Pig's head at the gate: as if the SA were stirring within AUR

On Sunday morning, Marius Lulea, one of AUR's founders who in recent months has increasingly openly opposed party leader George Simion, found a pig's head — a symbol of betrayal in Romanian folk tradition — in front of his house. Lulea filed a complaint that same morning, and told G4Media that investigators were already on their way to the scene. He said the footage clearly shows the perpetrators as well as the car they arrived in, so he trusts that the prosecutor's office and the court will do their job, because in this country no one should be intimidated for their opinions.

Next to the pig's head, a sticker depicting a menacing figure was also stuck onto the gas meter box in front of the house. The same sticker has in recent days been plastered on house walls, cars and even trash bins in Tunari, considered an AUR stronghold, and according to Lulea, without exception the marked houses belong to people who belong to the opposition within Simion's party. The politician compared all this to Nazi intimidation methods and openly accused Simion: he claims the party leader sent photos of him and a female MP to the woman, whom he had explicitly forbidden from meeting Lulea in the future, and he considers the secretly taken photos of his meetings that surfaced in media close to Simion to be the same kind of threat. Lulea called this behavior outright sociopathic, while also stressing that he was not scared and would not stay silent from now on either, and that he expects the authorities to take the matter seriously this time, unlike in Claudiu Târziu's case. The former co-chairman of AUR, after all, found a car registered to AUR and fitted with a camera parked in front of his own party's headquarters for months, and despite filing a report, as far as Lulea knows nothing has happened since.

Simion dismissed the accusations by saying he has no idea what this is about, and doesn't even know which female colleague Lulea is referring to, adding that in his view this is simply the latest chapter in the campaign of attacks that Lulea has been waging against him together with Realitatea TV, and that after this they expect anything.

Yet not so long ago the two men stood on the same side: they co-founded AUR together, and for a while Lulea was even Simion's employer at his construction company. The relationship began to sour when Lulea started criticizing, increasingly loudly, the anti-EU, pro-Russian direction in which Simion is leading the party, and in early October the rift became public. According to a report by Puterea, Senate caucus leader Petrișor Peiu then announced that Lulea was no longer a party member, because he had not paid his membership dues for more than a year, and under the party's statutes membership automatically lapses in such cases. In response, Lulea published a bank receipt which he says proves payment of membership dues for 2026, 2027 and 2028, and called on Simion and Dan Dungaciu to show their own payments first.

Before anyone mistakes Lulea for a persecuted democrat, it's worth recalling who he actually is. AUR originally intended him for prime minister, before he sided with Călin Georgescu, and according to a report by Newsweek România, in a televised debate he praised the communist regime for its housing estates and hydroelectric power plants, calling Nicolae Ceaușescu a "sovereigntist." The publication also reported that Lulea designed the renovation of the former NKVD headquarters in Bucharest, still owned by Moscow today, using Russian state funds. So within AUR it is not democrats clashing with extremists, but extremists clashing with each other, and now one of them is experiencing firsthand the methods the party has been using for years against journalists, Hungarians, and anyone unwilling to fall in line. Lulea spoke of methods reminiscent of the SA, and the comparison may be more fitting than he realizes. The Brownshirts, too, started out on the streets, with marked houses, threats and the public branding of "traitors," and their story ended in 1934, on the Night of the Long Knives, when the movement had its own leaders executed. Romania's far right has so far only gotten as far as the pig's head, and we very much hope it goes no further. Yet the direction is familiar, because once again the revolution is devouring its own children: first it was Târziu's turn, now Lulea's, and around Simion fewer and fewer people remain who haven't yet been branded traitors.

Ugar