Do we like them?

Do we like George Simion?

Our score: 1 out of 10. A run of baseless fraud claims and ugly rhetoric, with no verified good on the record, leaves him near the bottom.

Simion leads AUR, Romania's nationalist party, and he's best known outside Romania for the May 2025 presidential runoff. He lost it to centrist Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan, who won just under 54 percent. The pages I could open were mostly about that campaign, so the early-years backstory is thin here and I'm not going to pad it.

He also went to court over a claim about himself, and lost. Simion sued former Moldovan defence minister Anatol Șalaru, who had said Simion collaborated with Moscow's agents. A Chișinău court dismissed the case in April 2025 and the appeal court upheld that in October 2025. The article doesn't give the judges' reasoning, so it doesn't prove Șalaru right, but it doesn't help Simion either.

The rhetoric is where the good-person test gets shaky. Spotmedia reports that in Parliament in December 2023 he told senator Diana Șoșoacă “Te agresez sexual, scroafo!”, a crude sexual threat. Earlier, Alfred Simonis alleged a deputy had made a vile threat against him, and Simion denied it. In March 2025 he said those behind the coup should be skinned in the public square, later calling it a metaphor. He also refused to apologise for calling the Hungarian minority party a “creatură hidoasă”, and admitted he hadn't fully declared income from an earlier online business.

On the harm check, the clearest line I could read is gender. He told the Washington Times in January 2025: “We fight to keep men and women, not 76 types of gender.” Fact-checkers have also caught him out: Factual rated false his claim that the EU doesn't exist as an entity, and Euronews rated false his claim that Romania is one of the EU's richest countries. The page I read rated none of his claims true.

The recent stuff is more mixed. In July 2026 he said AUR would vote against the decarbonisation law, which is a vote against climate action. He also said AUR would vote against the SAFE defence programme, arguing it wasn't suited to modern warfare. And he said AUR wouldn't back the asset-declaration law unless spouses and partners were included, which is a fair transparency point.

On the good stuff, I couldn't verify any charity, kind act or standing up for others at a cost to himself. The closest thing is that asset-declaration demand. That's honestly the whole list, and it's thin against a record of baseless fraud claims, ugly language and a campaign built on grievance.