After months of turmoil, Romania has narrowly avoided electing a president who openly opposes the country’s democratic foundations. In a runoff election on May 18, the far-right candidate George Simion, who had decisively won the first-round vote, was defeated by Nicusor Dan, the moderate conservative mayor of Bucharest. Although Dan’s come-from-behind victory has halted Romania’s slide into autocracy for now, it does not resolve the deeper political crisis facing the country. Simion received 5.3 million of the 11.5 million votes cast. The breadth of support for him also raises larger questions about whether institutional guardrails in Romania, and in Europe overall, can be effective in countering a far right that seeks to undermine those democratic institutions themselves.

In his campaign, Simion made little secret of his intent to turn Romania away from Western liberal democracy. He attacked the European Union, NATO, French President Emmanuel Macron (whom he portrayed as an avatar of Western decadence), and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He praised Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, whose policies he promised to implement in Romania. And he attacked Romania’s civil servants, threatening them with the kind of purge that the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been conducting in the United States. He also presented himself as a fan of U.S. President Donald Trump and the MAGA right, although he never received direct support from the Trump administration. Although he did not call for withdrawing Romania from NATO, he opposed all aid to Ukraine and often echoed Russian talking points about the war there. He was repeatedly praised by mouthpieces for the Putin regime, such as the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, and the right-wing philosopher Alexander Dugin.

To outside observers, such a platform may have seemed anomalous. After all, Romania has long been a staunch member of the Western alliance. For years, it has maintained close ties to the United States and hosted several U.S. military bases. With its 380-mile border with Ukraine and its access to the Black Sea, it has acquired additional importance to NATO since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moreover, Romanians have been reliably supportive of their country’s membership in both NATO and the EU.

But these external allegiances have obscured widespread disaffection among ordinary Romanians with their own Western-leaning political class. For years, the Romanian economy has failed to bring broad-based prosperity as the population suffered from the highest inequality within the EU. Public services have been hollowed out. And many Romanians have been disillusioned by a political establishment that has resisted reform and lost much of its popular legitimacy. It was against this backdrop of discontent that the country’s Constitutional Court took the extraordinary step of canceling the December 2024 presidential election to shut down a far-right insurgency. The result was a crisis that nearly brought Simion to the presidency in the rescheduled election this month.

That a candidate openly hostile to democratic norms came within striking distance of the presidency reveals the extent of public alienation and institutional distrust. Romania today is not an authoritarian state, but it is not a confident democracy, either. The country’s far right, which now controls 30 percent of Parliament, has normalized radical antidemocratic rhetoric and mobilized a disenchanted electorate that sees liberal governance not as a safeguard but as a barrier to reform. The liberal order in Romania has survived, for now. But it stands on alarmingly fragile ground.

Paradoxically, the survival of Romanian democracy is owed in part to a move by the country’s highest court that many Romanians regard as highly undemocratic. As with this spring’s presidential elections, the first round of voting in November 2024 was won by a far-right candidate—but in that case, Calin Georgescu, an upstart independent candidate with large followings on TikTok, Telegram, and Discord who was linked to Russian propaganda networks, extremist paramilitary groups, and fringe conspiracy movements. A virtual unknown at the start of the campaign, Georgescu had somehow obtained 22 percent of the vote in his first-round victory. In December, Romanian intelligence services declassified reports that revealed coordination among Russian-operated bots and paid users on those platforms, backed by over a million dollars of funding from undisclosed sources, to boost Georgescu. Western governments, including the Biden administration, amplified these claims of........

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