Making Romania Great Again? Computational Insights into the Discursive Strategies of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians

This article examines how the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) adapted its institutional communication as it developed from a parliamentary entrant into Romania’s principal opposition party. It analyzes a complete corpus of 1,537 press releases and position statements published on AUR’s official website from June 2021 through May 2025. The computational framework combines transformer-based topic modeling with large language model-assisted labeling, zero-shot classification of people-centric, elite-critical, and out-group frames, multi-axis tone scoring, and stance detection toward parties and political figures. The longitudinal results reveal four connected patterns. First, AUR increasingly embedded material policy issues, including pensions, agriculture, energy, and health care, in a sovereignty-centered anti-elite narrative rather than relying on cultural grievance alone. Second, elite-critical rhetoric consistently exceeded people-centric appeals and rose sharply around electoral and governmental crises. Third, urgency and hostility increased while conciliatory language declined as AUR consolidated its parliamentary position, challenging expectations that institutionalization moderates populist communication. Fourth, AUR adjusted its stance toward other actors according to their changing position on a system versus anti-system divide, producing temporary alignments even across ideological distance. I describe this combination as strategically flexible populism, in which a stable anti-elite frame coexists with an expanding policy repertoire and tactically fluid relational positioning. The findings show how a far-right party can use institutional resources to intensify, rather than dilute, its oppositional communication. They also suggest that theories derived mainly from Western European cases should account more fully for post-communist contexts in which the legitimacy of democratic institutions remains contested.