Romania Is Falling Into the Abyss

Opinion|My Country Is Falling Into the Abyss

We knew it was coming.

Ahead of the first round of Romania’s presidential elections on May 4, it was obvious what would happen. This was, after all, practically a rerun of an election held last November that was won by a far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu. The Constitutional Court, citing Russian interference, canceled those elections and later barred Mr. Georgescu from running. But that merely cut off a head of the Hydra. The next far-right candidate in line, George Simion, stepped up — and won the first round even more comprehensively than his predecessor, taking 41 percent of the vote.

Worse is perhaps to come. On Sunday’s runoff, Romanians will vote for either Mr. Simion or Nicusor Dan, an independent candidate who scored 21 percent of the first-round vote. This race is tighter, but barring a surge in turnout, Mr. Simion looks likely to become the country’s next president. That would give him, a self-described Trumpist, power to appoint a prime minister, direct foreign policy and command the armed forces. For Romania, a country of nearly 20 million people, it would be a very bad turn of events.

It would also be entirely foreseeable. Far from sudden, the far-right’s rise in Romania is rooted in decades of economic failure: Chronic underdevelopment, widespread insecurity and mass emigration have generated deep anti-establishment anger, on which Mr. Simion and his Alliance for the Union of Romanians party feed. Even now, traditional mainstream parties have little to say about the broken economic model that has brought us to this point. That dereliction has spurred the country’s disastrous slide to the far right.

The costs of our economic model are clear to see. Though Romania posts respectable growth numbers, it consistently performs among the worst in the European Union on many key social indicators, with 28 percent of the population at risk of poverty and a further 17 percent living in severe material deprivation. Despite successive increases in the minimum wage over the past decade, the median wage is barely over five euros an hour, about one-third the European Union average.

These are the fruits of over three decades of free-market orthodoxy, which has seen mass privatizations of industry, decreased security in the labor market and successive cuts to public services — all underpinned by strikingly low taxes, which stand at 16 percent for corporations and 10 percent on all personal income. This low-tax nirvana, which most American conservatives wouldn’t even dream of, comes hand in hand with the European Union’s largest budget deficit and a growing debt pile.

Yet most politicians seem strangely unconcerned with this state of affairs. Mr. Dan is no exception. The mayor of Bucharest since 2020, he has built his profile around fighting corruption and nefarious real estate interests. But he emphasizes the need for public spending cuts and has little to say, if anything, on socioeconomic justice. Recently, he stated that he is on the political right because it “prioritizes work instead of laziness.” This is in a country with the second-highest rate of in-work poverty and one of the lowest shares of G.D.P. spent on welfare in the European Union.