George Simion made a name for himself as an anti-establishment activist and a militant for the unification of Romania and the Republic of Moldova, first with “Noii Golani” (The New Rascals), then with “Acțiunea 2012” (Action 2012). His collaborators from back then claim that the leader of AUR manipulated and lied to them in order to achieve his goals. They accuse Simion of violence, using minors and the destruction of the unionist movement. Others say that he would disappear for days, only to return with ready-made plans for future actions.
The testimonies of Simion’s former collaborators are public. Many have appeared on social media recently, in the context where opinion polls and the result of the first round of the presidential election show that George Simion is favorite to become the future president of Romania. His former collaborators have decided to speak out now so that voters are not fooled and used as they were. During the debate against Nicușor Dan, hosted by Euronews, George Simion was asked to comment these testimonies, to which he replied: “at a time when the election campaign is in full swing, a moment that will determine the future of Romania, of course everyone is trying to discredit me”.
“Papa George”: involving minors in civic actions
“Noii Golani” was an organization formed by anti-communist and unionist activists, led by George Simion as early as 2006. Headquartered at the 21 December 1989 Association, the organization first stood out through protest actions where its members trolled former president Ion Iliescu. At the time, the group organized civic actions under such slogans as “Bessarabia - Romanian land”, “Save Roșia Montană”, “March against the current political class” or “Freedom for Bessarabians”. The members of the organization surrounding Simion were mostly young people, some way too young, middle-school minors.
“As some of you may still remember, about 17 years ago I was a member of the Noii Golani movement, led by George Simion. I was 13 when I first walked into the headquarters located on Batiștei Street”, Sânziana Cristina Dobrovicescu wrote in a Facebook post the other day. Sânziana was a member of the Noii Golani movement from 2008 until the appearance of Action 2012, during which time, she says, “I was sending letters, putting up posters, selling T-shirts, caps and whatever he was selling in his online store. I would stay up all night at the headquarters to finish everything I had to do”. Shortly after joining Noii Golani, Sânziana met George Simion. They became close. Simion discovered the girl didn't get along with her father and he took on the role of a father figure, telling Sânziana to call her “Papa George”, while he referred to her as “my girl”. Sânziana’s argument was that “he was better than my biological father, who made my life a living hell”.
Sânziana recalls that, when she was 14, she asked her mother to sign a power of attorney, allowing her to accompany Simion at a rally in Chișinău. Her mother refused to sign off the power of attorney, but decided to join her daughter and travel to the Republic of Moldova, which turned out to be an inspired choice: at the protest in Chișinău, Simion offended a police officer and was arrested. If the girl had been entrusted in his care, she would have ended up all alone, a 14-year old girl in a foreign city. Sânziana also says that she was not the only vulnerable child in Simion’s entourage – there were many others around Bucharest and the entire country.
The mysterious disappearances of George Simion and his violent outbursts
In 2012, Noii Golani was dissolved and turned into the Action 2012 Unionist Platform, which described itself as an apolitical coalition and a “non-partisan initiative”. Sânziana Cristina Dobrovicescu argues, however, that at the time, Simion started to surround himself with a growing number of New Right representatives, which is why she decided, along with other volunteers from the team in Bucharest, to step back.
Ștefan Sabin was one of the volunteers who worked with George Simion as part of Action 2012, where he was running the financial department. He too stepped up to describe his relationship with the AUR leader. Sabin told Veridica.ro that the period he spent with George Simion is still a sensitive topic for him, but he decided to speak out because the prospect of Simion becoming president scares him. “I was tired of seeing his self-fashioned patriot aura. I was tired of the false image he made for himself, and I decided to tell you what George Simion was like before he became a politician, because there’s a huge difference. For those who only followed him from a distance and were given only what he wanted them to get, it may be difficult to grasp his true face, which is why I wrote what I wrote”.
In a Facebook post, Sabin writes that ever since he met Simion, he realized that he had certain leadership traits, that he was charismatic and had the ability to mobilize people around him. But that was also when he realized that he was completely unscrupulous, someone who “would sell his mother if he had anything to gain from that”. In a chat I had with him, he told me: “I tolerated his behavior and temperament, putting the cause he was fighting above all else. I was perhaps not mindful enough at the time and I can't help but blame myself right now, seeing things have gone so far. There were many of us who, at the time, seeing who we were dealing with, put the cause first and thought we would keep Simion in check. He basically slipped under our radar and left a wound that’s never really healed”.
Ștefan Sabin also writes about the mysterious disappearances of George Simion, who would someone go off the grid for days. It all came back to him when the AUR candidate left for Vienna, during the first round of the election: “George Simion was the man who, before establishing any future strategy, would leave me his phone, to take all his calls, while he disappeared for a few days, explaining that he needed time alone to think. Then he would reappear with a ready-made plan and just deliver it to the team. Our contribution was only here and there in the implementation method”. Ștefan Sabin suggests these actions resemble Simion's departure to Vienna on election day.
Lucian Valah, another former volunteer of Action 2012 who made a public testimony told us something similar, namely that he found it suspicious that Simion would disappear for days and no one could reach him. Valah adds that, although Simion would ask for their opinion regarding the next actions before going away, upon his return the plan was already ready, and the members of Action were merely supposed to implement it without asking too many questions.
Lucian Valah was a member of Action 2012 from 2012 until 2018-2019, when the civic movement turned into a political party, although George Simion “solemnly proclaimed that this thing would never happen. Another lie”. He says that every time he wanted more details about the organization or wanted to get more involved, he was treated with suspicion, as if he were an intruder, and that Simion “had started to exhibit authoritarian, even dictatorial tendencies at times”.
It's something Ștefan Sabin also mentioned: “The George Simion I knew was a bully, with misogynistic outbursts and often violent both verbally and physically. He frequently humiliated those around him and when he failed to impose his viewpoint through manipulation, he did so through verbal and sometimes physical violence. I witnessed many such episodes, and on several occasions, even fighting. From this point of view, the George Simion we see today is the same man of a few years ago”.
Has George Simion compromised the idea of unity for which he campaigned for years?
Elena Podoleanu, an Action 2012 volunteer from the Republic of Moldova recently wrote that she felt deceived when George Simion entered politics and adopted an anti-vaccine rhetoric. Later, the positions of the AUR leader got even worse: “it made me realize that George Simion, the person who you thought would take the Republic of Moldova home, to Romania, was just another mouthpiece of Russian propaganda”. I asked her what prompted her to leave Action 2012, and she told me that during the protests staged against oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc, which started in 2015, there were times when she could not understand why the unionists would not get involved in the movement against the oligarch, who had spun a genuine web of corruption that had virtually engulfed the entire the Republic of Moldova.
Journalist Alexandru Cozer examined this phenomenon in a longer post on Facebook. He said that, during the protests in Moldova, when people were fighting against the oligarchic system established by Vladimir Plahotniuc, George Simion was also staging a protest nearby, with unionist purposes, practically trying to hijack the anti-oligarchic protest and turn it into a “unionist” one: “I even remember one time when I was in downtown Chișinău, at a time when Simion was organizing a rally and people stopped me to ask in bewilderment where we, the leaders of the anti-oligarchic movement, were, because that was what convinced them to take to the streets in the first place”. Cozer also writes that “Plahotniuc’s media group, which accounted for about 80% of the Moldovan media at the time, went to great lengths to discredit our demonstrations. They made false accusations, claiming the people coming to our rallies were paid, or that some of them were drunk or on drugs, or that very few people took part in the demonstrations, or that we, the leaders, were driven by secret interests, etc. All this time, Simion’s demonstrations were broadcast live on Publika (Plahotniuc’s news station) hours on end, in their entirety”.
After the 2018 Centennial March in the Great National Assembly Square in Chișinău, journalist Vitalie Călugăreanu wrote that the unionist leaders were hesitant, lacking credibility, as if there had been some “understanding” between the leaders of the rally and the authorities. “Plahotniuc fashioned his own unionist movement (including by creating a puppet party), which he hopes will gather the unionist electorate under a single flag to be able to control it”, Călugăreanu concluded.
In turn, Elena Podoleanu concluded that George Simion merely mimicked unionism, while in fact pursuing a different agenda. She argues that the leader of Aur thus compromised this movement: “George Simion used our youthful energy, our Romanian identity and love for Romania to bolster his political position, so that, from the highest level, he could deal a deadly blow – lead Romania to disaster and play into the Russians’ hands. George Simion, before your arrival, talk of unification was still a possibility in the Republic of Moldova. Today, George, this is no longer possible, because you have drained this movement dry, drier than the Bessarabians suffering from thirst in the very wagons deporting them to Siberia”, the former Action 2012 activist writes in her post.
In the Republic of Moldova, George Simion grabbed only 12.47% of the votes in the first round of the presidential election.
