Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I Zanemunshank and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about elections. The elections that took place last weekend, some

elections take us into a second round in a couple of weeks, an election in Romania that didn't go as

the polls predicted, an election in Poland that also didn't go as the polls predicted,

but with the results in a sort of flip-flopped position. Jack, tell us a bit about Romania. I will

talk about Poland. Zuzana will talk about Portugal. These were three important elections.

The picture isn't sort of like uniform. That's something we can say from the beginning. It's

not like, one side prevailed, the other one lost,

and this is not a story from the far right going from victory to victory. It's nothing like this.

But this was an interesting set of elections that tell us a lot about where we are today. Jack,

what happened in Romania? So what happened in Romania is that they had the second round of their

presidential elections last Sunday.

And the winner was a kind of centrist, independent politician called Nikushor Dan.

So Don was prior to winning the presidency, the mayor of Bucharest.

He beat a candidate from the far right from the AUR party called George Simeon. It was quite a close election.

Don only won with about 53, 54% of the vote. And he also kind of defied the opinion polls.

Most opinion polls showed that Simeon was ahead, but Don was able to kind of squeak out the victory.

Compared to quite a lot of European

countries, the Romanian presidency is relatively important. They play quite a large role in

government formation, but also they have a lot of say on foreign policy, on security policy,

and on Romania's relationship with the European Union because the Romanian president

formally represents

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