In late August, a twenty-year-old Romanian fascist admirer filmed himself as he attacked a Nepalese food-delivery worker. “Go back to your country, invader!” he shouted as he punched the migrant’s face. Around the same time, a brawl erupted between Romanian and foreign employees at an IKEA factory. Meanwhile on Facebook, an MP for the leading far-right party, now sadly mainstream, advocated for people to refuse food if delivered by a foreigner.
Late in October, the New Right — an overtly fascist party — held a protest in the capital, Bucharest, against the “replacement of Romanians with foreign populations of a non-white race.” In early November, another far-right leader, George Simion — runner-up in the recent presidential election — and his nominee for Bucharest’s mayoral race posted a picture with them between two buildings. “Romanians live in the building on the left, migrants live in the one on the right, renovated with state funds,” he wrote — insinuating that migrants get all the benefits, not Romanians.
Before 2025, anti-migration discourse had been virtually nonexistent in Romania. So how did we get to this?
Just a few years ago, migrants were a rare sight even in Bucharest, a city of two million people. Now they have become a visible part of the workforce, including in smaller towns, especially in construction and hospitality. To illustrate: in 2017, the government set the quota for new permits for foreign workers at 8,000. By 2022, it was set at one hundred thousand and has added one hundred thousand new permits each year. Most come from South Asian countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh.
If immigration is itself a new phenomenon, Romanians’ attitude toward migrants has mostly been indifferent or neutral at best. Yet this may soon shift. Sensing it could be a ticket for electoral success in the 2028 general elections, far-right forces have strategically ramped up anti-migrant narratives. What we have seen thus far…
Auteur: Andrei-Constantin Gudu
