For those who have constantly refused to vote, you have every reason to break with tradition this time: after all, the country’s future is hanging by a thread, not something that happens in every election. If everything goes well, we will stay on the same path and probably get a little better because the harsh lessons we’ve learned over the last few days, can lead to changes for the better.
Those who voted in the first round, and opted for sovereigntist candidates with the sincere belief that only they can save Romania – morally and materially – today have all the information they need to understand that the two sovereigntists have only one mother: Mother Russia.
Those who went to vote, but did not vote for Lasconi, Simion and Georgescu, can be sure that there is no room for doubt. The threat to Romania is existential: Russia has declared a hybrid war on our country.
And those who voted in the first round for Elena Lasconi, has every reason to be proud for their fantastic intuition. I recommend they plead the Lasconi-Europe-NATO cause with colleagues, friends, friends and relatives who are undecided, or don’t want to vote, or are drawn toward Russia’s man. As uncomfortable as a desperate lobby can often be, the discomfort pales in comparison to the odious outcome if we people remain passive.
We would not have found ourselves in this position if in the institutional decision-making process, lucidity had prevailed at the right time, not just at the last minute. But to hold the culprits accountable and to strengthen the state’s mechanisms so that something like this does not happen to us again, it is imperative that the future president of Romania is not Russia’s candidate.
On the other hand, each potential voter can make a better decision if they carefully look at the profile of both candidates.
Călin Georgescu is a classic product of the “old system”, that world that we thought we had buried with the bodies of dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu 35 years ago.
It’s a world connected to the former Securitate officers and new businessmen, themselves fragments of the former Securitate and communism who welcomed Călin Georgescu with open arms.
Georgescu went to study in the West in the mid-80s, in the middle of the darkest period of the ‘Golden Age.’ When the prisons were again filled with martyrs, just like in (Gheorghe Gheorgiu) Dej’s time (the 1950s and early 60s), when the most an ordinary citizen could dream of was a mini-tour through the Warsaw Pact countries, when getting a passport depended on the Securitate, the agronomist comrade Călin Georgescu was able to study in Great Britain and America.
The invisible hands of the regime smoothed his path even then and continued to do so after 1990. He entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without an interview and remained there despite his mediocre performance. .
Moreover, the invisible hands of former Securitate officers later embellished his CV, adding all kinds of meaningless associations and organizations, with misleading titles. This is how Călin Georgescu ended up with the UN logo, although he didn’t even work in that organization as a tea boy.
Finally, all these details have now surfaced we can measure Călin Georgescu’s true value… or non-value.
The individual was a compulsive liar, pumped up by others until he burst.
How many of us, ordinary people, have had such luck in life: to do nothing, to know nothing, but still to get to the top and live like a boyar (a feudal noble of the highest rank in Eastern Europe)?
Compare the path of an impostor with prima donna airs with the path of his opponent.
Elena Lasconi represents everything that Călin Georgescu is not, but struggles to appear.
She’s an ordinary girl, not a boy from the System.
She had a tough childhood and adolescence, her teenage years were marked by hard work. A great deal of hard work!
She arrived in Bucharest from the small Transylvanian town of Hațeg under her own steam, without the help of her mother and father. Without the props offered at every step by the old Securitate officers versed in the dark arts.
She went to high school, then got married. She had a child at a young age, but she raised her alone after she got divorced.
Instead of stopping at only 20 years old, like 99.99% of girls from her socio-economic class would have done, Elena Lasconi moved mountains.
She was a single mother, got a job in the local press,went to college, and then completed another degree. She was finally promoted to a job in Bucharest thanks to her hard work and skills, without the invisible but super effective props that catapulted Călin Georgescu from being a nobody to being a nobody with airs.
Women can probably better understand the colossal efforts Lasconi made to become the accomplished person she is today: she has an independent grown-up child, a normal marriage (she was fortunate second time around), she went to a BBC school and had a career in ProTV (a kind of Mount Everest for young, ambitious journalists, she was voted for Mayor twice, and is now a presidential candidate in the runoff.
At this moment of the presidential race, I’d like to do a mea culpa: I was among the first people to criticize Lasconi at the beginning of the campaign, but I now admit that the last two weeks have been a revelation. It’s amazing how Elena Lasconi is doing, under the infernal pressure of having to be the person who saves the the future of this country. The speed with which she’s progressed in the mantle of a presidential candidate, is fantastic.
This success is probably this is also rooted in the challenging road she faced throughout her life, where she started from the worst possible pole position. I now deduce that Elena Lasconi is the kind of person who really shows what she can achieve and can pull off when times are the hardest. For the president of a country, this represents a supreme quality: effectiveness, calm and lucidity in conditions of extreme stress.
Elena Lasconi’s life story can only inspire and inspires as a kind of Cinderella-type fairy tale, stories that keep you on the edge of your seat, and end spectacularly and with the relief of happy ending that helps you sleep well at night.
By comparison, the life story of Călin Georgescu is everything that Romanians hated most in the post-communist transition: the impostor’s stubbornness, the luck of the one who is on the ‘wrongside’, the arrogance of the arrogant, the sickness of the the power-hungry person, the cynicism of the one who will step on corpses to achieve his ends.
Whoever is truly honest with themselves will find that Elena Lasconi is genuine, not Călin Georgescu.
Of course, Lasconi is also a realm of imperfection. She’s imperfect, yes, but she doesn’t hide that and that’s exactly what makes her authentic. Whereas, Georgescu… Georgescu is the repressed imperfect individual. He thinks he is superior to any form of human life on this planet, he is constantly preoccupied with shoveling a thick layer of foundation to cover every deep wrinkle that furrows his personality. He believes himself to be God’s ‘chosen one’ and envoy here on earth. He’s the only person on Earth who, as ‘the chosen one’, claims to have come into contact with aliens.
It’s painful when you think that such a man can become president!
He proclaims his openness to those around him, but we see him irritated to the point of a nervous breakdown when a poor journalist asks him the most banal question.
He does not admit that he may make mistakes, or that he was ever wrong, nor does he provide verifiable details on key aspects of his life: what did he do, where he was, why he was there, who does he associate with, who does he serve?
He changes his mind in the blink of an eye when he feels cornered (see the case of leaving NATO and the EU), but he is afraid in a way you don’t see with anyone else in distancing himself from Vladimir Putin (just the other day he just painted the Moscow criminal as a flawless patriot).
Compare this with Elena Lasconi’s extraordinary courage in publicly and unconditionally saying what she thinks. How and where she sees Romania. Who its allies are.
What do we want in the end? A president who is secretive to the core or one who is unreservedly open? A president who has already proved in advance he is capable of betrayal just when we are under attack or one who pleads for strengthening the relationship with NATO and the USA, the only ones in this world who have been guaranteeing our security for 20 years?
I know, Călin Georgescu speaks all the time about peace. Although he avoids telling us how he will ensure it. This despite the fact he admires Putin, the man who brought war back to our doorstep. In order to see Calin Georgescu, the president of Romania, Russia unleashed the dogs of hybrid war against Romania.
Finally, we shouldn’t be fooled by the fact that Călin Georgescu’s supporters are precisely the old politicians, the ones who eight years ago triggered the siege on the rule of law.
Should we overlook the fact that the Romanian archetype of corruption and theft of the state’s wealth, (Former Prime Minister) Adrian Năstase – “Four homes Năstase” – suppprt him? And the Romanian archetype of intellectual theft – Victor Ponta as well, the friend of the fugitive Sebastian Ghiță?
How come? The old system is a so-called outsider? Putin’s Russia represented by some kind of ‘sovereign’? The neo-legionnaires and the criminals who are pulling out all the stops for the ‘apologist for peace;?
There is an old profound Romanian saying: “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”.
Călin Georgescu or Elena Lasconi? Let’s think twice and vote wisely!
- PS: There is something else, something fundamental: Elena Lasconi breaks the mold that has driven us crazy in the last 35 years. She is the first woman in Romania who has got this far without being promoted because she was someone’s mistress, wife or secretary. Elena Lasconi proves to women that even in this country full of macho male politicians, it IS possible. You can work hard, be a woman, have a family, have a successful career and reach the very top. Călin Georgescu, on the other hand, would not have survived this far without a political sugar daddy, in Bucharest, and a geopolitical sugar daddy, right there in Moscow.
US concerned about Russian interference in Romanian election
