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Paper short abstract

Under austerity and political polarization, Romania’s far-right AUR hijacks labour grievances, racializes migrant workers, co-opts union activists, and forges neo-corporatist alliances, transforming worker precarity into moralized and racialized hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

Under austerity and neoliberal precarity, the far-right party AUR (Alianța pentru Unirea Românilor) has seized labour politics as a terrain for moral reordering. Drawing on ethnographic observation of rallies, media discourse, and union activity, this paper traces how AUR hijacks worker grievances, redirecting them into moralized and racialized hierarchies that valorize domestic labour while casting migrant workers as illegitimate competitors.

A vivid instance is the 2024 Baia Mare furniture factory conflict, where tensions between Romanian and Sri Lankan workers flared amid weak union mediation. The void left by unions allowed AUR to escalate the dispute into a nationalist moral drama, framing migrant labour as a threat to domestic livelihoods. Meanwhile, some domestic labour activists, still tethered to unions, are co-opted into AUR’s populist orbit, revealing how post-union precarity becomes fertile ground for fascist hegemony.

Paradoxically, AUR’s neo-corporatist labour platform addresses grievances that other parties ignore, staking out a dangerously expansive social-justice terrain while channeling worker representation into nationalist governance. From the standpoint of political economy, two conjoined processes emerge: first, the reordering of the working-class political field through moralized categories, which foment intra-class conflict and obscure deeper structural alliances based on shared exploitation; second, politically engineered fascist neo-corporatist alliances linking segments of the “virtuous” working class with factions of domestic capital.

Through a Gramscian lens, these dynamics constitute a form of cultural and political leadership, securing consent, reshaping norms, and racializing solidarity under structural crisis, revealing both the fragility and emancipatory potential of labour politics in polarized, precarious contexts.