The only thing that PSD and PNL cannot afford is to break the joint candidacy for the Mayor of the Capital. This is because the effect on the entire structure would spread exactly like ice fracturing, and would end up sinking the coalition at all levels, including governance.
The situation is already fragile. Never before have PSD and PNL been more disliked in the field, a liberal who has been involved in electoral campaigns since the 1990 Blind Sunday told me.
If, at the top, the symbolic candidacy falls apart, the wave of reciprocal fury will become uncontrollable for the central leaders.
So, one way or another, the coalition must come up with a common candidate until the last day of filing applications with the Central Electoral Bureau.
Who should be the common candidate?
First of all, the question is whether there would be anyone with a chance to capture enough votes from both parties to come in first. In my opinion, no.
Cătălin Cîrstoiu has been buried, I remain of this opinion, not so much because of the press revelations themselves, but because of how they were managed by him, and the two parties.
Everything that could have been done wrong was done very wrong, so at this point Mr. Cîrstoiu is in a worse position than when he entered the race. And the constant messages of dissociation, more or less explicit, from both parties have eroded him massively.
It is hard to understand why they took on a candidate with no political experience, if they were planning to leave him without support, without a team, without professionals behind him. Who were they making fun of in the end?
Another independent candidate is not only hard to find, but also no longer desired. Marcel Ciolacu has already announced that "the time of independents has passed." A statement that probably has a long reach, including towards the presidential elections.
Party candidacies have no chance, on one hand, because they would come in the wake of a resounding failure of the joint candidacy, and on the other hand, for the fundamental reason from the start: no candidate from one party will capture enough of the other party's electorate, which would migrate to another candidate, Piedone or Nicușor Dan (ND) as the case may be, or would stay home.
We see, in fact, that there is no great rush, except for Robert Negoiță, who is playing his own political games, this time in partnership with Firea and Pandele, and who is dangerously unstable for such a political leap.
So, at this point, realistically, PSD and PNL should not be looking for the winner, but for the candidate who will absorb the defeat and favor the future mayor. In other words, they will arbitrate between Piedone and Nicușor Dan.
Who should lose?
One option would be to keep Cătălin Cîrstoiu to avoid associating the defeat with any party logo and to not assume the failure of the election. They would let the electorates of the two parties naturally divide towards the candidates in the top two positions.
If they support a common candidate from PNL, it means they will try to regain votes from the liberal area to avoid ending up with Nicușor Dan, while the bulk of PSD votes will go to Piedone, whom PSD wants to support anyway.
If there is a candidate from PSD, on the contrary, Piedone will lose votes from the PSD electorate, while Nicușor Dan will massively capitalize on PNL votes.
In short, a common candidate from PNL would favor Piedone, a common candidate from PSD would favor Nicușor Dan.
Abandoning Cătălin Cîrstoiu would be a failure in itself that would entail a political settling of accounts, which seems to have begun. Nicolae Ciucă throws him into Marcel Ciolacu's court. The latter does not respond, but PSD pushes through unofficial sources that Mr. Cîrstoiu would be Klaus Iohannis's candidate.
The public statements of the two former intelligence chiefs, Eduard Helvig (here) and Silviu Predoiu (here), are extremely interesting. What they have in common is a vehement attack on the two coalition leaders, each of them reportedly having a protege they would like to see in various candidacies.
How did the largest parties in Romania end up ready to be defeated in the race for the position of General Mayor of the Capital, which, in political votes, are otherwise in the first place?
In short (the subject deserves a more in-depth analysis), because their leaders wanted to circumvent both political rules and the electorate, because they wanted to force unnatural and impossible-to-digest solutions onto their own parties.