Romania, a NATO member and host to a missile defense facility built by the United States, has been thrown into political disarray by the surprise victory of a little-known ultranationalist in the first round of a presidential election held this weekend.
Official results released Monday afternoon gave the most votes to Calin Georgescu, a dark-horse candidate without a party who had been widely dismissed as a fringe extremist. Mr. Georgescu, an expert on sustainable development who has worked for the United Nations, has denounced Ukraine, NATO and the European Union, and has often sided with Russia, and he has praised Romania’s fascist leader during World War II.
Despite leading, however, Mr. Georgescu took only 22.9 percent of the vote on Sunday, which is far short of the majority needed to win outright. He will therefore compete in a runoff on Dec. 8 against the second-place finisher, Elena Lasconi, a mayor and former journalist who took 19.2 percent.
Marcel Ciolacu, the center-left prime minister, came in third with just under 3,000 votes fewer than Ms. Lasconi. The vote involved a total of 14 candidates who were in general more centrist than Mr. Georgescu, as is Ms. Lasconi, suggesting he faces an uphill battle to win their voters in the second round.
The results have roiled Romanian politics just a week before a parliamentary election that will set the shape of the next government.
Romania’s president has limited powers, but they include a big say in military spending and foreign policy. Romania has been a firm supporter of Ukraine and has played a major role in strengthening NATO’s eastern flank. A new alliance air base near Mihail Kogalniceanu, a village near the Black Sea, will be one of NATO’s biggest in Europe.
The departing president, Klaus Iohannis, a multilingual ethnic German who has been in office since 2014, played down nationalist themes and pursued a strongly pro-Western foreign policy during his tenure. His popularity slumped amid widespread discontent over Romania’s strong but uneven economic development, high inflation and other problems.
Mr. Georgescu’s showing stunned not only Romania’s establishment parties but also George Simion, a right-wing populist and outspoken admirer of Donald J. Trump who had been expected to finish at least second. He came in fourth.
Mr. Georgescu, who campaigned mainly on social media and often spoke of his Christian faith, was largely ignored by mainstream news outlets. He cast himself as an avenger sent by God to serve Romanians, particularly those struggling to survive in rural areas. Many of those people feel betrayed by political elites since the collapse of communism in a bloody 1989 revolution that ousted the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Romania has flirted periodically with extreme nationalism, most notably in 2000, when Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a regime poet under Mr. Ceausescu who was known for virulent attacks on Hungarians, Jews and Roma, led in the first round of a presidential election. He lost the runoff to Ion Iliescu, who had been a senior Communist official, fell out of favor with Mr. Ceausescu, then served as the first post-revolution president.
Casting his ballot on Sunday, Mr. Georgescu declared the election a “prayer for the nation” that would give a voice to “the humiliated” and to “those who feel they do not matter and actually matter the most.”
A fervent champion of national sovereignty, he has frequently criticized the European Union and NATO, including an American missile defense facility at a base controlled by the alliance in the southern Romanian village of Deveselu, west of the capital, Bucharest.
That facility, along with a second missile defense system that recently started operations in Poland, has long been a major source of tension between Russia and the West.
Mr. Georgescu has denounced Romania’s agreement to host the Deveselu base as a “diplomatic shame.”
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says that the Romanian and Polish facilities, both fitted with ballistic missiles, were built to intercept Russian rockets and, before launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he demanded that they be shut down. The Pentagon says that the facilities were built to intercept missiles fired by rogue states like Iran.
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