Ana Ciceală, who is running for mayor of Bucharest for the leftist, pro-European SENS party says she won’t drop out of the race for the Bucharest City Hall on Dec. 7, because “voters aren’t sacks of potatoes that politicians keep in their cellars and move them from one place to another. That’s not how it works.”
It’s not an original argument. Other politicians have used the same argument when they are scoring poorly in the polls but don’t want to quit.
But this comparison of “sacks of potatoes”, is becoming an obsession in the political landscape.
Among the enormities uttered by Elena Lasconi, for example, when she irrationally clung to her own candidacy for the presidency, when it had become clear that Nicușor Dan was infinitely better placed, she also used the same expression: “And I don’t understand why… because they (the voters) aren’t sacks of potatoes,” she lamented.
The current spokeswoman of the Government also resorted to the comparison with the sack of potatoes, at the time when she was a journalist.
In a text in which she analyzed what she had labeled as the “putsch” of the USR against Lasconi, Ioana Ene Dogioiu wrote as follows: “the problem is that the votes are not sacks of potatoes to be moved from one trailer to another, and compared to the situation of the useful vote in November there are essential differences”.
In his case, the irony of fate is quite visible: her direct boss, Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, is the president of the National Liberal Party is also the most important supporter of the candidacy of Ciprian Ciucu, the Liberal Party mayor of district 6.
But Liberal Ciprian Ciucu needs to avoid the cannibalization of the December 7 vote, and fr that he needs the withdrawal of Ana Ciceală and Cătălin Drulă.
In any case, the fact that neither Elena Lasconi nor Ioana Ene Dogioiu were right with the “potato” analogy has been demonstrated at the ballot box, and today it is a historical truth.
Moreover, the very fact of comparing this kind of electoral strategy with moving bags of potatoes from one trailer to another is a cruel exaggeration and has no place in the logic of modern democracy.
Moreover, why not extend this profoundly inaccurate comparison to pre- or post-electoral alliances between parties or even to governing coalitions?
What if the people who had voted for the Liberal Party in the parliamentary elections felt treated like potatoes for the simple fact that PNL chose, given the circumstances, to govern alongside the PSD, USR and UDMR? Because no party could govern on its own.
The above question remains valid for USR as well, whose candidate for mayor of Bucharest is Cătălin Drulă and who now risks repeating the sad epic of Elena Lasconi in the presidential elections (she was runner-up in the first round of elections before the elections were cancelled over alleged Russian interference).
As far as he is concerned, however, Cătălin Drulă has developed a lame preference for an argument just as lame as the “sacks of potatoes”: “I have some reservations about polls”.
This is what he said in January 2025, in support of Elena Lasconi, when it was clear that challenges were mounting in her own party, not only because of her poor training and performance, but also because of the figures in the various polls.
This is what Cătălin Drulă says even now, when he is a candidate himself, when his candidacy is in a visible impasse, when the poll figures are clearly not in his favorm including compared to those of Ciprian Ciucu.
Cătălin Drulă does not believe in polls, just as Elena Lasconi did not believe, and this discourse increasingly resembles the discourse of the skeptics of the pandemic era, who… they didn’t believe in Covid, were indifferent to figures, indifferent to science.
By the way, those skeptics were en masse recovered by pro-Russian “sovereignists”. The same pro-Russian “sovereignists” who, unfortunately, Cătălin Drulă now helps twice: once, by cultivating the conspiracy phenomenon (on the polling side, of course); and the second time, irrationally clinging to his candidacy for the Bucharest City Hall, given that there are high chances not only that the PSD candidate will win, and even the pro-Russian candidate, supported by AUR, and at the same time a former trumpet for Călin Georgescu, could win.
Ana Ciceală is going to be bitterly wrong, on the side with the “potatoes”, as she had been wrong before, invoking the “potatoes”, Elena Lasconi and Ioana Ene Dogioiu (and others, of course, but there is no room here for a complete inventory).
In a few days, Cătălin Drulă is going to be wrong once again, on his favorite side, the one with the “polls”, as it happened to him a few months ago, in the case of Lasconi.
Ciceală and Drulă are intelligent and politically experienced enough to understand the substance of the problem in these elections for Bucharest:
- On a narrow electoral corridor and in conditions of single-round elections, the existence of three candidates is the sure path to the failure of the entire pole that the three represent.
- If Anca Alexandrescu wins, and through her, AUR, Calin Georgescu and the entire extremist pole, the impact will be painful for Bucharest and even more painful for Romania, given the already dangerous rise of pro-Russian extremism.
But the selfish personal calculations, because I don’t see any other reason, blind the two, Ciceală and Drulă, enough to derail Romania with a bang from the rail of logic and a sense of history.
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