After PSD-AUR announced their no-confidence motion, there was a day or so of silence from President Nicușor Dan.
And when he finally spoke it was only to give assurances that he would continue his well-known equidistance, as well as giving some even more indigestible assurances: “There are some party leaders, that when they want to say something, we have to take them seriously.”
Nicușor Dan was referring to the seriousness of the PSD leader, here’s the full quote: “A PSD-AUR government is extremely unlikely, as the PSD president said. There are some people who are party leaders, that when they say something we have to take them seriously.”
Two observations:
- President Dan’s long silence contrasted sharply with the other public reactions: the Foreign Investors Council, parties in the government and important voices from civil society who were vocal. And we’re not talking about easily impressionable actors, or people who just open their mouths of those who have no idea how to gauge a budding political crisis, (on the contrary all these three categories have gone public every time Romania began to slip seriously in the last two decades). Therefore, the unflappable air of the head of state has only raised new questions about his ability to adequately measure what is happening around him.
- Nicusor Dan’s confidence in Sorin Grindeanu’s public positions is ridiculous if we look at the facts. For example, in 2017, when Grindeanu was prime minister, and his party withdrew its support, he refused to resign. He used a similar argument to the one used now by PM Ilie Bolojan: “I am not resigning. I have the obligation to behave responsibly towards Romania and towards the party I belong to. It’s the Romanian Government,” But today, Grindeanu reproaches Bolojan precisely for the attitude he had nine years ago. Moreover, the same Sorin Grindeanu said in the past that he would not collaborate with AUR, which he is doing now, any not for anything trivial but for trying to bring down the government. Finally, Grindeanu promised not long ago that he would quickly resign as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and now he says and does the opposite – without a care in the world. But Sorin Grindeanu is unexpectedly fortunate: Romania’s president places a value on his words and poses publicly, as the guarantor of Sorin Grindeanu’s seriousness (how ironic that an old PSD campaign slogan – “Garantat Vanghelie” (a PSD mayor) has now become “Garantat Dan”). The question marks raised so far by Nicușor Dan’s attitude now only need exclamation marks!
The new shock produced, on Tuesday, by the emergence of the head of state mirrors the older shocks we’ve come to expect from Dan over the last five months, when he failed to sanction PSD’s initiatives to demolish the government; five months in which he failed to use the weight of his position in support of a prime minister systematically pressured by the PSD to slow down reforms.
Unlike Nicușor Dan, former President Traian Basescu took huge political risks to support his prime minister Emil Boc who was cornered by political and influence groups, also over structural reforms.
The big drama, however, is not even that – day by day, Nicușor Dan is paling more and more compared to Traian Basescu. The great drama is that as things turn pear-shaped Nicușor Dan seems to look more and more like ex-President Ion Iliescu from the time when the old Bolshevik was teaching the public (whom he probably considered infantile) the lesson of peace and parliamentary stability.
The distance between the expectations when Nicușor Dan won over six million votes in the presidential elections in May 2025 and what he delivers today, as president, could not be more cosmic, at times even tragically comical.
Since the political crisis broke out, the country’s president seems to have developed a two-step way of (in)action:
- On the one hand, he undervalues what is obvious, as if the true truth were strictly the subjective product of his gaze and interpretation, and not what is concretely happening in objective reality.
- On the other hand, when he is asked what he is going to do, he becomes opaque: I watch, I observe, I talk, I mediate.
One of the flaws in Nicușor Dan’s approach is that the parties that generated the crisis (PSD, and AUR), as well as the interest groups that hope for dividends as it gets worse have the opportunity to optimize their initial plans right now.
Because, encouraged by what they see from the president’s attitude, they can simply expand a subversive agenda that, initially, may have been a little more modest.
Apparently indifferent to the way he is perceived by others, and lacking a coherent idea about his role, Nicușor Dan does nothing but encourage those who initiated not only the ousting of Bolojan, but also the diverting Romania’s strategic path.
Sorin Grindeanu is not a serious character and it has become almost impossible to take. Nicușor Dan seriously.
