About this election
The 2025 Romanian presidential election — the court-ordered re-run of the annulled 2024 vote — was held on 4 and 18 May 2025 and produced a dramatic come-from-behind victory for Nicușor Dan, the independent, pro-European mayor of Bucharest, who defeated the hard-right nationalist George Simion of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) by 53.60% to 46.40% in the run-off. Simion had crushed the field in the first round with 40.96% to Dan's 20.99%, and the run-off was widely seen across Europe as a referendum on whether Romania would remain anchored in the EU and NATO or pivot toward the Eurosceptic, pro-sovereignty nationalism surging across the continent. A record run-off turnout of 64.72%, swelled by an enormous diaspora vote, delivered the presidency to Dan.
Romania's directly elected president serves a five-year term under a two-round majority system and holds significant sway over foreign and security policy and the choice of prime minister, while governing power rests with a cabinet answerable to Parliament. The 2025 contest was extraordinary precisely because it existed at all: it was convened after the Constitutional Court annulled the 2024 election over alleged foreign interference, and it unfolded amid acute political instability, including the resignation of Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu after the governing coalition's candidate failed to reach the run-off.
Călin Georgescu, the sensation of 2024, was barred from running, and his nationalist constituency consolidated behind Simion, the youthful, combative AUR leader who campaigned on sovereignty, social conservatism and hostility to the Brussels and Bucharest establishments. Dan, a mathematician and civic activist who founded the USR before becoming Bucharest's mayor, ran as a sober, anti-corruption pro-Westerner, drawing support from across the fragmented centre and centre-left after the establishment candidates were eliminated. The two-week run-off campaign was intense, featuring a pivotal televised debate and a late surge of diaspora mobilisation. Simion's earlier flirtations with annexationist rhetoric toward Moldova and his combative style alarmed moderate voters who broke decisively for Dan.
The geography of the run-off mirrored Romania's deep urban–rural and regional divides. Simion won 23 of the 42 counties — the rural south, much of Muntenia, and the Moldavian counties of the east and north-east — while Dan won 19 counties but ones with far larger, more urban electorates. Dan swept Bucharest (around 70%), the cities and university centres, the prosperous counties of Transylvania and Banat (Cluj, Timiș, Sibiu, Brașov), and the Hungarian-majority counties of Harghita and Covasna by overwhelming margins, where the UDMR's voters rejected Simion's nationalism almost unanimously. Above all, Dan carried the diaspora — long a nationalist stronghold in 2024 — by a wide margin, the decisive bloc that flipped the result. Simion's larger count of counties could not overcome Dan's commanding leads in the populous urban and Transylvanian units.
Dan was inaugurated as Romania's sixth president on 26 May 2025. His victory was greeted with relief in EU and NATO capitals as a check on the nationalist tide, but he inherited a fractured political landscape, a yawning budget deficit, and a large, mobilised hard-right opposition that disputed the legitimacy of the whole 2024–2025 process. The election confirmed AUR and Simion as the dominant force of the Romanian right and reshaped the party system that had structured politics since 1990.
Dan's victory was built on two pillars that overturned the conventional wisdom of 2024. The first was the diaspora: the millions of Romanians abroad, who had broken for the nationalist right in the annulled election, swung decisively to Dan in the re-run, handing him commanding majorities in the external vote that proved numerically decisive. The second was the country's deep geographic divide. Simion dominated the poorer, more rural and more religiously traditional counties of the south and of Moldavia in the north-east, while Dan piled up huge margins in Bucharest, the prosperous cities, the historically Western-oriented regions of Transylvania and Banat, and — almost unanimously — in the Hungarian-majority counties of Harghita and Covasna, where the UDMR electorate rejected Simion's ethnonationalism. Although Simion carried more counties, Dan's leads in the densely populated urban units delivered the national majority.
Coming weeks after a hard-right scare in other European votes, Dan's win was read across the EU as evidence that the nationalist surge could still be halted by a mobilised pro-European majority. Yet the closeness of the contest — and the fact that more than 46% of voters backed a candidate hostile to the Brussels consensus — underlined how profoundly Romanian politics had been transformed since 2020. AUR had grown from a fringe movement into the country's principal opposition force, and the traditional governing parties, the PSD and PNL, had been reduced to defending the centre rather than commanding it. Dan inherited not a settled order but a polarised, distrustful electorate and a fragile institutional landscape still reeling from the annulment crisis.
Permanent Electoral Authority (Autoritatea Electorală Permanentă) and the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC) — roaep.ro.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.