In just three and a half months, AUR leader George Simion has racked up two monumental failures. Together they have enough TNT to blow up Simion’s position in the party, in the not too distant future.
On November 24, 2024, George Simion not only failed to qualify for the second round of the presidential elections, but managed only to finish fourth, with the first place going to a fellow nationalist, Călin Georgescu. How humiliating!
Any leader with any decency who cared about his party and its supporters would have immediately taken a step back. But Simion clung to power and now plans to file his candidacy for the presidential elections, even though he’d promised right until the end that he wouldn’t. Seems his word isn’t worth anything!
The other two big losers of the first round, Nicolae Ciucă and Marcel Ciolacu, unlike George Simion showed exemplary behavior, and are light years ahead of Simion in terms of civilized political behavior. Ciucă resigned as Liberal Party leader and didn’t try to run again and Ciolacu at least made a show of stepping down as PSD boss. It’s worth noting that at least he did not run for the redo of the elections.
On March 11, the Constitutional Court definitively removed Călin Georgescu from the presidential race, following the Central Electoral Bureau decision to invalidate his candidacy.
Călin Georgescu isn’t a member of AUR, although the party treated him as its own candidate in an extraordinary meeting led by George Simion immediately after his return from America.
In other words, Călin Georgescu’s personal failure is also George Simion’s personal failure.
Moreover, Georgescu’s failure isn’t just limited to his candidacy, but it affects the entire sovereignist-Putin movement, which is now forced by circumstances to improvise a candidacy just three days before the final deadline for submitting it.
This does not mean that its chances of fielding a candidate which is able to reach the second round are definitively compromised, but the new circumstances make the mission far more difficult.
And the blame for the situation stops at George Simion.
Because George Simion, taking advantage of his authority, pushed the party to support Georgescu’s candidacy despite the fact that there were reasonable doubts that his candidacy would be rejected.
George Simion has managed to demonstrate that he is not fit for high office, because being a leader also means being able to plan ahead and anticipate various outcomes.
George Simion also proved that he is not good at the small party games that take place behind closed doors. Because, although he played these games (for example, by forcing his party’s support for a man who isn’t an AUR member), these games were a resounding fiasco for George Simion and a dangerous outcome for AUR.
I am not in a position to measure how much patience AUR members still have with their current leadership and president, but the history of political parties suggests that patience and indulgence have limits. And even when it seemed to be endless, the end was the serious illness of the entire structure and the fall, fast or slow, into irrelevance and political impotence.
What is certain is that, in order to properly weigh the suitability of George Simion for the leadership of the party, AUR members have at their disposal not only the history of the monumental mistakes made so far by their boss, George Simion, but also the new picture after Wednesday’s announcement: George Simion, and the president of the POT, Anamaria Gavrilă will enter the presidential race, and one of them will then drop out.
If AUR members look carefully at the new picture, they is obvious to anyone: that Simion and Gavrilă need to each collect in just three days, the required 200,000 signatures. AUR will be represented either by an already defeated candidate (himself, George Simion, in the first round, and then once again himself, George Simion, by “canceling” Călin Georgescu) or by an obscure candidate from a completely different party, Anamaria Gavrilă.
The scene created by Simion seems completely detached from reality. AUR is a party bursting with political testosterone; it’s a party on its own feet, and led by a capable, strong leader, well connected to the conservative movements on the two sides of the Atlantic.
George Simion lost at the polls to three candidates, then flogged a dead horse and created the conditions for AUR to enter the elections weaker than ever – either with a compromised candidate or with a candidate which isn’t part of the party and if absurdity won the elections, would have every interest in giving preferential treatment to POT to the detriment of AUR in the coming years.
George Simion has built the case for his own ouster. The ball is now in the AUR party members’ court.
PS: AUR MEP Claudiu Tarziu, who was co-president with George Simion for a while, has spoken even more explicitly than me in his latest comments.
I leave the final word to Mr. Tarziu who calls the Simion-Gavrila candidacies: “a couplet blessed by Mr. Călin Georgescu”.
- << We are on the edge of the abyss and we are waiting for salvation from a couplet blessed by Mr. Călin Georgescu.
- We have a bitter taste when we realize that Mr. George Becali gave us the result of the problem a month ago.
- I look back and I have the impression that it couldn’t have ended any other way.
- We have adapted too quickly to the “canons” of mainstream politics and we have entered the game of political ‘hooligans’ who have forbidden us to speak, to protest, to revolt.
- The sovereigntist movement was compromised on December 6, with a call for inaction from those who had the duty and the right to call people to protest on the streets.
- The time is fast approaching when we have to talk about responsibilities, complicities
- and the betrayal of the national ideal.
- The most terrible betrayal, from my point of view, is the blind, fanatical, idolatrous submission, in contempt for the fate of a nation and for the huge dangers that lurk in Romania. >>
