Al Jazeera talks to the two men who will face off on Sunday following the contentious cancellation of the 2024 election. Bucharest, Romania – Romania is set for its most polarized presidential election in democratic times, with voters prepared for showdown between right-wing populist and centrist technocrat on Sunday.
Recent surveys indicate that the contest is tight, with the two candidates – George Simion, head of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and Nicusor Dan, an independent candidate and incumbent mayor of Bucharest, where 25 percent of the nation’s 19 million inhabitants reside.
Simion identifies with populist leaders Donald Trump of the United States and Hungary’s anti-immigrant politician Viktor Orban. The vote is timely for Romania, which is a NATO and European Union member that shares a border with Ukraine.
Western nations are presently fighting to agree on aid to Kyiv – with Washington’s support for the war-torn country in jeopardy, a plan to cope with the backlash of higher US tariffs, and how to handle Russia as it keeps fighting and scolding European heads of state. The 38-year-old Simion won 40 percent of the vote in a first round on May 4. Dan, a former mathematician, came next with around 20 percent.
The first round followed the annulment of Romania’s October 2024 presidential election, which was controversially annulled, citing reasons of irregular financing and suspected foreign interference, and saw ultranationalist underdog candidate Calin Georgescu reach the final.
Simion has vowed to re-run the second round of the 2024 election if the people of Romania want him to. Simion, who is an admirer of banned candidate Georgescu, will probably have collected most of his following in the first round and has talked of advancing Georgescu to become prime minister.
Following the annulment, totally abusive and unjustified, of the [2024] elections, Romanians have witnessed the darkest face of this deep state that makes decisions above the people’s will,
