Resurgent Far-Right Populism in Romania: Disenchantment and Hope at Europe’s Periphery

Camil Ungureanu and Mihaela Mihai unpack the current resurgence of the far right in Romania, revealing how it emerged from complex domestic and international interactions across overlapping fields of power and discourse at Europe's periphery. Camil Ungureanu and Mihaela Mihai unpack the current resurgence of the Far Right in Romania, revealing how it emerged from complex domestic and international interactions across overlapping fields of power and discourse at Europe's periphery. Avoiding one-sided explanations – whether demand- or supply-side, internal or external, and cultural or economic – this book situates the Far Right within a dynamic geopolitical configuration shaped by tensions and convergences among political, economic, and cultural forces. It argues that far-right expansion is driven by three mutually constitutive drivers: material, ideational, and affective. Economic polarisation, demographic decline, entrenched corruption, and democratic fragility create the conditions for far-right mobilisation, whose entrepreneurs filter growing discontent through religiously inflected nationalism. Resurgent Far-Right Populism in Romania will be of interest to researchers of the Far Right, populism, new authoritarianism, democratic resilience, political theory, European and Romanian history and politics.