In order to avoid being hit by the train on May 4th as it hit us on November 24th, we should try to break out of the electoral hypnosis state created by slogans in our bubbles for a virtual excursion into other bubbles or, ideally, physically into social areas completely different from ours, meaning at the grassroots level, where, for example, parents refuse to vaccinate their children against measles or polio to protect them from autism and toughen them up.
Things look completely different there compared to what we know, and this is without taking into account any sociological analysis. Anyone interested in a detailed one can read it in the one conducted by the director of INSCOP, Remus Ştefureac, in an interview with News.ro.
The reality at the grassroots level practically ensures the entry, without any unpredictable political cataclysm, of George Simion into the second round, even more consolidated than polls show. And the photo taken at Easter alongside Călin Georgescu gave him essential validation.
The AUR electorate votes for Simion, the majority of Georgescu's electorate, which also includes voters from PSD, PNL, and even UDMR. Let's not forget that the depopulated Romanian villages are found in the diaspora captured massively by extremists, who also influence significantly what remains at home.
Plus an interesting category, that of the furious ones who want to punish the very poor political offer. In other words, they vote for Simion "damn it," so to speak.
And George Simion's discreet campaign, completely misinterpreted as a power outage, was intended to focus on certain accessible electoral areas. For example, now we understand that Simion will send one million personalized letters to pensioners.
In the PSD villages, even where mayors achieved good scores for Marcel Ciolacu in November, the hope is to be able to take out about half of the votes received by the PSD president. And this is a daunting task.
Because Marcel Ciolacu's votes are now divided between the candidate officially supported by PSD and Victor Ponta. The flood scandal does not seem to have been as devastating as it appeared on Facebook and on some television channels. Victor Ponta has his faithful television channel, with a very large audience in these areas, which tells them something else. "Women especially go after Ponta, and I can't do anything about it, no matter what I say," a PSD mayor recently told me.
Crin Antonescu needs to be pushed, he is struggling, he doesn't connect with the common man, in fact, his meetings in the field have been mostly with party activists, the 10 years of unemployment weigh on him, his speech is for the big city dwellers. Rural and small-town urban areas don't want philosophies and rhetorical charges, they want simple things about what interests them.
Nicușor Dan is quite unknown at the grassroots level and doesn't inspire anything. His quiet, bookish style of speaking with his eyes down, his prestige as an academic achiever may convince sophisticated city dwellers, but it is far from what a rural environment expects from a leader. And the fact that he has been in a civil partnership for two decades and has children, but is not married in church, matters to the uncompromising rural conservatism regarding the traditional family.
The one who seems to have taken off as a victim of the USR coup is Elena Lasconi, who could achieve a much better score than she would have without the betrayal of part of the party leadership. A friend who returned from Easter vacation in Moldova told me that there the votes are massively split between Simion and Lasconi.
The trendy thing now is the strategic vote, but limited to blocking a Simion - Ponta final. It's certainly a calculation, but the final is a stage, not an end in itself. The end goal is winning the elections, thus avoiding the extremist disaster. Therefore, the strategic vote should be considered in favor of the candidate with the best chances of defeating George Simion in the final round.
Just as in the USA there are so-called "swing" or purple states, which do not have a firm Democratic or Republican option and can tilt the balance in one direction or another in each round of elections, now we have swing voters. That is, the PSD electorate, the largest and most conscientious (though not disciplined, as we have seen) in voting, with a high turnout rate.
It's "swing" because, for the first time, it doesn't have its own candidate.
Crin Antonescu is embraced by the central leadership but not deeply embraced. Victor Ponta is a former PSD member, but with a complicated history that some, even some PSD mayors, have not forgotten and cannot overlook.
A part of this electorate has already been lost since November in favor of Călin Georgescu and left as a legacy to George Simion.
But what will the others do when there are only two candidates on the ballot? Which candidate could massively capture this electorate in the second round against Simion, and which candidate will the PSD electorate run to Simion because they consider him closer to their ideas?
These are the questions that anyone invoking the strategic vote must answer. And because we want to be a democracy, the answer can only be individual. But informed and lucid.