Propelled overnight into the spotlight, far-right Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu has put aside his most controversial declarations for a single motto: “Romania first”, in a Trumpian style.
A few days before the second round, where he will face a centrist mayor, Elena Lasconi, the sixty-year-old is hammering home his nationalist program and dodging press conferences and angry questions.
His role model: US President-elect Donald Trump. “I’m 100% for Trump,” he told the media this week. “I share his state of mind”, his “pragmatism”, his “vision”.
“Just as he put America first, Romania must be first,” he explains, interviewed by the Politico news site.
When asked if he is pro-Russian, he replies that he is “pro-Romanian”, evading questions about the admiration he has displayed in the past for Vladimir Putin and “Russian wisdom”, and prefers to brandish “l importance of the partnership with the United States.
As for the EU and NATO, this former senior official assures that he does not want to leave but criticizes the double standard between the different member states. With him, Romania will “keep its head high and not kneel” in the face of diktats from the outside.
In June, however, he estimated that the Atlantic alliance was “the weakest on the planet”. “Why stay in a club that offers no security?”, he said.
– Protectionism –
Since his surprise arrival at the top of the first round of the presidential election on November 24, Calin Georgescu has weighed each of his words, anxious to bring people together.
Far from the anonymity of the first round, impeccable in his suit, he voted in the legislative elections on Sunday in front of a swarm of cameras alongside his naturopath wife.
Faced with attacks from his adversaries, “he is modifying his speech”, comments political scientist Radu Magdin for AFP. And to make people forget his pro-Russian sympathies, “he plays the Trump card”.
Like the billionaire, he advocates “peace” in Ukraine and opposes all military aid, refusing to be “dragged into a conflict that is not ours”.
Same similarity on the economic side: this agricultural engineer is the champion of protectionism, promising to reverse the questionable privatizations of the post-communist era.
“When today I pay for water, I pay a French company (…). I also pay a foreign company for gas. The same for electricity and gasoline,” he was offended.
Like Trump again, he regularly relays false information, from Covid-19 to climate change. And also prefaced the Romanian edition of the latest book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a follower of conspiracy theories to whom the Republican wants to entrust the keys to the Ministry of Health.
– “Magnetism” –
Finally, he also mentions God and says he is the victim of a cabal while the authorities accused him of having benefited from “preferential treatment” on social networks, where his videos have been seen millions of times.
“It wasn’t TikTok who voted, it was people in the flesh,” he reacts. The platform denied the allegations.
Among the voters interviewed by AFP, many evoke his image of “a serious and patriotic man, capable of bringing change”, his “family” values.
The many undecided people, disappointed and feeling abandoned by traditional parties in a difficult economic context, saw in him “a savior”, according to experts.
“He speaks like in old Romanian films, with a deep voice and slow movements”, giving off a certain “magnetism”, describes Radu Magdin.
Calin Georgescu began his career in 1992 within the Ministry of the Environment before joining that of Foreign Affairs. He also carried out missions within UN agencies in Vienna and Geneva.
His name appeared as a possible Prime Minister in the 2010s. But it was ten years later that he truly emerged on the public scene, taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to spread a conspiracy story.
Once linked to the far-right AUR party – whose candidate George Simion supported him in the second round – he was removed after positions considered anti-Semitic and too radical.
Before “feeling” a year and a half ago a call to become president, he says.
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