Crossing the red line: Romania’s centre-left and far-right team up

It has been a loud couple of months on Europe’s eastern front. In Hungary, voters recently ended sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s rule. Bulgaria, after eight elections in five years, finally produced a stable governing majority. And yet, Romania’s governing coalition, assembled around a year ago as a pro-European bulwark against the far right, has just collapsed.

The party that leads the polls, the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), describes itself — in its leader’s own words — as “the European branch of the MAGA movement”. It is currently polling at around 38%, far ahead of any mainstream party. The continent spent the last decade watching Hungary closely. George Simion may be on the verge of becoming its next Orbán.

It began on 5th May when Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan lost a no-confidence vote initiated by the Social Democratic Party (PSD), itself a member of his coalition. To secure the numbers, PSD turned to AUR. This was not the manoeuvre of a fringe party. PSD is currently Romania’s largest parliamentary party. What PSD did has a name in European democratic politics: breaking the cordon sanitaire.

The cordon sanitaire is a long-standing principle, borrowed from public health by mainstream parties, to not collaborate with anti-democratic forces — because doing so legitimises what should remain illegitimate. The principle of the cordon sanitaire is now eroding across the continent: in Sweden, in the Netherlands, and even in the EU, where the centre-right European People’s Party has repeatedly passed legislation with the far-right. What happened in Bucharest is simply the latest instance.

The aftermath has been no less troubling. On the 4th June, President Nicușor Dan nominated Eugen Tomac as Prime Minister — the leader of a party that won 2% of the vote in 2024 and holds no parliamentary seats. Tomac is not even a technocrat. He is a career politician whose sole qualification is the President’s personal trust. The only arithmetic that makes his confirmation possible runs through PSD.

PSD will not hold ministerial portfolios openly. But they will place loyalists in key positions, as they have done in every similar government Romania has produced. And if Tomac fails to secure the 233 votes needed from the two parliamentary chambers, Dan can make one further nomination. If that also fails, the constitution requires the President to dissolve the parliament and call early elections. This is the outcome AUR has been angling for since the beginning.

What fear assembles, interest dismantles

To grasp why the governing coalition collapsed so quickly, one must first understand what brought it together. Romania’s coalition was born in the aftermath of one of the most serious democratic crises any EU member state has experienced in recent years: the annulment of the first round of the 2024 presidential election. This followed evidence of a coordinated foreign interference campaign that propelled far-right outsider Călin Georgescu to a surprise first-place finish.

Out of the wreckage, the mainstream parties formed a government around a single organising principle: to keep the far-right out. PSD, once Romania’s dominant, post-Communist force, had just recorded its worst electoral result in history. After failing for the first time to place a candidate in the presidential run-off, it allied with the centre-right National Liberal Party (PNL), the centrist Save Romania Union, and the minority interests Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania.

To sweeten the deal, a rotation was agreed: PNL’s Ilie Bolojan would govern first as Prime Minister and a PSD premier would follow. It was a coalition held together not by a shared conviction, but by the fear of something worse. Bolojan’s government came to power facing one of the worst fiscal situations in the EU, with a deficit at nearly 8% of GDP. The Prime Minister tackled it with measures that were blunt and poorly targeted, with little social sensitivity.

Indeed, public frustration was real. But the reason PSD moved against him had nothing to do with austerity’s social impact. PSD ministers co-signed every measure they now condemn. To understand the real reason, it is important to acknowledge that Romania’s political class has historically treated the state as a resource to be distributed among insiders, rather than a public good to be governed.

PSD is the consummate practitioner of this logic: a vast network of local power brokers whose influence depends on discretionary funds, public contracts, and political appointments from the centre. Bolojan cut off the supply, that is why he had to go. On April 20th, PSD held an internal vote, ironically known as “The Moment of Truth”, in which 97.7% of delegates voted to withdraw support. The result was known before the first ballot was cast.

The firewall breaks

After that, PSD still needed AUR’s votes to bring down Bolojan in the no-confidence vote. Both parties had publicly ruled out working together, yet they voted together anyway. The argument being made, namely that it was merely a tactical vote and not an ideological alignment, is precisely the reasoning that makes such arrangements so corrosive.

Each individual step seems containable. It is only when you look back that you notice how far you have walked. The cordon sanitaire was broken by a party that sits in the Party of European Socialists. That last fact has not received the attention it deserves. For years, European social democrats criticised the centre-right for normalising extremist forces through tactical cooperation. It has now done the same.

The no-confidence vote was not an isolated incident. PSD senators recently voted again with AUR in the Senate’s Human Rights Committee to green light a bill re-legalising Legionary symbols and the honouring of war criminals. This is a reversal of legislation passed just months earlier that had toughened penalties for fascist propaganda.

PSD’s leader Sorin Grindeanu called it “a mistake”. However, he did not acknowledge the real reason his senators had made it. The case of Romania illustrates quite well something European politics has been too slow to acknowledge: the danger does not always come from the far-right crossing into the mainstream. Sometimes it comes from the mainstream crossing to the far-right.

A shadow cast in both directions

This crisis casts a shadow backwards because the annulled election of 2024 has never been properly resolved. No one in the intelligence services has been held accountable. The declassified report promised by the President has not appeared. The annulment was the right decision and the wrong precedent: it resolved an immediate crisis by creating a longer-term legitimacy problem. The conditions that produced the crisis — public cynicism, institutional capture, and the erosion of trust in the political system — were never properly addressed.

But it also casts a shadow forward because AUR, currently polling ahead of each of the mainstream parties, is watching with undisguised satisfaction. Romania faces a hard August deadline to deliver structural reforms and claim the final ten billion euros of its European recovery funds. A budget built on that absorption cannot survive prolonged political paralysis.

AUR therefore needs only to wait. Every week of instability, every billion euros of recovery funds at risk, every image of pro-European parties tearing each other apart, confirms AUR’s central argument: the system is rotten to its core and cannot fix itself. And a survey published in April by the Political Rating Agency shows that this is working: nearly 40% of Romanians believe their political system needs to be replaced, regardless of the means used.

Mourning in future tense

These are no longer simply protest figures. They are the kind of numbers that precede proper societal ruptures. Historians will one day note the strange myopia of it. A year ago, Romania narrowly avoided handing its presidency to a man who had been propelled to first place through a coordinated foreign influence operation. Georgescu is someone who, had the constitutional court not intervened, would have held the highest office in the state while being, in effect, a product of external manipulation aimed at the heart of Romanian democracy.

The spectre of the cancelled elections comes back because the people who cancelled them learned nothing from why they had to. You can annul a ballot. You cannot annul the conditions that produced it. The conditions that led to foreign interference working are still here, and they are being dangerously tended by the political class that desperately holds onto power.

Turkish author Ece Temelkuran writes that “this is the first time in human history we are mourning in future tense”. We watch things we love, such as democracy, the rule of law, and the post-war European order, being eroded — and we grieve for them before they are fully gone. Unlike previous crises, something in us suspects that the pendulum may not swing back this time.