Nicusor Dan was disappointed and angry when the party he founded distanced itself from him, according to multiple political sources. The head of state hoped that USR would become a presidential party, offering him leverage in negotiations to form a majority in Parliament.
Dominic Fritz, the mayor of Timisoara, supported by some party leaders, decided that it was better for the future of USR to ally with PNL and form a center-right political pole.
In reality, the pact blocked Nicusor Dan’s plan to replace Ilie Bolojan as the head of the government.
If USR had not allied with PNL, it would have been easy to achieve a political arrangement that would exclude the liberal leader, between PSD, UDMR, USR, and the liberal coup plotters, who would likely have succeeded in taking over the party.
The meeting between Simina Tanasescu, the president of the CCR, and Ilie Bolojan, the current prime minister ousted by a censure motion, should be interpreted as an informal discussion through which Bolojan learned that Dominic Fritz would be overthrown by a CCR majority influenced by PSD.
The meeting sparked artificial emotion and false debate, overlooking the fact that Florin Iordache, the PSD puppeteer, works one floor above the CCR headquarters, in the same building in the Palace of Parliament, from where he monitors and controls all movements of the constitutional judges.
Such a two-pronged plan, one aimed at undermining PNL from within, and the other at decapitating USR, could only have been devised and executed, in my opinion, by PSD, at least with the tacit approval of the president.
The Privileged Mafia
Nicusor Dan's absence from the scene is not accidental. He could not show up at Navy Day, be booed, and then come and present himself as a great mediator in political negotiations for the formation of a new government.
So, he allowed images of himself in church, praying, to leak to the press and social media, so that he would be perceived as a good Christian, after failing in everything so far in his presidency.
"If the president promulgates the ANI law, my term as mayor will end in 30 days, as a retroactive sanction for things that happened before the law came into force," announced Dominic Fritz, the mayor of Timisoara.
"The need of the privileged mafia to get rid of me drives them to act desperately to the point of demolishing the foundations of democracy. A rule of law that exists only when PSD desires is no longer a rule of law," added the USR leader.
Notice that the text written by Dominic Fritz begins with a direct reference to President Nicusor Dan, indicating that he knows where the strategy of political decapitation comes from and to whom it belongs.
From the way events unfold, it is evident that Romania, in a precarious economic balance, is also a victim of a blind power struggle, in which the current president seeks to take control of political life.
The Disaster of 2024, in a New Presentation
The CCR declared unconstitutional an amendment in the same integrity law that required the "life partner" of an official to disclose their assets.
This was an amendment introduced by AUR, targeting Nicusor Dan and his partner, Mirabela Gradinaru, in exchange for supporting PSD against Dominic Fritz.
Both were deemed unconstitutional by legal experts, either violating legal principles or citing the lack of a legal definition of terms, but one passed CCR, the other did not. Here, in the decision, lies the hint of a political judgment within the Constitutional Court and not a legal one.
After the courts shredded the decisions and the PNL congress, it is now time for USR to be hit by a CCR majority, thus brutally breaking the alliance between Fritz and Ilie Bolojan, through the intervention of an axis formed by Nicusor Dan, PSD, and Lia Savonea.
What happened in 2024 continues today. And then, through brutal interventions by the country's president, the justice system, and the CCR, election data was modified, some candidates were removed from the lists, while others, with the same type of radical political action, were left, presidential elections were annulled, causing an unprecedented crisis of trust internally and internationally in Romania's democratic system.
The Head of the System
It will be interesting to see how the residents of Timisoara will react when they see that the mayor they elected with 50% of the votes will be dismissed following an "administrative error" made by over half of the local elected officials.
"Before the European Commission, PSD will have to explain how a landmark law of 770 million euros was turned into a weapon against a mayor elected twice. In front of investors, it will be harder to explain why to create jobs here if the entire state is at the mercy of a single corrupt party," Dominic Fritz further wrote in his reaction to the CCR decision.
Nicusor Dan, the "head of the system," as he self-styled, has engaged in a dangerous game that further exposes Romania to powerful external threats.
Instead of strengthening institutions, changing the conspiratorial atmosphere poisoning society, and using the trust of those who elected him to lift the country out of the pit where Iohannis threw it, he has done nothing but continue in the same vein and approve a Machiavellian mechanism aimed at destroying parties and political leaders outside electoral confrontation.