George Simion admits: electoral promises were built only for "media impact"

George Simion, the AUR and POT candidate for president of Romania, admitted on Tuesday evening, in an interview with Digi 24, that his promise to offer one million apartments at 35,000 euros for homeless Romanians was a political marketing strategy.

"It was our form of marketing, promotion, media coverage of the action. If we said houses in the ANL program for everyone at 35,000 euros, no one believed, that you don't have access to ANL, for example," George Simion declared, for the cited source.

The Simion plan promised the construction of up to one million apartments at 35,000 euros. These were to be financed through zero-interest loans for buyers.

George Simion's statement marks a significant break between the electoral rhetoric of the AUR leader and the reality of the political intentions behind it. What had been insistently presented in the 2024 electoral campaign as an ambitious policy, an integral part of the "Simion Plan", is in fact proving to be a promotional artifice meant to capture public attention. This recognition, coming from the candidate himself, not only discredits the entire political program, but also raises serious questions about the honesty with which AUR and its leader are building their public agenda. And the first questions are: How many of the measures presented in the Simion Plan are just political marketing and how many remain to be implemented in reality, in case George Simion becomes the President of Romania on May 18 and appoints - according to his statements - Călin Georgescu as Prime Minister?

• The measures in the Simion Plan - mere promises without coverage?

Can George Simion present us with a list of measures that were just electoral marketing? We remind him that the Simion Plan includes the following measures: zero interest on real estate loans; capping prices for the construction and purchase of residential homes; supporting young people and families in purchasing homes; promoting agri-food products under the "Made in Romania" brand and supporting their visibility in supermarkets; financial support for the opening of stores supplied by agricultural cooperatives formed by small farmers; reindustrializing the country; developing domestic tourism; drastically reducing taxes and contributions to the pension, social insurance and health system up to a maximum cumulative level of 25% for the first 5,000 lei of the gross salary; substantial tax reductions; equal opportunities for health and treatment for all citizens, regardless of financial status, with an emphasis on accessibility to health services in all regions of the country; granting loans with subsidized interest and state guarantees for families with three or more children for the purchase of housing and tax exemption for certain properties.

Returning to the presidential candidate's statement, the affordable housing initiative was initially presented as a support measure for young people and families, with financing through zero-interest loans and capping construction prices - a combination that, in the context of the current market economy and budgetary constraints, was already difficult to achieve. What revolves around this statement, however, is the fact that the promise was not only unrealistic, but deliberately designed to be misleading, in order to generate electoral capital.

Under these conditions, citizens with the right to vote may wonder whether this superficial and manipulative approach was also applied to other components of George Simion's political program, especially regarding the theme of the country's reindustrialization. We recall that, before the presidential elections last year, within the same electoral plan, Simion promised to reindustrialize Romania by creating a sovereign investment fund, which was to be fed by royalties collected by the state and other taxes. This idea, although attractive at a theoretical level, was not followed by a functional institutional outline. Moreover, in the new presidential campaign, the sovereign fund completely disappeared from George Simion's public discourse, which suggests either the silent abandonment of the idea or confirmation that the promise has no solid basis.

From an economic and administrative point of view, the sovereign investment fund proposed by Simion assumed a series of preliminary conditions impossible to ignore: macroeconomic stability, significant royalties, an institutional apparatus capable of managing strategic investments and a clear legal framework. Romania, with some of the lowest royalties in the European Union, a fragile fiscal system and a deeply politicized administration, is far from meeting these conditions.

• 500,000 layoffs from the budgetary system - the new Simion's priority

This inconsistency is also found in other statements by George Simion. In the interview given to Digi 24, the AUR presidential candidate claims that the budget apparatus needs to be reduced and that it would be good for the state to return to the level of approximately 800,000 employees - how many it had in the early 2000s, compared to 1.3 million today, practically proposing a cut of 500,000 positions in the next five years. Although the problem of the oversizing of the public administration is real, Simion's solution is simplistic, lacking details, phasing or impact study. He does not explain which institutions would be restructured, how the social and economic effects of the layoffs will be managed or how the functionality of the state will be maintained in parallel with this massive purge. Especially since the early 2000s and up to now, new public institutions have emerged whose activity is closely linked to the fact that our country is a member state of the European Union, a member of NATO and is in the midst of a negotiation and accession process to the OECD.

In support of the reduction of the budgetary apparatus, George Simion states that many of the 500,000 positions he wants to cut are occupied by "party members", suggesting a generalized clientelism of the administration. Even if the phenomenon exists, the proposed approach is rather punitive and populist than reformist. In the absence of clear evaluation criteria, transparency in the process and alternative plans for the efficient resizing of the state, the statements risk remaining in the area of aggressive rhetoric, meant to fuel popular resentment, but without the ability to generate authentic change.

Overall, George Simion's speech seems to be increasingly based on instruments for emotionally capturing the electorate, to the detriment of a coherent vision of governance. The "Simion Plan", promoted with intensity in 2024, is gradually losing its consistency in the face of political and economic reality, and the recognition of the marketing character of one of its most emblematic measures calls into question the entire political approach. This transition from ambitious promises to cynical justifications not only weakens the credibility of the AUR leader, but also dangerously affects public confidence in the viability of political alternatives. Instead of a strategic construction for Romania, it seems that we are witnessing an image exercise, in which the real objectives are secondary to the immediate media impact.