It would be reasonable to assume that people who move from one EU country to another in search of work and opportunity are among the union’s most reliable supporters. Freedom of movement within the 27-nation bloc is, after all, one of the big advantages of EU citizenship. But Romania’s diaspora has recently upended that theory.

With about a quarter of its 19 million citizens living abroad, mostly in western Europe, Romania has the largest diaspora in the EU. About two-thirds are economic migrants: picking fruit in Andalusia, caring for elderly people in Vienna, laying bricks in Brussels. In 2023 alone they sent home €6.5bn in remittances, almost 3% of Romania’s GDP, sustaining communities across the country.

In Romania’s tense presidential re-run in May, the pro-Europe candidate, Nicușor Dan, carried the election, seeing off his far-right Eurosceptic challenger, George Simion, in the decisive round. After months of political chaos, the outcome drew sighs of relief across the EU. Complacency would be deeply unwise, however, because among Romanian voters abroad, Simion was the clear winner, scoring nearly 70% of the vote in diaspora-heavy countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain.

For years, Romania’s diaspora mostly supported centrist, pro-European candidates. So why would nearly 1 million of them embrace a candidate who questions Romania’s place in the EU? Simion’s inflammatory past statements about the EU include: “We don’t want to be secondhand citizens of this new Soviet Union.” Among Romanians working abroad, such sentiments appear to have struck a chord.

The answer, for me, lies in years of political neglect: from Bucharest, host countries and Brussels alike, many Romanians feel invisible and unheard. The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis deepened their discontent, which the far right has fanned and........

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