Inevitably populists will win in every country in the West - in Hungary, Italy and US first, UK and Germany last.

The Romanian presidential election was an enormous surprise for me and all the clever people. 

Plenty of waiters and taxi drivers foresaw it. 

I had assumed that the right-wing sovereignist candidate George Simion would win the first round of the election with 30% of the vote but lose in the second. 

He won 41% instead. 

It is now likely, not certain but likely, that he will win the presidency.

Many of the Social Democrat (ex-Communist) Party voters share Mr Simion's anti-American (pre-Trump), pro-peace, socially conservative views. 

Every party in Romania is conservative but the left-wing party is most so.

Former Social Democrat Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who won 13% of the votes, also claimed to be a sovereignist. His voters will mostly go to Simion.

People voted for George Simion because they are very angry that the court cancelled the first election in November in which a right-wing candidate won the first round and then banned him and another rightist from standing in the new elections six months later (why six months later not one month later?) 

For a long time the court did not even explain its action. That was very Romanian.

Had the court let the original Romanian election proceed the president would now probably be an inoffensive though stupid woman who loves the European Union. 

Assuming Romanians could tolerate a woman president, which they probably would, faute de mieux, and an idiot, again yes.

Among business people and the people employed by international companies the outlook is very gloomy and frightened this week. They know that a hard right president will be very bad for the Romanian economy because he will scare foreign investors.

But, as an international company employee said to me yesterday, the Romanian election is part of a universal trend. 

It's not about Romania. It's a backlash against endless wars, international organisations usurping the place of nation states, social liberalism, but more than any of this lack of democracy. It is happening everywhere.

Inevitably populists will win in every country - Hungary and US first, UK and Germany last.

A very senior businesswoman who knows people at the top in more than one party told me on the morning after the vote that they think a victory for George Simion is going to happen and therefore politicians will ally with him to be in the winning team. She says that Simion has highly educated and responsible people around him.

The president has relatively few powers but does control the secret services and so will have power over part of what most people here think is the deep state.

He can also, if he cannot find a Prime Minister to form a government, call an early parliamentary election. 

The resignation of the Prime Minister after the results of the first round of the election will give the new President the opportunity to put together a new government or call elections in which the right will do very well. 

George Simion has said he wants Calin Georgescu, the man who came first in the November election and was banned for standing in this one, to be Prime Minister.