Many officials across Europe see U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration as a shared victory. Count George Simion among them.
The conservative Romanian figure, president of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians party, is in Washington this week to celebrate Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. He said that throughout his country and the European continent as a whole, there’s a belief that shared core values on both sides of the Atlantic are politically ascendant like never before.
“We fight for the same values … We share the same goals: To put our countries first, to collaborate, to grow economically, and to fight against new Marxism, to fight against woke propaganda, to fight against the ones who want to take our children from us, from the family, and want to indoctrinate them,” Mr. Simion told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview.
“We fight for biology and truth. We fight to keep men and women, not 76 types of gender,” he added.
Mr. Simion met with House Speaker Mike Johnson and other key Republican figures during events across Washington on Sunday. As vice president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, he said he came to the U.S. with a “mandate” to represent the continent’s conservatives at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
In Romania, the AUR party was founded in 2019. Mr. Simion described the party as “part of the Trump wave” that took root in the U.S. a decade ago.
While part of what he considers a worldwide conservative movement, Mr. Simion and his colleagues are dealing with considerable political turmoil at home.
In December, a Romanian court annulled the results of the November presidential election amid allegations that a well-orchestrated Russian political interference campaign helped long-shot conservative Calin Georgescu finish in first place.
He garnered about 23% of the vote despite having polled in the low single digits just a few months before the November contest. Mr. Simion also ran in the election, finishing in fourth place.
New elections are set for May, but Mr. Simion said it isn’t clear whether Mr. Georgescu will even be allowed to run. He said that Romanian courts never produced concrete proof of the alleged Russian meddling.
“We are dealing with a captured state in Romania by people who only listen to their own corrupt interests, to the globalist system,” Mr. Simion said, adding that he’ll support Mr. Georgescu if he’s allowed into the race because the Romanian people voted for him.
The European Union last month launched a formal investigation of the China-linked social media app TikTok, which the EU said was used as part of the purported Russian plot in Romania.
Declassified EU intelligence files alleged that the scheme included payments worth $381,000 to TikTok influencers to promote Mr. Georgescu’s candidacy.
TikTok said it worked to protect the integrity of the platform during the Romanian electoral process.
Still, some key U.S. political figures said they, too, saw Russian manipulation at work in the Romanian election.
“We condemn [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s manipulation of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled TikTok to undermine Romania’s democratic process. The world must wake up to the serious threat to democracy posed by Russian manipulation of TikTok to undermine our free societies,” a bipartisan group of senators wrote in a joint letter last month, after the EU announced its TikTok investigation.
The group included Sen. James Risch, Idaho Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Mr. Simion, whose AUR party organized protests against the court’s annulment of the election, said that it was Mr. Georgescu’s message, not a Russian-TikTok scheme, that led to his strong showing.
“The people in Romania, across Europe and across the world are fed up with politicians and the lies and the current system. He rose up as an independent figure,” Mr. Simion said of Mr. Georgescu.
On the Russia-Ukraine war, Mr. Simion backed Mr. Trump’s push to end the conflict as soon as possible. But he stressed that Eastern Europe is also looking for guarantees against future Russian aggression against their nations.
“We need a truce so that innocent lives are spared,” he said. “We need to come to a peace plan and we think only President Trump is capable of making peace in our region, because we are neighbors with Ukraine.”
Romania, which has a 380-mile border on Ukraine’s southwest, has been a member since 2004 of the NATO alliance, which declares that an attack on one is an attack on all.
“On the other hand, we need security guarantees that Russia won’t do this in the future. Because there’s a huge possibility that Russia tries this again,” Mr. Simion said.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.