Just as in Bucharest the emperors were politically laid bare in a session that will go down in history, in Washington, Mircea Geoană was giving an interview in which he practically announced his presidential candidacy in the strongest possible terms, considering the position he still holds as NATO Deputy Secretary General:
„…I must fulfill my duty at NATO until the last day of my mandate. It is an obvious obligation and part of my professional ethics and my responsibilities as a Romanian political leader and at the NATO level. But, seeing what is happening in the country and abroad, I am getting closer to a decision.”
And, as an extremely well-connected interlocutor repeated to me a couple of times in the last few days: at the moment of speaking, Mircea Geoană is the President of Romania. Which is not even surprising or hard to argue.
After the epic failure of the joint candidacy in the Capital and the split into individual candidacies, there is very little room left for PSD and PNL to come up with a common candidate for the presidential elections moved to September (there are rumors they want to move them back to December, which I don’t think would surprise anyone).
The common support for an independent candidate is dead, buried, and with a memorial service held after the Cîrstoiu episode, at least because I don’t see any person with respect for their own image getting involved with Nicu and Marcel after seeing how the common candidate was treated.
And a common political presidential candidate from either of the two parties is not a viable solution for the same reason it couldn’t work in Bucharest: a major rejection of any candidate by the electorate of the other party.
The scare tactic of extremism clearly didn’t work, so it won’t push anyone en masse to the polls.
### Country and Coalition, at the Slot Machine
The worst for the two knights of the coalition apocalypse, Nicu and Marcel, is not the failure of the joint candidacy in Bucharest per se. In politics, there are miscalculations and misjudgments, I don’t think anyone has been exempt from them anywhere in the world.
The worst part is the shocking evidence that they had no calculation or plan to make a mistake because they had no calculation, no plan. The evidence is that everything was an improvisation on the fly, a game at the slot machine. This crisis left them politically exposed, amateurs and impostors.
If it was just about their own electoral pot, it would concern them, but these people lead a country exactly as we saw them handling the issue of the joint candidate. Without a grounded plan, without numbers, without serious analysis. A country led like a slot machine.
– [Marcel Ciolacu is losing control? The key is with Dan Voiculescu](https://spotmedia.ro/stiri/opinii-si-analize/marcel-ciolacu-pierde-controlul-cheia-e-la-dan-voiculescu)
For Marcel Ciolacu, it’s devastating and a humiliation show. Humiliation towards Gabriela Firea, reclaimed as a savior after humiliating her in turn – the current candidate, the fifty-fifty candidate, to whom he now promises to personally gather signatures.
Humiliation towards Piedone, the one no one wanted to talk to, the one with the barbecue smoke, whom he now pleads to give up his candidacy. The decision is not with Piedone, it’s with Dan Voiculescu. And the longer the dithering, the higher the price of withdrawal.
Dan Voiculescu’s stake is not necessarily the Mayorship of the Capital. It’s a means to boost his party’s score above 5% in the European and parliamentary elections, to become a political player again.
Does Ciolacu really want Gabriela Firea to win? I’ve said it before, a tough question. In the internal party equation, he doesn’t need a victorious rival, so before the Cîrstoiu episode, the answer would have been a firm no.
Now, however, if Firea loses, it won’t be her failure, it will be his, because Firea came too late, after his blunder with the joint candidate, because if she hadn’t delayed, Piedone wouldn’t have entered, because she antagonized Piedone.
„If Firea had been nominated from the start, today I would be a candidate in Sector 5,” this statement that Piedone obsessively repeats, Ciolacu will hear obsessively if Firea loses. The Cîrstoiu episode changed everything.
Moreover, after gluing the European elections to the local ones to boost them, after making joint lists, all accidents from the local elections will surely impact the European election score.
### The Main Culprit
With the stamp of amateurs, politically exposed, armed with paper helmets and wooden swords, the two knights of the apocalypse paint the fence as much as they can, but behind it, at the presidential elections, the leopard awaits them.
Mircea Geoană was also politically exposed in 2009, felt the grit in his teeth and the sharp humiliation from mocking stamps that haunted him for years. He crossed the desert alone, but he deserves credit for metabolizing the past and, apparently at least, learning from it, thus achieving a somewhat improbable reinvention 15 years ago.
He refined himself in high-level politics, exchanged internal stamps for the valuable NATO label. The only real danger is falling into the sin of arrogance that has cost him in the past. All in all, there is hardly any comparison with the rest of the offerings.
But for this situation, the main culprits are not the two coalition leaders. They can only do so much and are a product of the main culprit. The one who from Seoul spat out the observation that losing the joint candidate is not a great success.
In 10 years, Mr. Klaus Iohannis has destroyed politics in Romania with tenacity and diligence. To ensure a comfortable life, to not be bothered by anyone, to have absolute power in his own interest, Mr. Iohannis has cleared the political class through all means.
He destroyed political mechanisms, twisted political logic, confused democracy and common sense. Nicu and Marcel are the crowning achievement of his tireless political work.
It’s not unnatural for the only viable offer to come from outside the country, from outside the Iohannis system.