1 First as tragedy, then as farce? AUR and the long shadow of fascism in Romania Raul Cârstocea In the current political climate, witnessing an ascendance of far-right parties across Europe, and a more general shift to the right in mainstream politics globally, Romania was often pointed out as an exception in this respect, certainly when it came to the area of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe. Since 2008, when the Greater Romania Party (Partidul România Mare, PRM) failed to meet the 5% electoral threshold for entering Parliament, there had been no far- or radical-right parties in the Romanian Parliament. As of the 6 th of December, the date of the latest legislative elections, the ‘Romanian exception’ is no more. A new political formation, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (Alianţa pentru Unirea Românilor), whose acronym, AUR, means ‘gold’ in Romanian, won 9.07% of the votes for the Chamber of Deputies and 9.17% of the votes for the Senate, becoming the fourth largest party in the current Parliament. Their success is all the more remarkable since the party was established only one year ago, on 1 December 2019 – the symbolically chosen national day of Romania that harks back to 1918 and is known as the ‘Great Union Day’. In this respect, the party recalls the electoral fortunes of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which barely missed meeting the 5% threshold for entering the Bundestag some six months after its establishment in 2013, and had its first electoral successes in state (Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg) and European Parliament elections in 2014. There is thus a case to be made for reading this electoral result within the overall framework of the evolution of right-wing ‘populism’ – a term that has been however rendered almost meaningless by overuse and that glosses over significant differences within the political spectrum it covers – in Europe and elsewhere, and that case has indeed been made. There are, however, also good reasons for looking more closely at the Romanian specificities of this instantiation of the contemporary European far right and its links with interwar Romanian fascism, and it is here that my contribution can hopefully be of some help. Unlike the seemingly more benign ‘populism’ (something that is in itself problematic), the association made immediately by commenters on AUR’s electoral success was with ‘fascism’, and specifically the native form it took in interwar Romania, with the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’ / ‘Iron Guard’. Experts on the topic were interviewed, offering valuable insights about the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church (Biserica Ortodoxă Română, BOR) in accounting for this result, pointing at continuities with the national-communism of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime (mistakenly, in my opinion), while others offered valuable class-based analyses that however ignored the specificities of interwar Romanian fascism or its legacies in post-socialist Romania. A characteristically clear analysis by one of the most prominent experts on the legionary movement, Roland Clark, was both the most direct and the most worrying, asking ‘Is fascism returning to Romania?’ and hinting toward a positive answer, inflected however by awareness of the different conditions of the 21 st century and the importance of contemporary influences, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, in accounting for AUR’s strategies. My own take on the matter follows along similar lines, with a much more straightforward ‘yes’ answer to Roland’s question, and one that factors in one of the important structural similarities between interwar and present-day Romania, i.e. the absence of a credible, organised, electorally-powerful left as a driver of class-based, rather than national- / religious-based politics. The first thing to note is the novelty of AUR in Romania’s post-socialist political landscape. The very useful distinction made by Michael Shafir between parties of ‘radical continuity’ and ‘radical return’ within the spectrum of right-wing politics in post-1989 Eastern Europe is an