In the bedraggled Romanian village of Pestera, 45 percent of the residents have moved abroad. Farmland has been bought up by foreigners and well-connected locals. The only business besides farming is a German-owned convenience store.

Nearly every family has a father or mother working outside Romania. And most of those who stayed behind, according to the village’s mayor, were — at least until the cancellation of Romania’s presidential election on Sunday — “waiting for the messiah,” in the form of an ultranationalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, who promised jobs, good salaries and dignity for those feeling forgotten.

In Pestera, Mr. Georgescu won 46 percent of the vote last month in the opening round of the presidential race. The village, with few paved roads and far from Bucharest, the prosperous capital, illustrates why the 62-year-old former soil expert without a political party has set off Romania’s most severe bout of political turbulence in decades.

Located in rolling farmland between a communist-era nuclear power plant and a large and growing NATO air base near the Black Sea, Pestera is a microcosm of the parts of Romania that feel ignored by established parties. There, nationalism has become a powerful vehicle for expressing anger at an establishment seen as corrupt, neglectful of people’s needs and too beholden to the European Union and foreign business interests.

Mr. Georgescu won the first vote for the presidency on Nov. 24 (85 percent of Pestera’s vote went to him and two nationalist rivals). But on Friday, the result of that vote was annulled by Romania’s constitutional court, which also called off a final runoff election that had been scheduled for Sunday, between Mr. Georgescu and a pro-European centrist, Elena Lasconi. The court ordered a redo, saying it wanted to “to ensure the correctness and legality of the electoral process.”