At certain times of the day, the road outside our walled-in ground-floor apartment in Bucharest is like a racetrack: three lanes of position-jostling cars and a bus lane going in the opposite direction – which some drivers also use.
You need your wits about you in a city that challenges Auckland for roadworks and where people drive like meth-fuelled Parisians, notably in the whirlpool of lanes at the Triumphal Arch.
Many old buildings near here are abandoned or falling apart, but peppered at intervals are little shops and amenities. Across from us is a strip club and, a few doors down, the ill-lit Two Bastards Pub.
We’re a short walk from the Belle Epoque and Art Nouveau glamour of the shabby Old Town buildings, many converted into cafes and upmarket dining options. We’re also 10 minutes from the Palace of Parliament edifice, one of the largest administrative buildings in the world after the Pentagon, twice as long as Buckingham Palace and, apparently, the world’s heaviest building. If the analogies impress, the building – the vision of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu – is an imposing if clumsy mishmash of architectural styles.
We’ve arrived in Bucharest after 40 hours in airports and planes. Our luggage didn’t. One bag went to Luxembourg, the other somewhere else. It was Friday the 13th.
So our first night in the chilly capital of Romania (3°C, -2° the following morning) was spent inside the warm, highly illuminated and impressively-stocked Carrefour hypermarket, which could comfortably accommodate Auckland’s LynMall shopping centre in one corner. We bought socks, underwear, shampoo and such, as well as pickled herrings, cheeses and salami for breakfast.
We had arrived in Romania at an interesting time: there was the bustling, colourful Christmas market in the shadow of Ceaușescu’s financially crippling monument and December brought the 35th anniversary of his overthrow. But the approach of Christmas also saw the sudden emergence of far-right politician Călin Georgescu, the surprise leader after the first round of voting for the presidency.
The emotionally cool, dapper and somewhat characterless Georgescu was polling in single digits just weeks earlier but on November 24 pulled 22.95% of the vote. He doesn’t have a party, called climate change a hoax, denies Covid and doubts anyone walked on the moon. But he advances a Romania for Romanians agenda, wants to withdraw support for Ukraine (with which Romania shares a lengthy border) and is pro-Russia in a country long aligned with the West through Nato and EU membership.
Georgescu is untried as a serious politician but, like Donald Trump in 2016, that may be his appeal. He’s not seen as a politician and may even benefit from a sympathy vote at the next election.
His campaign was largely on TikTok – clips of overly made-up influencers putting on eyeliner while championing Georgescu are bizarre beyond belief – and his success has been attributed to Russian cyber interference on a massive scale.
The Constitutional Court annulled the result but that has created the biggest political crisis since Ceaușescu was shot.
Some note the TikTok campaign went to a generation who never knew the dictatorial Communist era (so clearly needs to visit the small but informative Museum of Communism in the Old Town).
Perhaps they heard only the nationalistic sentiments, such as misinformation about how much refugees were costing, and are part of widespread disaffection with the status quo.
As the Economist has noted, incumbent parties didn’t fare well in elections in 2024: in the US and UK they were thrown out; in India and South Africa forced into humiliating coalitions, in France, a shaky coalition collapsed. The question is, can new leaders deliver the deliverables?
Fortunately, a van delivered our bags and now we’re in Cluj-Napoca, over the Carpathian Mountains in the northwest.
Outside it is “2°C, feels like -1″. Soon we’ll be in northern Scotland.
Enjoy those summer barbecues.
Graham Reid thanks Emil Tudorache for his assistance when the Reids arrived bagless in Bucharest. The writer is travelling under his own steam.
