In Romania's 2025 presidential election, far-right political actors portrayed intellectuals as not just ineffective, but as a threat to Romanian values. Mimi Mihăilescu reveals how their rhetoric, which frames expertise as liability rather than an asset, is winning votes – and reshaping how an entire country determines what is true
Anti-intellectualism favours intuition over expertise, belief over evidence, and group loyalty over epistemic accountability. Fostering an anti-intellectual culture creates a dangerous cognitive framework for political manipulation. If you can disregard verifiable facts to preserve your worldview, what else can you ignore?
Western European examples of the phenomenon often focus on economic grievances. Romanian anti-intellectualism, by contrast, is fundamentally concerned with questions of national identity and sovereignty. During the 2025 presidential elections, candidates framed expertise not merely as ineffective but as fundamentally foreign: a Trojan horse carrying alien values that threaten Romanian cultural distinctiveness.
Political actors have a sophisticated understanding of this mechanism. George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), and Călin Georgescu, the barred candidate for the annulled 2024 Romanian presidential elections, are not anti-intellectual by accident, but exploit anti-intellectualism strategically.
Nicușor Dan, Bucharest's technocratic mayor, is the villain of this epistemic drama. His methodical, data-driven approach – paradoxically – undermines his credibility with significant portions of Romania's electorate. Many perceive him as out of touch, elitist, even arrogant. The more he references empirical, data-based facts, the more he becomes disconnected from 'the people'.
The 2025 presidential election became a contest over epistemic authority; over who is authorised to speak the truth, and on what grounds. Simion's campaign normalised expertise-scepticism, portraying 'specialists' as agents of foreign influence. The implication was clear: knowledge, unless homegrown and intuitive, is suspect. Simion's first-round lead, with 41% of the vote, validates the effectiveness of this approach and challenges conventional assumptions about electoral politics.
Simion's strength lies in his ability to 'perform' authenticity. His rejection of intellectuals is not accidental; it is a feature, not a bug. By refusing the language of analysis, he weaponises intuition, identity, and anecdote. He speaks not to voters, but like them, positioning himself as one of the many who have long been patronised by the few.
Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan may have won the election, but his victory does not signal the end of anti-intellectual sentiment in Romania
In stark contrast, Dan – a mathematics prodigy with two gold medals from the International Mathematics Olympiad and a PhD from the Sorbonne – secured just 21% in the first round. His technocratic approach failed to resonate beyond urban centres. Most tellingly, to counter disinformation, Dan was forced to publicly display his baccalaureate diploma. This was a revealing manifestation of how anti-intellectualism can transform credentials from assets into liabilities. The technocratic establishment appears incapable of recognising that expertise divorced from lived experience becomes politically vulnerable. Appeals to expertise do not foster trust, but arouse suspicion.
Despite these challenges, Dan prevailed in the second round, winning the presidency with 53.6% against Simion’s 46.4%. His victory, however, does not signal the end of anti-intellectual sentiment in Romania. While intellectual credentials can still help win elections, they must contend with powerful currents of anti-elitism that have reshaped Romania's political landscape.
Simion's anti-intellectualism does not exist in a vacuum, but is a culmination of decades of growing distrust in institutions. Romanians have endured economic precarity, post-communist disillusionment, and waves of emigration. Institutions have failed them repeatedly. So, when Simion says, 'Don't trust the experts', it lands. It feels like liberation. He reframes knowledge as something imposed rather than shared; the domain of those who leave (the diaspora) or rule from above (the technocrats), not those who stay and struggle. Simion's plea echoes British MP Michael Gove's infamous pre-Brexit declaration that 'people have had enough of experts'. Across a variety of democracies, expertise itself is under suspicion.
Romanians' distrust of institutions has grown over decades of economic precarity, post-communist disillusionment, and waves of emigration
Indeed, anti-intellectualism here acts as a conduit: once you accept that beliefs matter more than facts, you open yourself up to all forms of manipulation. This phenomenon parallels the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment in the United States, exemplified by Robert F. Kennedy Jr's rhetoric that signals a new era of anti-intellectualism in American politics.
Romania's education system has long prioritised memorisation [pdf link] over critical thinking, creating structural conditions ripe for anti-intellectualism to thrive. National assessments overwhelmingly reward recall-based learning, focused on factual reproduction rather than analytical reasoning.
The consequences are stark: OECD PISA results show that 48.6% of Romanian 15-year-olds are failing to achieve basic proficiency in reading and mathematics, while only 28% of Romanians aged 16–74 possess basic digital skills, by far the lowest percentage in the EU. These statistics represent not just educational failure but the systematic production of epistemic vulnerability that makes anti-intellectual appeals inevitable, and attractive.
Electoral data reveals the consequences. Simion's support was strongest among voters with lower educational levels. 58.8% of his voters had only primary or vocational education, while just 11.1% had university degrees. By contrast, Dan's electorate showed inverse proportions. 44.1% of his supporters had university education, while only 24.7% had primary or vocational education. The urban-rural divide amplifies this pattern, with Simion performing significantly better in rural areas, while Dan dominated in major urban centres, particularly Bucharest, where he served as mayor.
Romania's educational model has inadvertently produced citizens who are under-served by the system and primed to distrust those who speak in its name
Romania's educational model has inadvertently produced citizens who are under-served by the system and primed to distrust those who speak in its name. Anti-intellectualism, in this sense, is not simply a cultural phenomenon but an institutional outcome.
If anti-intellectualism has become a dominant political currency, the path forward lies not in doubling down on technocracy but in reimagining how expertise is communicated, embodied, and earned. Romania's 2025 election is not an aberration, it is a warning.
When trust in knowledge-producing institutions erodes, alternative authorities who may prioritise ideological consistency over factual accuracy quickly fill the void. Romania's democratic future depends on bridging the growing divide between intellectual rigour and popular sentiment, a challenge that extends far beyond a single election cycle.
