Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks.

In southeastern Europe today, there's been a contest which goes to the heart of so much of politics these days, at least politics in the West.

The Romanian presidential election runoff has

pitied a hard-right nationalist candidate, a self-declared fan of Donald Trump and foe of the

multinational European Union, against an avowedly pro-EU liberal candidate. And despite the hard-right

Georges Simeon, having been the leading candidate out of

the first round of voting two weeks ago, with almost all the votes counted in today's vote,

it looks as if the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicholshor Dan, has polled far ahead. The counting

suggests there's a healthy seven-point gap between the two men.

Although, I should say, the candidate who most emphatically did declare victory at the

close of polling and the release of the exit polls was Mr. Simeon.

That's Mr. Simeon saying, good evening. I am the new Romanian president. We'll hope to catch up with our correspondent in Bucharest, Sarah Rainsford, very shortly.

But we can speak now to Cladio Nassoui, who's a Romanian member of Parliament,

with the Save Romania Union Party, he's a former Minister of the Economy, and his party backed Nicosaw Dan.

So Claudio Nassoui, I mean, first of all, welcome to the programme, but secondly, you are

presumably delighted.

So first of all, thank you very much for having me. We are very delighted. I think Romania dodged the bullets tonight. So if

we look at the first round of elections, the results were not very encouraging. Actually, there was a fair

chance that Mr. Simeon could win. And right now,

I think that the general atmosphere is that disaster was averted. So we're very, we're very happy.

And now we have to focus on Romania's next set of issues and woes which have to be resolved.

Yes.

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