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I recently returned from an 8-day tour of Romania beginning in the city of Bucharest. The trip was planned in December 2024 about the time Romania’s Constitutional Court cancelled the results of the presidential election in which conservative Călin Georgescu won the popular vote on the first round of voting.
Georgescu’s victory created panic among status quo liberal politicians, causing the liberal judiciary to claim that Russia had somehow influenced the election results. The Russian interference claim was never proven, just as it was never proven – and later proven false – when Hilary Clinton made the same claim about the 2016 election in the United States.
The judiciary, so it seems, is an enemy of true democracy in Romania.
Romania’s political history is a study in subservience. The country fell to Ottoman suzerainty in 1541; its liberation from Ottoman rule occurred in 1871. After the Turks were driven out of the country by the Hapsburg Austrian Emperor, there was an Austrian push to convert Orthodox Christians to Catholicism.
Orthodox monasteries and churches were confiscated and used as horse stables. Two notable Orthodox churches, Voronet Monastery, founded and erected by Stephen the Great in 1488, and the Cozia Monastery church, built in 1388 by Mircea the Elder, grandfather of Vald Dracula, became hovels for a variety of barnyard animals.
Romania was in the grip of Nazi rule during WWII but that ended in 1944 when Romania’s King Michael, at the age of 22, successfully forced out Hitler’s puppet dictator, Ion Antonescue, saving thousands of Jews from extermination. Antonescue previously had been given a free hand by Hitler to solve the “Jewish question,” and this resulted in the murder of at least 420,000 Jews early in the war.
Ironically, Antonescue’s Nazi regime was followed by an even harsher communist one.
Gheorghe Gheorghieu-Dej, leader of the Romanian Communist party, became the nation’s first communist leader. He served until 1965 and was followed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, a dictator who held the reigns of power until 1989 when communism began to fall throughout Eastern Europe. (The execution by firing squad of Ceausescu and his wife Elena officially marked the end of communist rule).
My Romanian tour guide – a Trump supporter who told me he hopes his country follows America’s lead and elects a Trump-like nationalist in the May 4 and May 18, 2025 national elections – expounded on the current state of affairs as we traveled throughout the country.
At one point when we were 40 minutes from the Ukraine border he said that while most Romanians dislike Russia, they have an even greater contempt for Ukraine. He called the country brutish and insensitive.
“If I were to drive us across the border into Ukraine, we wouldn’t last long. We would be ‘disappeared,’” he said.
Fortunately, a tour of Ukraine was not on the agenda. When we passed a car with a Ukraine license plate he remarked how Ukrainians like to escape the bleakness of their country by taking car trips into Romania’s scenic Carpathian Mountain region.
“Their country is so bleak and gray, they need Romanian beauty,” he said.
We drove to Timisoara (the birthplace of the 1989 revolution) via the Olt River Gorge, then visited the Cozia Monastery, then headed out to Cluj Napoca and later to Gura Humor, passing large abandoned factories built during the communist era.
These buildings reflect the ugliness and barrenness of communism. They sit like dark monoliths in an otherwise beautiful terrain. Some of these abandoned factories are twenty stories tall with eerily small windows reminiscent of prisons. Even in Bucharest, once known as the Paris of the East, one can see many large scale communist buildings, some of them falling apart and rotting.
Even if one knew nothing about communist ideology and how it works, the bounty of leftover ugly communist architecture all over Romania stands as a testament as to why a country should never go communist.
Bran Castle, once owned by the Romanian royal family and cherished as a favorite family residence by Queen Marie, was robbed of most of its furniture by the Stalinist reformers who wanted to destroy all traces of royalty. A few authentic pieces of furniture managed to escape the plunder, such as Queen Marie’s breakfast table and the bed of King Ferdinand, but for the most part what visitors see are replica replacements.
The castle is also filled with tacky Vald Dracula paraphernalia, such as a Dracula dummy placed upside down in a coffin, installed by boardwalk commercialists in a bid to attract tourists. (For the record, Vald Dracula never set foot in Bran Castle.)
Traveling throughout the country, I learned from my guide that most Romanians celebrated the election victory of Donald Trump. Although Romania joined the European Union in 2007, many Romanians are now questioning that alliance. Currently, under the direction of the EU, the country is undergoing an expansive road building explosion which is causing multiple traffic detours in and out of Bucharest.
“Why the need to build new highways?” my guide asked as we drove through the Olt River Gorge. “The roads we have are fine. They just need repaving. All this construction is not necessary.” On numerous occasions we were stuck in long lines of traffic with scores of trucks, unwieldy detours that went on for miles and miles.
An even bigger issue for Romanians in the May 2025 elections is immigration.
While going through Romanian Customs when I first entered the country, I was shocked to see large numbers of migrant-types from Muslim countries and West Africa. I mentioned this to my guide who supported Calin Georgescu in the last election and who told me that migrants from Ukraine are given free stays, including meals, in many Bucharest hotels. At the Berthelot Hotel Bucharest where I stayed two nights, he pointed out several cars in the parking lot with Ukraine license plates.
On another occasions while driving down one of Bucharest’s main thoroughfares, he pointed to Turkish and Middle Eastern immigrants hanging out in the streets in groups of five or ten. “They do nothing all day long. They gather in groups and do nothing, nothing. It gets worse all the time.”
The Middle Eastern immigrant street scene made me ask: Is Romania a United Kingdom in the making?
The National Salvation Front (FSN) was the first post-communist political party established in Romania. In 1993, FSN split into two parties, the largest being the Social Democratic Party (PSD), a leftist mirror image of the Democrat party in the United States. The current Romanian Prime Minister, Ion Marcel Ciolacu, has been the leader of the PSD since 2019, and much like his leftist cohorts in the Social Liberal Humanist Party, is likely to label anyone who challenges the EU and its policies a “right wing extremist.”
Yet Romanian polls have former PSD leftist-turned conservative, Victor Ponta, running for president as an independent, coming in second in the first election round after conservative conservative nationalist George Simion, who’s considered the favorite.
With two conservatives in the lead, it is likely that Romania may get its own Donald Trump. Donald Trump Jr. in fact is scheduled to visit the country in late April ahead of the May 4 election.
Yet Romania’s top court has been quite active in barring nationalist politicians like Diana Sosoaca from this year’s and last year’s annulled presidential election. Sosoaca might be called Romania’s Marine Le Pen. Ruthless in her comments, she once said, “The EU and NATO destroy everything they touch….Europe is corrupt from the very tip.
“Serbians,” Sosoaca continued, “are the bravest people in all of Europe. Most Serbians do not wish to be part of the EU because they’ve seen what happened to Romania and to what extent Romania has been destroyed.”
Other candidates in the May 4th runoff include pro-EU Bucharest mayor Nicusor Dan, a member of the liberal USR party, and Elena Lasconi, a former journalist and the leader of the Save Romania Union Party.
The American left-wing Politico had this to say about the Romanian elections:
“The Eastern European country of 19 million people borders Ukraine and is one of NATO’s key eastern flank members, with access to the Black Sea. A victory by a far-right candidate in the presidential election threatens to bring Bucharest more in line with U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement while harming EU plans to continue aiding Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion.”
Romania, without a doubt, seems to be on the brink of a MAGA revolution.
