In a setback for the growing nationalist forces of Europe, Nicusor Dan, a centrist mayor and former math professor, on Sunday the presidential elections won in Romania, defeating a right -wing candidate who is aligned with President Trump and has opposed Aid Tokraine.
With more than 98 percent of the tickets counted, the preliminary official results cool 54 percent of the votes in the presidential runoff to Mr. Dan, 55, the mayor of the capital of Romania, Bucharest. His opponent, George Simion, a nationalist and fervent admirer of Mr. Trump who had been widely seen as the favorite, attracted only 46 percent.
When he slipped behind Mr. then in the early counting, Simion told supporters that “we are the clear winners of these elections.” The one required for national protests in the event that the final count shows that he as the loser, criticizing what he said was an attempt to “steal the victory of the Romanian people.”
Mr. Dan’s victory will probably calm the fears in the political current of Europe that Romania, which limits with Ucrine and plays a vital role in the defense of the NATO eastern flank against Russia, could join Hungary and Slovakia to oppose the help of Ukraine and in the cozing.
But it will probably inflame the nationalist camp of Romania and its supporters abroad, including vice president JD Vance, and Stoke accusations that the system is manipulated. Last year, a Romanian court ordered a last -minute cancellation of a presidential election that an ultra -nationalist seemed well positioned to win.
In the last days of the campaign, when the opinion polls showed the adjustment of the race, Simion laid the foundations for a Romanian version of the “Stop The Weal” efforts of Trump in 2020. Hello, he insisted that only electoral fraud could prevent him from winning.
On Sunday, shortly before the vote ended, Simion said that “many deceased people” had appeared in the electoral lists, echoing Mr. Trump’s claims after he lost the 2020 elections in the United States. Mr. Simion did not provide evidence to support accusations that his victorious rival had benefited from fraud.
A prodigy of mathematics in his youth that obtained a Ph.D. In France, before becoming a teacher in Bucharest, Mr. Dan campaigned as a modern conservative committed to the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007, and with NATO, which has been a member since 2004.
The thought supported, at least tacitly, for much of the political establishment of Romania, Mr. then ran as independent and presented himself as a stranger not contaminated by a close association with the two main political parties in Romania. These parties have entered and left power since the overthrow of 1989 of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Mr. then his public career campaigns against corruption and the destruction of old buildings by real estate developers linked to corrupt politicians. Both candidates were involved in demonstrations in the early 2000s to save the Historic Center of Bucharest.
But while Mr. Simion embraced the nationalist policy, campaigning to “unite” Romania with the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, which is largely Romanian, and fragments of Ukraine inhabited by Ethnic Romanians, Mr. Then followed a more moderate agenda.
Mr. Dan helped found the Save Romania Union, a liberal party, but separated on the issue of same -sex marriage, than the progressives in the party supported. When Romania, when urge right -wing activists, Hero is a referendum in 2018 about the change of the Constitution to the same sex unions, Mr. urged his party to stay out of the problem. The referendum failed due to low participation.
The leftists see it as a conservative and nationalists as a sale of the European Union, but their victory on Sunday indicated that voters wanted an average path between the political fields bitterly Poliazed.
Campaigning last week, he said that voters “between democratic, stable and respected in Europe, and a dangerous path of isolation, populism and challenge of the rule of law.”
Andrada Lautaru Bucharest contributed reports.
