Romania & Poland halt hard-right breakthroughs

BUCHAREST: Presidential elections on Sunday in Romania and Poland - the two most populous countries on Europe's formerly communist eastern fringe - halted, or at least slowed, a hard-right breakthrough that many liberals had feared.

In Romania, a centrist mayor who campaigned as an independent untainted by close ties to two long-dominant mainstream parties - widely viewed as corrupt - defeated another outsider, a hard-line nationalist who aligned himself with US President Trump and had been seen as the front-runner.

Nicusor Dan, the mayor of Romania's capital, Bucharest, won a decisive victory over George Simion in a runoff for Romania's presidency, confounding expectations of a sharp turn to the right. He won 54% of the vote, boosted by an unusually high turnout of 64%. That turnout was nearly 10% more than in the first round, in which Simion trounced Dan and nine other candidates.

The result Sunday delighted mainstream political leaders across Europe and also the EU's executive arm in Brussels, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, congratulated voters for having "chosen the promise of an open, prosperous Romania in a strong Europe."

Simion, who Sunday responded to early results that showed him losing with cries of fraud and Trump-like vows to "stop the steal," curbed his fury early Monday, conceding defeat and dropping complaints of irregularities in a video address. "We may have lost a battle, but we will certainly not lose the war," he said on the social platform X. "We will continue our fight for freedom and our great values along with other patriots, sovereigntists and conservatives all over the world."

Poland delivered a far less emphatic rebuff to EU-skeptic nationalism, with hard-right candidates taking second, third and fourth places in the first round of presidential race.

Rafal Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Poland, and an ally of PM Donald Tusk, still came in first. That secured him a slot in a runoff June 1 against the second-place finisher, Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist historian backed by Poland's previous governing party, Law and Justice. But the margin of his victory - 31.3% of the vote to Nawrocki's 29.5%, according to the official count - was so small and support for hard-right candidates so strong that a repeat win for Trzaskowski in the runoff is far from certain.

Like Simion in Romania, Nawrocki positioned himself during the campaign as part of an unstoppable global movement, visiting Washington in early May for a meeting in the White House with Trump, who gave him a thumbs-up.