Days after Romania cancelled last year’s presidential election due to alleged Russian meddling, prompting the ire of some of Donald Trump’s closest aides, one politician flew from Bucharest to the US and checked in at Mar-a-Lago.
Victor Ponta, a former leftwing prime minister, was an unlikely visitor at Trump’s Florida resort given their past ideological differences and the upheaval back home.
“It was a private meeting,” said Ponta, who is in the current race for Romania’s top job. “I enjoyed the environment. Mr Trump was not president yet, and I was not a candidate. I am happy I went.”
Ponta’s trip and his subsequent bid for the presidency under the slogan “Romania first” highlight the growing influence the US president and his closest aides are exerting in Europe’s populist Maga-style movements, most notably by backing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which secured a historic second place in parliamentary elections in February.
US vice-president JD Vance, who met AfD co-leader Alice Weidel before the German elections and suggested that mainstream parties should include the far-right party in government talks, has lambasted Romanian authorities for annulling the December vote based on “flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours”.
Other European and Nato officials have backed Bucharest’s assessment that only Russia could have been behind such a sophisticated campaign that allowed a previously unknown candidate to top the first round of the election.
Moscow has denied the allegations but openly backed Călin Georgescu, the pro-Russia candidate who won the vote last year, saying that any election without him was “illegitimate”.
Ponta, who also backed Georgescu and suggested he could appoint him as prime minister, said “cancelling the elections was a mistake and a big problem for Romanian democracy”. He added that he hoped the vote rerun, which takes place on May 4 and May 18, will not be cancelled again if a non-mainstream candidate succeeds. “That would jeopardise our democracy.”
After nearly a decade spent as a disgraced former premier, Ponta recently emerged as a dark horse in the presidential race, polling second at about 18 per cent of voting intentions — behind George Simion, the far-right leader who has taken over the baton from Georgescu.
Once a leader of the ruling Social Democrats, Ponta was forced out of the office by massive anti-government protests when a nightclub fire killed 64 people in 2015. His political star faded after being convicted for plagiarising his doctoral thesis and tried in several corruption cases — though he was ultimately acquitted of those charges.
Last week he sparked fresh controversy after admitting that he was rewarded with Serbian citizenship during his time as premier, when he ordered a dam on the Danube river to be opened and intentionally flood Romanian villages to protect Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, from a big flood upstream.
His decision was not made public until now, and ruling politicians are calling for an investigation and for Ponta to withdraw his bid for the presidency. Ponta has maintained that Romanians were evacuated in time and compensated for their lost assets, while possibly thousands of Serb lives were saved.
Simion and Ponta’s appeal after adopting a Maga-style discourse has alarmed pro-EU candidates who are struggling to gain traction with voters disillusioned with a political class marred by corruption scandals and incompetence.
Nicușor Dan, the liberal mayor of Bucharest, who is roughly tied with Ponta for second place in most opinion polls, has warned about what an ultranationalist win would mean for Romania.
“A Simion or Ponta victory would be big, big trouble for the relations of Romania and its EU partners,” Dan told the Financial Times. “The president leads our national security council, he can block Romanian aid to Ukraine or parts of the EU rearmament programme. We must preserve the link between Romania and its EU partners.”
He added that Bucharest had to “preserve its strategic partnership with the US”, particularly for security reasons — and that “it is possible to stay within the EU fabric and maintain the US special relationship”.
Dan, a mathematician trained in Romania and France, could leap ahead of Ponta if another pro-EU candidate, Elena Lasconi, drops out of the race.
Lasconi’s party, the Save Romania Union co-founded by Dan before he left to run as an independent, last week decided to endorse him for president over her. But Lasconi has so far insisted she should stay in the race even as she is polling in the single digits because she made it into the run-off against Georgescu last year.
Another pro-EU candidate is Crin Antonescu, who is polling fourth behind Dan at about 15 per cent of voting intentions. Antonescu is backed by the three-party coalition government and has also sought to warn Romanians about the perils of a Simion or Ponta victory.
“There is a clear challenge of populism and isolationism in our country, fuelled by economic problems,” Antonescu told the Financial Times. “On top of that, there is a clear hybrid attack from Russia on Europe and western institutions.”
He said that Romania’s Maga-style candidates are “opportunists with no real convictions”. “My effort is to expose them for what they are: clueless demagogues and politicians incapable to stand their ground in any meaningful international interaction.”
Simion in recent weeks sought to moderate his anti-Ukraine discourse and play up his own recent contacts with the Trump administration after attending the US president’s inauguration.
Ponta also claims to have a special kinship with Trump after fighting off corruption cases and attempting a political comeback.
“I’m a golfer,” Ponta said. “I always play the full 18 holes.”
