Who is AUR, the anti-system movement that has become the new force in Romanian politics?

The December 6 parliamentary elections in Romania have brought a new political force on the local scene while also marking the political demise of three once almighty politicians. The big surprise is called the Alliance for Romanians’ Unity (AUR), a conservative and nationalist political party established just one year ago, on December 1, 2019, which took 9% of the votes in the recent parliamentary elections. The acronym of the party’s name, AUR, means gold in Romanian.

Nobody predicted this score, especially after AUR took only 0.45% of the votes in the local elections in September. In just three months, the party jumped from 36,000 votes taken in the elections for the local councils to almost 530,000 votes in the elections for the Parliament without running costly advertising campaigns on Google and Facebook and without much promotion on local televisions.