May 22 (UPI) — Far-right Romanian presidential candidate George Simion lost a legal bid Thursday to annul last weekend’s run-off election after a surprise loss to centrist rival, former Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan.
Romania’s Constitutional Court threw out the challenge to the election result by Simion, who accused foreign states, including France, of vote-buying and alleging ballot fraud involving some of Nicusor’s votes.
In a unanimous decision, the judges ruled Simion’s request to annul the election was “unfounded” because the presidential poll complied with all “procedures within the scope of its authority,” the court said.
Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians party, attacked the decision, calling it a “coup” and urged his supporters to fight on.
Dan, who is an independent, condemned Simion’s legal challenge as trumped up, saying “it was clear from the beginning to everyone that it was completely artificial.”
The strategically key European Union country and NATO ally has been in unprecedented territory since the court annulled a presidential election in December, two days before a run-off between centrist Elena Lasconi and previously unknown far-right candidate Calin Georgescu, citing Russian interference.
Simion polled 40.96% of the vote in the rerun of the election earlier this month — short of the 50% needed for an outright win — but was expected to prevail over Dan in Sunday’s run-off because the mayor received half as many votes.
Simion has previously argued against military assistance for Ukraine in its struggle to repel invading Russian forces and in favor of a return to the Greater Romania of the interwar years by reunifying Romania with neighboring Romanian-speaking Moldova.
Simion received a three-year entry ban from Ukraine in 2024 for “systematic anti-Ukrainian” activities and is also banned from neighboring Moldova on national security grounds.
The constitutional court’s decision to annul “the entire electoral process” came after declassified Romanian intelligence files detailed a security services warning that Russia had attacked the election system with an “aggressive hybrid action” in order to promote Georgescu.
The intelligence assessment was that Georgescu’s victory was “not a natural outcome,” and that a “state actor” had enabled him to leap ahead of Lasconi and Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu with an artificially coordinated social media campaign run from 25,000 TikTok accounts activated just two weeks before the first-round vote.
Condemning the alleged Russian interference, then-U.S. President Joe Biden said it was critical that Romanians had confidence their elections reflected the democratic will of the people “free of foreign malign influence aimed at undermining the fairness of their elections.”
