Belgium’s Romanians poised to propel the far right into power

BRUSSELS — They may barely know him, but Călin Georgescu is betting hard on their votes.

Long disillusioned with Romania’s political class and bitter at being forced to leave home, Belgium’s 130,000-strong Romanian population looks set to help push the maverick ultranationalist presidential candidate into office, along with hard-right parties backing him in parliament. 

In the first round of the presidential election, one in six votes cast for Georgescu came from the Romanian diaspora — something the former bureaucrat is well aware of. Speaking after the election Monday, he told journalists the diaspora “were forced to go abroad” and are “much more humiliated than the Romanians here,” in a clear signal to his supporters abroad that they’re on his radar.

On Sunday, Romanians vote in crucial parliamentary elections, with polls showing hard-right parties on track to bag a third of the ballots, riding on the momentum created by Georgescu who surged in the polls out of nowhere last Sunday to secure a shock win.

The stakes are high. An outright victory for the far-right presidential hopeful, an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin and staunch euroskeptic, would shatter Romania’s image as a reliable NATO ally and EU member in southeastern Europe at a time when the bloc is facing the war in Ukraine raging at its border and the return of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

In Belgium, 51 percent of Romanians cast their ballots for the far-right presidential candidate in last Sunday’s election. Now, voters there are “very likely” to back him again in the runoff scheduled for Dec. 8, said Oana Zamfir, director of the Bucharest-based GlobalFocus Center think tank. 

The result reflects a broader pattern globally. Outside Romania, 43 percent of voters opted for Georgescu, who topped the polls in the U.K., France, Germany and Italy. His main rival for the presidency, the liberal Elena Lasconi, took just 27 percent of the vote abroad.

Partly, that’s because the diaspora are “very frustrated with the fact that they had to build a life elsewhere, very much idealizing their home country and seeing it as prisoner to a political class that’s inept and has not been able to create the conditions for them to stay home,” she said.

Anti-system feeling

In Belgium, where Romanians make up the country’s second largest immigrant population, voters opted for Georgescu partly because of a feeling of abandonment by the state, according to Daria Pîrvu, a project expert at the ROMBEL non-profit organization, which hosts discussion groups and provides practical information to the Romanians in Belgium.

First arriving in the early 2000s as Romania suffered political turbulence after the fall of communism in search of better wages, the majority now work in construction, for the EU, or as small business owners, she said. Tens of thousands more work on farms in precarious conditions, Pîrvu added.

But “a lack of education” among some, combined with a feeling of being “rejected” inside Belgium, has helped fuel both a general frustration and distaste for mainstream parties in Romania, she said.

For some, Georgescu represents a welcome change. 

Elena, a 40-year-old worker in a Romanian food store who arrived in Brussels from Bucharest one year ago and declined to give her last name, did not vote in the first round last week but said she was now considering backing the ultranationalist in the runoff.

“From what I’ve heard, a lot of people want to vote for him because they hope he’ll change Romania for the better,” she said. “Let’s hope he will … keep his promises.”

Now, that’s a recipe Georgescu and other rightwing parties hope will pay dividends.

While the candidate himself has no political party, another hard-right party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), is capitalizing on his brand ahead of the parliamentary vote to win voters in Belgium in a bid to form a broad coalition of nationalist lawmakers.

Viorel Ungureanu, a coordinator of the party’s Belgian arm, said the campaign’s 80 volunteers have mostly focused their messaging on telling “people that AUR supports Georgescu.”

“Everybody that wants to have Georgescu as president, they understand that he needs to be supported by a political party with the same values,” he added, arguing he was “pretty confident” AUR would do well on Sunday.

Still, Lasconi’s pro-EU Save Romania Union (USR) party isn’t giving up either.

Arabela Sabangeanu, a USR MP candidate in Belgium, said her team was “intensifying” campaigning efforts by stepping up their TikTok presence and boosting in-person canvassing ahead of the parliamentary vote. She said she was “very much optimistic” about the outcome.

“Our democracy is at stake,” Sabangeanu said. There’s a “feeling of emergency — it’s now or never.”