From the modest living room of the Toader home, a Roma family from the outskirts of Tintesti − a poor and rural town two hours North of Bucharest − a new revolution seems to be dawning in Romania. "The people have awoken!" exclaimed Georgeta Toader, 55, a tall brunette with an arm wrapped in a compression stocking who lives off her meager disability pension and the typical resourcefulness of rural Romanian areas. "I always supported the Social Democratic Party (PSD), but we all changed our minds in 2024," asserted Toader, who cast her ballot for George Simion, the far-right candidate who led the first round of the presidential election on Sunday, May 4, with 41% of the votes. On her mobile phone, videos of the candidate scrolled on TikTok, which is quite popular in Romania.

"We are 7 kilometers from [the city of] Buzau, and we don't even have gas and running water; it would be better if Trump came to Romania right away," said Dana, a cousin who claimed to have switched her support to Simion after waiting too long for the construction of pipelines. "We need a radical change. I kept hoping in the PSD for a long time, but our country has been destroyed," added a niece, Silviana Preda, 49, explaining that she lives on 1,200 lei (€230) in sickness benefits after having earned a living for a few years by begging in Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

Once the leading party in Romanian rural areas, the PSD is now, for this small group of disillusioned people, just a bunch of "liars" and "thieves" who took "all the money from the European Union [EU] without doing anything."

Voice of the diaspora

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