shows and with his likeable personality, later with his presidential campaign in 2016 which reinvigorated the American right and created the MAGA movement, which George Simion and Călin Georgescu copied coining the term "MRGA" - Make Romania Great Again (pronounced M-eugh-R GA).

Simion, who is 38, started appearing in public only wearing suits with ties when before he wore office casual clothes, more recently, he deleted his Facebook and TikTok and said he will only be on X (Twitter) and Telegram to talk to his supporters, two platforms popular with Trump supporters. When Simion deleted his Facebook and TikTok accounts he tried to pass them off as him being censored but when people caught on he didn't get censored he admitted he deleted them on his own.

After admitting defeat in the presidential elections Simion ended up contesting the results even though there wasn't any credible evidence of fraud and then called for protests against the investiture of Nicușor Dan but said he would not attend the protest "fearing arrest" just like Trump did with the Capitol protests on January 6th 2021.

Simion's strategy for the next 5 years seems to be playing the victim, a victim of the "Sorosist" media, "globalists" and France, the same way Republicans blamed their loss in 2020 but at least their claims of fraud had more substance as there were widespread reports of malfunctioning voting machines, bags of ballots being "misplaced". The Romanian presidential elections didn't have any of that. Also you can't complain to be a victim when you've antagonised the same medias time and time again, not that they didn't deserve it but this shows another problem facing AUR: a lack of friendly newspapers. The notable pro-AUR publications are Activenews and R3Media and they don't have a lot of readers nor are respected enough to be considered "trustworthy" sources the same way Foxnews or someone like Mario Nawfal are.

This represents one of the problems faced by the Romanian conservative side of politics: they straight up copy the discourse found in the US, adapt it to Romania. Very little is original and most of the time it doesn't make sense.

I've mentioned before Marius Lulea and his praise for Nicolae Ceaușescu. How is this compatible with statements made by George Simion a few months ago saying he wants to do in Romania what Javier Millei did in Argentina?

One of AUR's main points of its political program is buying back the oil company, Petrom from Austria, and keep Petrom state-owned. This is not something Trump nor Millei would support in their own countries (to be fair, they would never sell their countries' resources to other states).

Claudiu Târziu complained that Simion runs AUR like a dictator, refusing to allow the local branches of AUR to elect its own leaders, Simion preferring to name the local branch leaders personally after they pay him of course, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros. Is Simion preparing to let the local branches of AUR to hold elections? No. He's continuing to insist with this approach even though it is illegal and if someone wants to ruin AUR, they can very easily bring this in front of a judge.

5. What is the future of the conservative/nationalist movement in Romania?

The first step AUR needs to make in order to succeed is to stop playing victim. The purpose of a system is what it does. The system "isn't unfair" it simply does what it was supposed to: ward off any threats to its existence and AUR is a threat to it. The press lying/posting defamatory articles, NGOs and other political parties filing criminal complaints are the lawfare, the defense mechanisms of the status-quo who doesn't want anyone to upset the balance of power. No matter how hard you complain, the system isn't going to stop defending itself from the forces which want it to collapse.

Second of all, AUR needs to drop its practice of bribery for political office and actually be democratic and allow for party elections and critical discourse instead of doing whatever Simion wants. Simion so far negotiated an alliance with the Israeli Likud Party which upset a lot of people who left and ended up joining SOS România, The Young People's Party (POT) or Claudiu Târziu's new political platform Acțiunea Conservatoare (Conservative Action) because the Israelis told Simion he must drop all talk and public support for anticommunist dissidents because a lot of them were former Iron Guard members.

Third of all, AUR must find some ideologues, intellectuals to write an original doctrine rather than copying everything Donald Trump and the Republican Party do in the US, they need to figure out a way to talk to the young people, ages 16-25, as these people voted overwhelmingly for Nicușor Dan and support the pro-EU camp, while in the rest of Europe is the opposite, with 16-25 year olds being the most rightwing generation Europe has seen since the end of WW2

Ideally, AUR and the other conservative/nationalist parties would set aside whatever grievances they hold against each other and build an alliance to promote the nationalist cause because at the moment, the nationalist camp in Romania is extremely weak. Although nationalist parties won 35% of the Parliament last year, today, SOS România and POT lost respectively 12 and 11 MPs of the 40 and 31 MPs they had through defection or resignation. At best, the nationalist camp control ~30% of the Parliament today.

This doesn't necessarily mean that those MPs won't vote for nationalist causes but their loyalty and interest become questionable. AUR too lost 3 MPs and 3 of its MEPs due to the problems mentioned before. Defections of MPs on this scale don't happen in a strong/coherent nationalist movement, this happens only in disorganised movements.

Lastly, AUR needs to decentralize its leadership. George Simion must learn to share power with others and start promoting people based on merit, their ideas, not just because they had enough money to bribe him for a seat in the Parliament. Right now, AUR is basically a personality cult for George Simion. If the system would want to put Simion in jail, it only takes a mistake, Simion saying something which comes across wrong for them to vote to lift his parliamentary immunity and imprisoning him leaving AUR in complete disarray thus destroying conservative opposition in the Parliament.

With the departure of Claudiu Târziu, its not clear who would take control in case George Simion would not be present to lead the party, but most likely it will be Marius Lulea and he didn't make a good impression considering that he is a nostalgic for the Socialist Republic of Romania (RSR), but again, no one knows for sure as Lulea isn't Simion's official deputy, this is a presumption simply because Lulea has invested the most in AUR.

To conclude AUR should have an easy time in 2028 and win more than 40% of the Parliament considering the state of the Romanian economy at the moment and the austerity measures needed to bring it back to a sustainable level. Simion's loss now probably was for the better as, by the looks of it, Nicușor Dan has all the potential to end up hated more by his own side than Simion's supporters, as he is put between a rock and a hard place, having to mediate between hotheads calling for reeducation camps for Simion's voters and the shrewd civil servants telling Dan to start investing in the areas where Simion won to fracture his support base.

Regardless what happens, AUR needs to evolve from being Simion's party into a real institution that doesn't rely on a single person to function. It needs to become a real conservative platform which has original ideas and for that it needs someone that doesn't back down the moment journalists start calling him out like when Simion backtracked immediately after calling Nicușor Dan an autist, excusing himself saying he "actually" meant to say: "sorosist", "marxist", "globalist". Come on, no one believes that.

Simion needs to be more coherent in his personal discourse and with AUR's discourse. Despite campaigning for Romanian-Moldovan unionism, he and thousands of his supporters signed petitions to remove the Romanian citizenship of all Moldovans who voted in the presidential elections, which would set back the unionist project by decades.

Personally, I don't think Simion is fit to carry out a single suggestion I've written here he's too egoistical to focus on anyone but himself. He doesn't have a political creed or higher purpose, he just wants power for the sake of having power, but what he will do with such power no one, not even Simion himself, knows.

And the Romanian people have observed this, that's why they voted for Călin Georgescu instead of George Simion when they had the option to pick between the two. Hopefully, the next 3 years will bring another conservative politician that won't repeat Simion's mistakes.