What Elections in Romania and Poland Say About Populism and the Press

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In November, I wrote about a presidential election in Romania, and noted that much of the international coverage ahead of time had focused on George Simion, a far-right candidate; stories often cast him as “a threat to continued Romanian military assistance to neighboring Ukraine in the latter country’s war with Russia,” I wrote, and “also mentioned his support of Donald Trump, his background as a soccer hooligan, and his party’s giant Vlad the Impaler posters and slick TikTok videos.” In the end, however, Simion didn’t even make the second round of the election. The candidates who did qualify were Elena Lasconi, a moderate former TV journalist—and, shockingly, Călin Georgescu, an ultranationalist soil scientist who had gotten almost literally zero international attention ahead of the vote, and was not well-known domestically either, but surged late on thanks in no small part to a viral campaign on TikTok. A Romanian journalist called it “the first election where social media has been more influential than television. We have seen how TikTok can defeat mainstream media.”

This, however, was not close to the end of the story, or even the beginning of the end, as I explored in a follow-up newsletter in March: Romania’s government claimed that Georgescu had benefited from an online influence campaign, and effectively pointed the finger at Russia; officials then annulled the election altogether, teeing up a rerun to take place this month; Georgescu intended to stand again, but found himself under investigation on various grounds and then, eventually, disqualified. As the election neared, a new front-runner emerged on the right: Simion, who pledged that he would try to install Georgescu in a position of significant power and, in turn, received Georgescu’s endorsement. Two weeks ago, Simion picked up 40 percent of the vote in the first round of the election—not enough to win outright, but nearly double the score of his closest challenger, Nicușor Dan, the more moderate mayor of Bucharest, Romania’s capital. On Sunday, following the second round of voting, Simion declared, in a post on X, that he was the new president of Romania, using the emoji of the country’s flag. It may have looked like we were back where we started.

Simion’s claim, however, was not true—by this point, an exit poll had suggested that Dan was on course for an unexpected victory. (Apparently, Simion also used the wrong flag emoji—that of the African nation of Chad, whose flag looks extremely similar to Romania’s; either way, his post has since been deleted. Remarkably, this wasn’t Chad’s first cameo in Romania’s recent electoral drama.) Even before the votes were in, Simion alleged fraud—“Many deceased people are on Romanian electoral lists!” he wrote on X, adding, “this is not misinformation, but a fact”—and he continued to do so as the results were being counted, while calling on supporters to protest. In the end, though, he conceded. “We cannot accuse significant tampering with the ballots,” he said in a video message. “We’ll continue to represent the sovereignist, patriotic conservative movement in Romania, and we will continue to fight together with all the sovereignists, patriots, and conservatives around the world.”

Simion’s rallying cry was significant—since Georgescu’s breakthrough and its annulment last year, Romania has become a cause célèbre beyond its borders, not least among conservatives in the US. Politicians including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have seized on the episode to accuse Romania, and Europe more broadly, of democratic backsliding, while key figures in the new right-wing mediasphere have spotlighted the country, too; when Georgescu was still running, he did interviews with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and influencer Mario Nawfal; last month, Simion visited Washington and sat down with Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec, and, ahead of the second round of voting, video-called into Bannon’s show again, as well as speaking with Nawfal. (According to Politico, Simion came under pressure during the campaign for allegedly attempting to hire a US lobbying firm to set up media appearances and meetings with politicians; a presidential rival accused him of investing “in his own personality cult and in well-known conspiracists abroad.” Simion denied impropriety.) As well as proudly claiming Trump’s mantle, Simion has echoed his press-bashing rhetoric. Recently, he hauled journalists from a Romanian TV channel into his office, filmed himself giving them a dressing-down, then posted the footage to X; according to Romania Insider, Simion’s presence and the filming caught the journalists by surprise. Last week, during a trip to Brussels, he accused a reporter of supporting Dan and called the latter “autistic.” (Per Romania Insider, he later apologized for using that word, saying that he’d instead intended to call Dan a “Nazi,” a “Marxist,” or a “Sorosist.”)

In a sign of the internationalism of his crusade, Simion wasn’t just in Brussels in the run-up to the second round: he also traveled to France, where he made an in-person appearance on the right-wing network CNews, and to Poland, where he appeared at a rally with Karol Nawrocki, a historian backed by the hard-right Law and Justice Party, which led Poland’s government until 2023. Indeed, Nawrocki was himself up for election on Sunday as Poles went to the polls to choose a new president to replace Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice ally, who is term-limited. (Romania and Poland have both a president and a government led by a prime minister, elected separately; in both countries, the power of the president is thus limited, though the role remains highly significant.) According to the New York Times, Nawrocki, too, traveled to Washington recently, where he met Trump at the White House, and played up “his tough-guy credentials” at home, “posting images of himself training in the gym, boxing and firing guns.” In the end, he came in second in the first round of voting, fractionally behind Rafał Trzaskowski, of the centrist Civic Platform party that currently leads Poland under Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The pair will go to a runoff on June 1.

The outcome of the election will be highly significant—Law and Justice may not run the government anymore, but Duda has retained veto power and used it to stymie Civic Platform’s agenda as it has sought to unwind various authoritarian ways in which the previous government reshaped the Polish state. One key early theater for this dynamic was a fight over the state-run broadcaster, which I and Luke Johnson separately wrote about for CJR last year. Law and Justice effectively turned the broadcaster into a mouthpiece, using it to attack not only political opponents but critical media; after taking power in 2023, Civic Platform moved quickly to put a stop to this, but senior Law and Justice politicians dug their heels in—framing the move as an assault on media pluralism and even, at one point, occupying the broadcaster’s headquarters—and Duda threatened a veto. In response, the new government moved to place state-owned outlets into liquidation, a technical maneuver that officials said granted them authority over personnel and other matters. This proved controversial, however, even among rights groups and legal experts who had been critical of Law and Justice. One respected observer wrote at the time that the move echoed the latter party’s “modus operandi of executive decisionism at the blurry borders of legality.” 

Since then, the media has remained an area of contestation between the new government and the populist right. As Johnson noted in May of last year, while Duda benefited from overwhelmingly positive coverage on the state broadcaster while Law and Justice was in power, a report from one independent fact-checking group accused the broadcaster of bias in the other direction after Civic Platform took over (even if it was to compare this with the rampant politicization of the Law and Justice years); more recently, the government moved to add Poland’s two largest private TV networks to a list of strategic companies that cannot be sold without official approval, following rumors that an associate of the far-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán was looking to buy TVN, a US-owned channel (that I profiled in 2023). Ahead of the election, disagreement between Nawrocki, Trzaskowski, and other candidates as to which networks might host a debate and who might be allowed to take part led to a confusing mess whereby two rival debates nearly counterprogrammed each other and an eventual offering organized by the two major private networks and the state broadcaster ran for several hours, as the news site Notes from Poland reported. At one point, Nawrocki walked over to Trzaskowski’s lectern and placed a Pride flag on top of it.

According to Notes from Poland, the moderate Trzaskowski is still the favorite to win the second round, though only narrowly, and the first-round results, marked by stronger-than-expected support for the hard right generally, suggest that Nawrocki has a real chance—even if the outcome of the Romanian second round over the weekend should teach us not to be overly confident in making electoral predictions. That election may have been a reminder, too, that votes in disparate countries are not all about Trump or the state of the global right, however much certain candidates might gesture toward those things and the international media might like to treat the results as proxies for geopolitical power dynamics. Whatever happens next in Poland, its recent experience has already shown, as I suggested last year, that beating populists at the ballot box is no guarantee of an easy return to supposed political normalcy, in the area of media policy or anything else, and that liberals and moderates can easily behave undemocratically themselves, or appear to, even if they believe they are merely trying to reassert the status quo ante. (As I noted in March, it wasn’t just the US right that was up in arms about Romania’s annulled election, but voices on the left as well.)

And electoral defeat, of course, never spells the end of the right-wing populist fight or its media tactics, as voters in the US should know all too well by now. Simion may have lost, but this morning, he was still posting through it on X, promising a major announcement for “FREE ROMANIANS,” boosting an article headlined “The EU’s Quiet Coup in Romania,” and sharing a TikTok video in which he can be heard announcing, in part, “fuck all globalists,” scored to “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. Scroll down his feed, and messages of continued support from all over the world pop up: Poland, the US, France. In the six months since the annulled election, Marion Maréchal, the French far-right politician and Marine Le Pen relative, posted, Simion significantly increased his score. She added, “This result heralds the victories of tomorrow.” 

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, there was more turmoil at CBS, whose parent company, Paramount, is reportedly in talks to settle an absurd lawsuit brought by Trump over the network’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, as the company seeks federal approval for a corporate merger: Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News, is out, after executives reportedly told her to resign; in a memo, McMahon told staff that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” Her ouster follows the departure of Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, who cited concerns about corporate meddling with the program. According to the Times, the CEO of CBS proposed an idea last week that would have preempted another critical 60 Minutes report about Trump, though in the end this didn’t happen.

• Recently, CJR’s Meghnad Bose reported on the case of Celeste Gamble, a reporter for WKCR, the student radio station at Columbia University, who was pressed by administrators to participate in a “fact finding” meeting after covering a pro-Palestine protest. That case was resolved after Bose published his story, but he now reports, with Anna Oakes, that Gamble has since been investigated again after covering a subsequent protest in Columbia’s library; that case, too, was dropped, but Gamble says she still can’t access campus, and her treatment is emblematic of a wider trend at Columbia, Bose reports. Meanwhile, four reporters barred from covering a recent protest at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, which is public, are planning to sue.

• Karen Hao, a reporter at MIT Technology Review, is out with a new book, Empire of AI, about OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, based on hundreds of interviews and years of reporting. In an excerpt, Hao reflects on becoming the first reporter to be granted extensive access to the company, which was then obscure, back in 2019; she was granted three days to embed there for a profile, she writes, but while she was there, her access proved to be limited, and after she published her story, OpenAI didn’t speak to her again for several years. (ICYMI, CJR’s Camille Bromley recently interviewed another tech reporter, Steven Levy, about dealing with such companies.) 

• The Guardian reviewed another new book, How to Save the Amazon, that draws on the reporting of Dom Phillips, a former contributor to the paper who was killed, alongside an Indigenous expert with whom he was traveling, in the Amazon region of Brazil in 2022. (An alleged local poacher has been charged with masterminding the killings.) A committee of journalists attempted to complete the reporting that Phillips was undertaking at the time. “Nothing good could come from such a heinous murder,” they write, “but we could at least prevent the killers from silencing the story.” 

• And, after former president Joe Biden revealed over the weekend that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, Scott Adams—the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, which was syndicated by many newspapers but dropped by most of them in 2023, after Adams made racist remarks—said that he has been diagnosed with the same condition, and expects to die soon. Adams said on his podcast that he hadn’t revealed his illness sooner because “once you go public, you’re just the dying cancer guy,” and also criticized the “cruel” public reaction to Biden’s revelation.

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