18 hours in the making of a president: Inside Nicușor Dan’s election win

It’s 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 18 — election day — and Nicușor Dan is trying to hold it together. 

After months of campaigning in the country’s fraught presidential race, the independent mayor of Bucharest has just 12 hours left before he will learn his fate. 

The morning air is cool in the yard outside School Number 4 in Făgăraș, Dan’s Transylvanian hometown. The sun breaks through, picking out streaks of snow on the tops of the mountains in the distance. 

Today, the school Dan attended as a young boy is being used as a polling station, and he has chosen to come here with his long-term partner Mirabela Grădinaru to vote. At one point, the emotion of returning home and seeing his old neighbors and teachers threatens to overwhelm him. 

“I was forcing myself not to,” Dan tells POLITICO afterward, laughing, as he mimes tears rolling down his face. “It was very emotional.”

Wearing a plain dark suit, white shirt and navy tie, he grips Grădinaru by the hand as they meet familiar faces and old friends on the playground. Several receive hugs. 

Dan, 55, was born in the house next door to the school, a low-rise building painted apricot pink, with vines hanging over the garden to the side. His parents lived in the town for most of their lives, and Dan returned here for several months during the pandemic before winning his first term as mayor of Bucharest later in 2020.

With voting underway, POLITICO was granted exclusive access to Dan as he spent time with his family and closest aides away from the TV cameras on election day. These would be the last hours of calm before his life would be transformed forever. When the results rolled in on Sunday night, it became clear he had defied the odds and beaten the radical right-wing nationalist George Simion to take the presidency. 

Dan’s victory was cheered in the halls of power across much of Europe, where many centrist politicians and officials had feared Simion would derail their mainstream agenda.

Desperate Dan

While the opinion polls had started to tighten in the final week of the campaign, the 38-year-old Simion had been favored to win the run-off after winning the first round with 41 percent of the vote to Dan’s 21 percent. 

“After the first round, the people for our side felt a little bit desperate,” Dan says, seated at the Bistro Story Caffe in the center of Făgăraș, with his partner and family at the next table. “Mr. Simion made a lot of mistakes,” he adds, chief among them refusing to show up for television debates. 

Dan and Simion debated each other directly only once — a three-hour affair that observers agreed benefited the mayor. While Simion spent much of the time attacking his opponent loudly and aggressively, Dan remained calm, delivering methodical responses and refusing to be drawn into a slanging match. 

And that is very much his style: even-tempered, technical, intellectual, and showing little interest in game-playing or political theater. By background, Dan is a gifted mathematician, twice winning the International Mathematical Olympiad as a young man, and he has previously said he’d return to academia if he were to leave politics. 

His otherworldliness can clearly be disconcerting for opponents who prefer a political street-fight to intellectual analysis. In the final days of the campaign, Simion caused an uproar by calling Dan “autistic.”

English breakfast

Unlike many thrusting and ambitious leaders, Dan does not have a punishing workout routine to brag about. Instead he stays trim by skipping evening meals. By the time he makes it to the restaurant, he’s ready for his “English breakfast” of eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and toast. 

Despite the obvious election day nerves, Dan’s team is optimistic. During the interview, news filters through suggesting that voting is going his way. It’s still early and a lot can change. But Dan’s 9-year-old daughter has been checking Polymarket every day — and his odds keep getting better. 

Yet the campaign contained dark moments. Dan was the subject of abuse and criticism for his personal life choices in a traditionally religious and socially conservative country. He refers to his long-term partner Grădinaru as his “wife,” but they are not legally married. At one point his critics said he was “some kind of satanist” because they had not baptized their children, he says. 

“For City Hall I had four campaigns. I have always been attacked of course but never my family, and never my wife,” he says. “It was the first time that she was attacked. It was quite difficult for her.”

Dan decided to run for the presidency last December as Romania collapsed into a constitutional crisis over an aborted first attempt to hold presidential elections. State authorities suspected a vast foreign interference campaign had helped catapult a previously little-known, Moscow-sympathizing ultranationalist into first place in the first round in November. 

Shortly before last year’s scheduled second round, Romania’s Constitutional Court ruled that the questions over the campaign of the candidate, Călin Georgescu, were so grave that the entire election had to be canceled and run again in May. Georgescu was prevented from taking part but Simion embraced him, attracting a huge following and promising if he won to make Georgescu prime minister.  

Broken trust

Dan says the trust of Romanians in politics has been severely damaged. He has a plan to restore it by addressing the widespread cynicism about the canceled election (many voters believe it was just the old deep state in action, exposing democracy as a sham). 

He intends to begin by releasing more documents about what happened so the public can see the evidence for themselves. “The Romanian state didn’t explain enough why the election had been canceled,” he says. Then there are personnel changes he can make: appointing a new ombudsman, adding new judges to the Constitutional Court, and appointing new chief prosecutors with a remit to tackle corruption. 

He also plans to overhaul the inspectorate of the judicial system, which is supposed to regulate the activities of judges and prosecutors. “It doesn’t work,” Dan says. “It doesn’t make proper evaluation[s]” and is inconsistent. The way magistrates are appointed and promoted is also in dire need of reform. “The criteria are more personal than objective,” Dan notes.

“But the main answer to your question is it will take time to regain the trust of the people,” he says. 

Corruption in Romania has been a problem for decades and remains stubborn at the local level, inside the bureaucracy and also at the top of business and politics. But previous efforts at tackling corruption have faltered, Dan says, including one under Traian Băsescu’s 2004-2014 presidency, when there were “many excesses” such as suspects being outed as corrupt before they had even been prosecuted in court.

Dan promises to nominate a new chief prosecutor within his first year in office. “That will be a big moment,” he says, “to nominate a prosecutor that will work systematically on the big corruption points, which are: tax evasion, real estate, deforestation and [the] network of drug dealers.”

Foreign relief 

For much of the past five months, Dan’s pugnacious opponent Simion seemed likely to ride a wave of popular anger at “the system” into Cotroceni Palace. Simion threatened a Romanian MAGA revolution — channeling the election slogan of U.S. President Donald Trump — and vowed to stand up to Brussels, cut off aid to Ukraine and punish his critics in the media and elsewhere. 

While aligning himself with Trump and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Simion signaled his anti-establishment credentials by accusing French President Emmanuel Macron of having “dictatorial tendencies.” Macron then spoke to Dan by phone in a call arranged through Romania’s former prime minister, Dacian Cioloș, who knows both men. 

Macron “was extremely friendly with me, and also concerned because it’s not just a Romanian question,” Dan says. Macron told Dan he was worried that Simion would block aid to Moldova and Ukraine and hold up efforts to rearm Europe. 

Dan says he would “strongly” support the greater integration of EU defense. “I want to maintain the partnership with the United States. But supporting the European effort to strengthen European security to inter-operationalize the structure of the European countries [and their militaries] and of course increasing [defense expenditures].” 

Watch out Brussels

Dan says Romania has not been “active enough” in Brussels in recent years. Ahead of EU budget negotiations he has pledged to be more energetic in “promoting the Romanian interest, which would be in the near future the negotiation of the Multiannual Financial Framework [and] the Common Agriculture [Policy].” Expanding the EU to the Balkans and supporting Moldova’s “European direction” would also be key policies, he adds. 

What about sending Romanian troops to Ukraine as part of any future peacekeeping force? 

“First, to have a big operational support on Romanian territory, yes. To be part of the armies guaranteeing peace in Ukraine, no. I think it would not be very appropriate because of the tension that already exists between Romania and Russia.” 

Dan has been critical of Trump’s approach to seeking a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose unrealistic demands do not augur well for the prospects of peace. Dan emphasizes again that when it comes to a settlement, “anything on Ukraine has to be decided and agreed by the Ukrainians themselves.” He adds: “I’m not very optimistic that we will have peace very soon and I’m also glad that Europeans together decided to continue to support Ukraine until they obtain the most reasonable peace for themselves.” 

No palace, thanks

During the interview he breaks off to chat and laugh with his daughter, who wanders off to play with an antique telephone on a nearby side table. Later, his 3-year-old son bursts in and Dan is instantly delighted, abandoning his answer mid-sentence to lift his boy up and tip him onto his back to be tickled. “I missed the contact with them a lot,” Dan says. 

Dan had just won reelection as mayor of the capital when the Georgescu election crisis blew up last year. “The first question my daughter asked me in December was: ‘What will people think about you? You just earned City Hall of Bucharest and you want now to earn more!’”

“I tried to explain [to] her that it’s something important, that in Romania the people do not trust politicians and we need someone that has some trust … and she understood. From that moment every morning when she wakes up she looks to Polymarket. She said that she would prefer that I would be a mathematician at the institute to have more time with her, but as she understood that I liked to be president she would support me.” 

The family lives in what Dan describes as a quiet neighborhood of residential streets, where children play outside with their friends. He regularly walks his daughter to school and doesn’t want normal life to change. Security considerations may force them to move, but if he can he intends to remain living in the same area of Bucharest. “I want [them to] have a normal, proper house, not a palace, because for their minds it could be dangerous,” he says. “If it’s possible to stay in the same neighborhood it would be perfect.” 

A split country

For all Dan’s unflappable calm, the country he leads is far from settled or stable. Its economy is struggling under the strain of high inflation, while the government needs to bring debt under control. Politically, too, tensions remain. 

While voting was underway, Simion began stoking the narrative that the contest had not been fair. He claimed there was a risk that some 1.8 million dead people had been included in the electoral register and could rise from the grave to vote. 

Then the Russian founder of social media platform Telegram claimed in a message to all users in Romania that France had tried to censor “conservative” voices in the country, a move officials denounced as Russian interference and fake news. 

Is Dan worried about a backlash from Simion, Georgescu or their far-right extremist supporters? After all, charges have been brought in connection with an attempted insurrection plot after last year’s canceled election. 

“Yes, but I’m not very worried about protests and so on, violent protests … I think that they will continue to think that I am part of the system that [I] in some sense stole their hopes and their future, but I don’t think there will be many manifestations of protest,” he says. “It is a very safe country.” 

Dan’s aides feel sure enough that he is on their side, at the end of a long campaign, to make jokes at his expense. “Nicușor trusts people a lot. He thinks Romanian people are so good and kind. I do not agree at all!” says one of the possibility of a Simion-inspired backlash. “He is like a child,” another aide says at one point, pretending to scold her boss, who laughs. 

Dan clearly inspires deep loyalty and affection from his team — one member of his entourage says simply: “I love him.”

Back in Bucharest  

The next time Dan appears in public, he is back in the capital.

A thunderstorm drenches the city in the early evening, leaving the streets glistening. With dusk falling, at 8:53 p.m. the candidate is bundled through a noisy crowd and onto a podium in a park a few yards from his campaign headquarters, and just across the street from City Hall, where he goes to work every day as mayor. 

Dan waits, along with more than 2,000 of his supporters packed into the tight outdoor space, for the exit polls due at 9 p.m. The first arrives early at 8:58 and predicts he will win with 55 percent to Simion’s 45 percent. The crowd screams with joy, chanting: “Nicușor! Nicușor!” 

Dan smiles his broad smile and says a few words in his soft, light voice, urging everyone to wait for the final results, before being bundled out again by a phalanx of protective police who force their way through the throng. 

Simion initially refuses to concede and declares himself the winner. But the margin of votes in Dan’s favor eventually pushes even this punchy politician to admit he is beaten, which he finally does around 1 a.m.

In the streets, the crowd has swelled in size, music is playing and groups are dancing in celebration.

Inside Dan’s campaign headquarters, aides and officials embrace. There are bottles of Champagne and pizza boxes in one of the private rooms upstairs set aside for the night, but Dan won’t touch them.

Instead, he tells journalists packed into a press huddle that he intends to celebrate by catching some sleep.