After slamming NATO for days on end, bombarding the alliance with pro-Kremlin rhetoric even going as far to say that the Mihail Kogălniceanu military base (Eds: Black Sea NATO base) will be used to attack Russia, (presidential candidate) Calin Georgescu has touched a raw nerve in the extremist wing in Romania so quickly that disagreements and criticisms are now difficult to ignore.
The leader of AUR (Eds: Romania’s biggest nationalist party), George Simion, and AUR MP Gigi Becali are two distinct voices that have drawn a new and rather vocal boundary between themselves and Calin Georgescu – at least on NATO and its military bases.
On the surface, none of them went as far as to sanction Georgescu explicitly by refusing to support a possible new candidacy. However, they subtly dropped some suggestions on the matter (Becali even made room for [former prime minister] Victor Ponta in the equation).
In their internal forum, however, both Simion and Becali, and most likely others too from AUR, would be perfectly happy if Călin Georgescu did not run again for Cotroceni presidential palace.
And this isn’t so much for reasons of national interest, but rather for personal, group and party interests.
AUR cannot have its own candidate if Calin Georgescu wants, and the Constitutional Court allows him to run again.
If AUR were to have its own candidate and Georgescu were running as well, there is the obvious risk of cannibalizing the far right’s votes. If a third party were to itself into the fight on this sulphurous corridor of Putinist sovereignism, for example from the SOS party (Diana Șoșoacă), the electoral menu would become even more indigestible for the ‘Russia House’ in our house called Romania.
But until things are definitively clarified in terms of who will run for the presidency in the extremist lane, it is better to debate a very topical topic, one which is especially embarrassing for the Simion-AUR wing.
The politicians in the extremist lane try to cultivate the appearance of a seamless unity in thought, feelings and action, so that the electorate will greedily swallow their lies, distorted truths and hidden intentions.
Călin Georgescu produced a total surprise in November presidential elections, a surprise that was not only hard for the pro-Western political-electoral segment to swallow, but also for anti-Western politicians – in this case, those from AUR and SOS.
Why? Because he grabbed a large slice of the electorate by surprise.
Somehow, AUR and its leader, George Simion, had and have suffered the most from the meteoric rise of Calin Georgescu.
In the first round of presidential elections, AUR and Simion were among the absolute losers, even though the initial ‘game’ had been to help them to be among the relative winners.
The notoriety and electoral traction of Călin Georgescu continue to diminish the notoriety and electoral traction of George Simion, which can easily deduced from the polls and from the atmosphere that currently dominates the sovereignist-Putinist universe in Romania.
Therefore, if AUR and Simion are among the big losers of the Georgescu phenomenon, AUR and Simion could also be among the potential big winners if Georgescu disappeared from the presidential race scheduled for May.
But Simion and AUR can’t gain, and can only lose, if they openly admit this, because it would make it difficult to impossible to connect with a part of Georgescu’s electorate. And, at the same time, the current environment still does not offer the necessary and sufficient conditions for AUR and Simion to get rid of Călin Georgescu.
For the latter scenario, external circumstances are needed, circumstances that would lead to Georgescu’s exit from the game, but without AUR and Simion being associated in any way or even suspected of being connected to the dynamic.
If at the beginning of this year there is something that George Simion and his party really want and should want, that would be for Calin Georgescu to stop running. And if he were to run, it would be logical that Simion and many AUR leaders would not want Calin Georgescu to win.
Why do they not want Călin Georgescu’s victory either?
Because, judging by Calin Georgescu’s inclinations towards authoritarianism, there will not be only one president above the parties.
And we could well see that if he was elected president he would abolish the political parties.
But even if, absurdly, he would not abolish all parties or would only abolish the pro-Western ones, then at least he will move to take control of all parties in the sovereignist-Putin wing.
In order to achieve this, it’s a safe bet that the pro-Russian Calin Georgescu will use all the levers of formal and informal power that the position of head of state would confer on him, to bring in these parties (including the AUR).
It remains to be seen how they will seek to get rid of him and whether they will really succeed.
In any case, as the election comes knocking on the door, this is the moment of greatest risk for AUR and Simion.
