section_path: Early life and education
section_name: Early life and education
paragraph_text: Early life and education
  
  George-Nicolae Simion was born on 21 September 1986 in Focșani, the capital of Vrancea County, in the Socialist Republic of Romania. He is the second of two children born to Constantin Simion from Ialomița and his wife from Vrancea, the other being his elder sister Elena. At an early age, the family moved to the Romanian capital Bucharest, where his parents, both economists, had met when studying at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies. Romanian Development Bank.
  
  Constantin suffered from alcoholism and was involved in numerous police confrontations. Simion was thus largely raised in the care of his mother. In 1995, at the age of nine, Simion attended the opening of Romania's first McDonald's restaurant, an event he later reflected upon as among the formative ones in his perceptions of Western capitalism's influence on post-Communist Romanian society.
  
  He completed his secondary education at Gheorghe Lazăr National College in Bucharest, graduating in 2005. He then studied at the Faculty of Business and Administration at the University of Bucharest, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 2008. In 2010, he completed a master's degree in history at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași, located in the historical region of Moldavia, with "the crimes of communism " as his research topic. During his academic years, Simion actively participated in student organisations that promoted Romanian history and cultural heritage.