Far-right, pro-Russia independent candidate Calin Georgescu won 22.94% of the vote in Romania’s presidential election on Sunday, securing an unexpected lead in the first round but falling short of the 50% needed for an outright victory, partial official results indicated on Monday morning.

Pro-NATO candidate Elena Lasconi, the leader of the opposition center-right Union Save Romania (USR) party, clinched second place with 19.17% support and will face Georgescu in the runoff vote on December 8, provisional data on the Permanent Electoral Authority’s (AEP) website shows.

In another surprising turn of events, prime minister and Social Democrat Party (PSD) leader Marcel Ciolacu narrowly missed the second spot by a few hundred votes, gathering just 19.16% support, and for the first time since 1989 PSD will not have a candidate in the presidential runoff.

Another far-right candidate, populist nationalist Alliance for Uniting Romanians (AUR) leader George Simion, placed fourth after winning 13.87% of the votes.

Former prime minister and leader of co-governing National Liberal Party (PNL), Nicolae Ciuca, came in fifth, with an underwhelming 8.79% support, while former NATO deputy secretary general Mircea Geoana, who ran as independent, took the sixth place, winning just 6.32% of the votes.

Georgescu’s lead in the first round of the elections came as a huge surprise as most pre-election polls had projected that he would receive only a single-digit share of the vote. Georgescu is an ultranationalist who opposes military aid for Ukraine and has mainly campaigned on social media platform TikTok.

His runoff rival, Elena Lasconi, mayor of the central town of Campulung and leader of USR, is a pro-EU, pro-NATO candidate who supports military aid for Ukraine and advocates anti-corruption, institutional, and administrative reforms. She was the only leading candidate in the first round in favour of civil unions for same-sex couples, but she opposes same-sex marriage.

Voter turnout in the first round of the presidential election was 52.55%. As at 0942 EEST, 97.56% of the ballots had been processed, with 231,178 votes left to be counted.