In rural southern Romania, farmer Marius Valeriu, 56, has decided to support George Simion from the nationalist party AUR in the first round of the presidential election on Sunday.
He doesn't think much of other politicians.
They're all thieves. We need to get rid of them once and for all. The people have woken up. Everyone is behind change, says Marius to the AFP news agency.
Romanian Trump
The 38-year-old Simion tops the opinion polls with his promises to put Romania first and likes to present himself as a Romanian Donald Trump.
We are ideologically almost perfectly in line with the Maga movement (Make America Great Again), Simion has explained, according to Politico Europe.
Simion wants to stop the military support to Ukraine and put an end to the influx of Ukrainian agricultural products. Nationalist statements about Romanians' status in neighboring countries have made him unwelcome in both Ukraine and Moldova.
He still wants to remain in both NATO and the EU, although he wants the latter to focus on the economy, and not "culture and defense".
Disqualified candidate
Romania actually held its presidential election last autumn, when the relatively unknown far-right candidate Calin Georgescu surprisingly got the most votes in the first round. However, this led to allegations of undue influence from outside, not least through Tiktok and other social media. The election was annulled and Georgescu was disqualified from running again.
His voters are now instead supporting Simion, who has also promised to work to make Georgescu prime minister. And Simion is also building much of his success on effective messages via Tiktok.
He has been using the platform for a long time, understands it and knows what type of content to upload, says media expert Raluca Radu to AFP.
Romania is holding a presidential election on Sunday, May 4. If no candidate directly gets more than 50 percent of the votes, the two most popular will go to a decisive second round on May 18.
Opinion polls suggest that George Simion from the far-right party AUR will get just under 30 percent of the votes, against around 20 percent for the former leader of the right-wing party PNL, Crin Antonescu, and the independent liberal mayor of Bucharest, Nicosur Dan.
The president represents Romania at EU summits. Much of the politics is, however, controlled by the government, which is currently leaning on a broad coalition in parliament between conservatives and social democrats.
