The Romanian election scenarios scaring Brussels – POLITICO

While Dan is also well placed to collect support from Romanians abroad, he’s not yet well known outside Bucharest, which is in fact his Achilles’ heel. Across Romania, “10 percent of the population don’t know who Nicușor Dan is,” and that could cost him victory in a tight second-round runoff against Simion, according to Ștefureac.

A poll published Monday by Curs, a polling company based in Bucharest, concluded the same, giving Simion (54 percent) an 8 percentage-point advantage over Dan (46 percent) in a hypothetical runoff.

Ștefureac stressed that it’s early days with the election still weeks away, and that a second-round campaign with “emotional traction” and an appeal to a broader coalition of voters could be highly unpredictable.

Simion vs. Antonescu

Antonescu, the husband of Romania’s former European commissioner Adina Vălean, is running with the backing of Bucharest’s governing parties: the center-left Social Democratic Party (PSD), the center-right National Liberal Party and the country’s Hungarian minority party, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania.

In this scenario, the establishment support is a clear advantage for Antonescu, as winning the second round in a presidential election is all about the ability of candidates to collect support beyond their base. But he’s at a disadvantage in the diaspora vote: Between 5 percent and 7 percent of total ballots are cast by Romanians abroad — who tend to vote “against the system,” Ștefureac said.

Romanians abroad previously supported liberal former President Klaus Iohannis in vast numbers as a protest against the once-powerful PSD. In November, Ștefureac recalled, Georgescu won diaspora votes by telling people that “You are there [abroad] because of the failed government that wasn’t able to gain enough prosperity in Romania, and you had to leave your families.”