Who Is Călin Georgescu?

International commentators have widely described Georgescu as a pro-Kremlin candidate and fierce NATO critic who has expressed sympathy for Putin and his fusion of religion and patriotism. Georgescu has also endorsed Hungary’s far-right premier, singling out Orbán’s foreign policy for praise. He has not spared the European Union (EU) from criticism, either, and stated that it does not represent the interests of the Romanian people. However, it is not yet clear whether he actually favors quitting the EU.

His strong anti-NATO and anti-EU sentiments take center stage in foreign commentary, sparking fears that his election could jeopardize support for Ukraine as yet another neighboring country (besides Hungary) turns against Kyiv. Romania’s strategic location between Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey makes it a key NATO asset in the region. In 2022, Georgescu was one of the loudest critics of the American antimissile shield located in Southern Romania.

By background, Georgescu is an engineer, a university professor with a PhD in pedology (a branch of soil science), and an expert in sustainable development. Indeed, his résumé is positively technocratic. He worked at the Ministry of the Environment and the Foreign Ministry from the 1990s, and was proposed several times for the position of prime minister — the last time by the far-right AUR in 2021. In 2010–12, he took the position of special rapporteur for human rights and hazardous waste at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Later, he was president of the European Support Center in Winterthur of the Club of Rome and executive director of the United Nations Global Sustainable Index Institute in Geneva and Vaduz.

Georgescu has long campaigned to reduce Romania’s dependence on food and energy imports. In 2021, he announced that he would launch the “Ancestral Land” movement, aimed at implementing the “Food, Water, Energy” national project. This is meant to lift up Romanian agriculture, by creating solid networks of small producers, farmers, and craftsmen by organizing activities, including cultural jamborees, that “can lift the people from the sense of abandonment in which they are now stuck in.” In this sense, Georgescu does have a certain “populist” appeal demonstrating concern for the Romanian working classes, if only in rhetoric that offers little in the way of government action. His initiative is not based on a clear political and economic vision to achieve this goal, like reducing taxes or other material offers. Instead, he offers a new identity politics and the promise of a Romanian national community.

Georgescu gained most votes in northern Romania and coastal counties on the Black Sea, closest to Ukraine and Russia. These are the regions where the influx of Ukrainian war refugees has been the highest in the past years, and where anxiety over escalation is highest. However, despite his right-populist appeal, Georgescu failed to perform in the country’s poorest rural areas (southern and eastern Romania) where the Social Democratic–aligned candidate secured most support.

Controversies

In recent years, Georgescu has sparked a series of controversies with his endorsement of Putin and Orbán, his downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic, his unfiltered social media rants, and his crude antisemitism praising the Iron Guard and Romanian Nazi collaborators. In 2022, a criminal case was opened against him for promoting the cult of people guilty of genocide because of his statements calling Iron Guard leader Corneliu Codreanu and pro-Nazi prime minister Ion Antonescu “national heroes.”

Călin Georgescu had indeed said in 2020 that Antonescu and Codreanu are heroes through whom “national history is still lived, and only through them does national history speak and has it spoken, and not through the lackeys of the globalist powers that today lead Romania.” These statements provoked sharp reactions from the Center for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism in Romania, the National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, and advocates of the local Jewish communities, who described these statements as “an irresponsible and dangerous act.” Because of his nostalgia for the fascist era, his critics started referring to him as Romania’s Meloni, given the Italian prime minister’s past glorification of Benito Mussolini and other regime leaders.

Georgescu’s statements defending Nazi collaborators nonetheless opened a rift within the far-right camp, including with the AUR party closest to Meloni herself. Its leader, George Simion, declared that “such vague statements can only harm us, and I categorically distance myself from any statement that would damage my political future and that of the party.” In response, Georgescu broke ties with AUR and ended negotiations about his candidacy for prime minister. In 2024, he entered this presidential race as an independent.

Călin Georgescu soon gained popularity on social media as his campaign promised to end aid to Ukraine. He was heavily criticized for his pro-Russia statements, with some Romanian commentators even considering him a representative of pro-Kremlin interests in the country. Following the illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgescu blamed the US military-industrial complex for the escalation, stating, “The situation in Ukraine is clearly being manipulated, triggering a conflict in America’s interest that will contribute to the expansion of the US military complex.” Regarding NATO and the EU, Georgescu declared that Romania “did not negotiate anything, so it has lost everything.” He later claimed that the United States and the EU “neutralized us economically, erased our national identity, the DNA that ensures the immunity of the Romanian nation and spirit” and that NATO will likely not defend any allied country in case of direct armed confrontation with Russia.

In a 2015 interview, Georgescu claimed that corporate power represents a greater danger to Romania than enemy states, “especially preserving national identity against invasive nonstate entities, i.e., corporations and investors, like hedge funds.” He also praised Donald Trump, whom he called “a hero. After Kennedy, he is the only president who has challenged the corporate demon.” In reaction to Sunday’s results, Georgescu spoke of how “the thirty-five-years-long economic uncertainty imposed on the Romanian people became uncertainty for the political parties today.” Flirting with anti-capitalist ideas in rhetoric is fairly common among post-fascists in Eastern Europe, much as it was for interwar fascists.

Unlike his liberal peers, Georgescu did not ignore the economic challenges and austerity brought upon Romania by authoritarian neoliberalism following the Soviet bloc’s collapse. He is not unique in this sense: Hungary’s far-right Mi Hazánk Party also pretends to be critical of post-1989 neoliberalism and globalization, but like to Georgescu, they attribute a racial character to capital and end up popularizing antisemitic conspiracy theories — blaming George Soros and “globalists” for national and economic decline. However, Georgescu and other post-fascists in the region do not promise to transcend class or break up globalization, instead simply promoting a “nationalist capitalism.”

Disaster Nationalist

Having a background in the niche of sustainable development and environmentalism, Călin Georgescu seemed to be the answer to novel social antagonisms birthed by crises, including the climate collapse, economic depression, post-socialist alienation, globalization, and more. Richard Seymour explains in his recent book Disaster Nationalism that resentment, not simply personal economic interests, drives people’s votes for these far-right parties:

The contagion of disaster nationalism flourishes, not merely because of disinformation and false beliefs, but because the economy of resentment circulating in modern societies makes these beliefs attractive. The modern witch, be it a “cultural Marxist”, “communist”, “Antifa”, “anti-national”, “Arab lover”, or some other “traitor” who can be killed in the streets of Manila, Kenosha, New Delhi, or Sao Paulo, offers a pseudo-explanation for the misfortune specific to the nation-state: how a sovereign people lost its sovereignty.

This phenomenon is prominent in Georgescu’s case. He bemoans how Romania’s national identity has been corrupted by the “globalists” and offers a new sense of belonging and national self-love. As Seymour explains, “disaster nationalists speak the language of class. They claim to represent an ’abandoned’, ’betrayed’, ’left-behind’ constituency.” Georgescu specifically used words as “abandoned” and “alienated” to describe Romanian farmers and workers who have indeed been left behind since the collapse of state socialism. G. M. Tamás has also described this phenomenon extensively, and warned that these “left-behind people” may seek refuge and form a new identity in the niche of post- and neofascism.

Georgescu’s election success could simply be explained by the fact that he was able to harness ordinary people’s resentment against the neoliberal system that failed them for the past thirty-five years. US-led shock therapy and the fallout of the transition after 1989 left peasants and workers humiliated and vulnerable, and liberal elites ignored their struggles and desperate appeals. Thirty-five years under a class of ignorant and morally nihilistic liberal elites rising to power led to this moment exactly. This is the dynamic that also produced Orbán in Hungary, and it seems like Romania may become the next Eastern European country to follow this pattern. Whether or not Georgescu ends up winning the presidential election, it is certain by now that he released the spirit of resentment and vengeance against the liberal order in Romania in a dangerous and reactionary direction. It can no longer be ignored.