The second tour illusions

In the middle of the electoral campaign, the data remain unchanged. And nothing new can be foreseen. The promised sensational disclosures, announced by certain parties and certain political analysts, are late. CDR (Romanian Democratic Convention) hasn’t a strategy, PNL (National Liberal Party) has one but unclear for the moment. Will they rather ally with PDSR in the governing system or they will remain in opposition? Nobody threatens Iliescu’s position, his way to Cotroceni is safer than ever since 1990. Vadim Tudor plays with patience his part in the play and, with a little bit of chance, he is right to hope in a confrontation with Iliescu in the second electoral tour. What will be Romania’s image, if a former communist high dignitary and a nationalist grown up in the Securitate laboratories got in the second tour? Are there any more chances to stop Iliescu, given that PDSR’s victory became a certitude? The questions had surely appeared before the electoral campaign started, but they haven’t burst out until now with the group of intellectuals recently regrouped like in the romantic years ’90s.
The intellectuals’ appeal to support a single Right wing candidate was meant to re-launch the electoral campaign. One single candidate of the Right? The formula has been discussed since the local elections ended. Their results were the ones everybody knows. CDR preferred Isarescu, probably thinking that it will get a special engine to surpass the electoral limit. The result was just the opposite. After he entered the race undecided, Isarescu’s popularity gets more and more eroded.
During the campaign, as it can be noticed, CDR has not a strategy and no clear idea about what it should mean. Within CDR the situation gets more complicated, as the staff are separated. PNTCD (National Christian and Democratic Peasant Party), UFD (Right Forces Union), ANCD (Christian and Democratic National Alliance) or PM (Moldavians’ Party) overlap, not managing to offer a unitary message. On the other side, PNL (National Liberal Party) chose the variant of the candidate who decides the first. It was Stolojan, but only after he got, in his turn, Isarescu’s assurances that he wouldn’t join the competition. Theoretically, a fragmentation of the votes for the Right was thus averted.
The intellectuals’ initiative was not only belated, but also extremely bad conceived, being taken without them to have a previous contact with the candidates’ staffs, the ones who impose the electoral agenda. What did the supporters of the appeal actually imagine? In case there was an availability to rationally give up his own candidacy, who would have been forced to do it? The UDMR (Democratic Union of the Hungarians in Romania) candidate should have normally negotiate with someone, as this is the mission of his candidacy. Petre Roman is no more the one he was in 1996. Now his achievement is reduced to a few percentages, anyway, much under Isarescu’s or Stolojan’s results. Let us logically suppose that these only two would have remained in the game. Who would have been the favorite? An independent candidate, Mugur Isarescu, supported by an organization with reduced chances to enter the Parliament? Stolojan, supported by a rising party, with much more "calculated" actions, but with a credibility mined by the scenario of an alliance with PDSR?
The candidates’ refusals to withdraw from the competition also suggest that supporting one candidate of the Right wing, even for the second tour, will be a complicated problem. Not because it would be impossible to surpass the adversities and the vanities appeared over this rule, but because there is no reward that mobilize them. A president, be it the one who will forcedly be labeled as "a Right one", will only have a limited presidential apparatus, that will not satisfy the parties’ clientele, as the governing act does. Supposing that Isarescu will be the one, his independence doesn’t represent a big attraction for the parties, especially now, that CDR takes a lot of trouble to pass the electoral limit. Why support a president that is not quite relied to the party that supports him? If PNL announced clearly that it enters the opposition pole, though the present intentions show the opposite, Stolojan would be the only one to fulfil these conditions. Presidency will become a realistic stake for the Right parties in the second tour, in the conditions when the future president will belong to a party on which basis the future opposition could be organized. For now, out of different reasons, one can not bank either on PNL or CDR.

(Mihai CHIPER)