Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Romania on Oct. 10, but the visit did not go entirely as planned, with a scheduled speech in front of the country’s legislature scuppered at the last minute.
Zelensky himself called off the speech, but the real reason was pushback from Romania’s nationalist opposition party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), which threatened to protest the speech. The party has seen its support more than double since the 2020 parliamentary election. It leads in some polls for next year’s European Union elections in the country, even though Ukraine and Moldova have both banned its leader from entering their countries over alleged connections to the Kremlin.
The country faces a turning point—both in terms of its position on Ukraine and its position in Europe. In the aftermath of the return of Slovakia’s controversial populist Robert Fico and its subsequent shift toward a stance approaching Hungary’s in terms of resisting European support for Kyiv, Bucharest is likely to prove the next battleground for the agenda. Except it is far more significant.
