Nicușor Dan, from the activist mathematician to the president in search of the “new patriotism” – who handles the head of state
It has been 100 days since Romania has a new president. And we are in a race on the economic route, transparent and discussed, as we find ourselves and in a spectacular and harder to prove with figures, which President Nicușor Dan takes seemingly solitary, without too many explanations.
The most successful politicians of the moment, which they hurt in the elbow when they are called populists, are often defined as those who claim to do what people want, because the decisions they make to the rest of the politicians are no longer people.
A study by Professor Laurenz Guenther of the University of Toulouse (France) puts his finger on a paradox. The classic parties “represent well the economic attitudes of the citizens” through their actions. But this does not use traditional politicians too much. Because the major fracture is cultural.
In 27 countries, including in Romania, “the average parliamentarian is more culturally liberal than the national average voter”, says the study.
The gaps of political representation appear not in the economic policies, but in the cultural themes of society, and here the difference of citizens – politicians is overwhelming:
1. It appears in almost all cultural problems.
2. In almost all countries.
3. Almost all the consecrated parties are more culturally liberal than the national average voter.
4. All major demographic groups tend to be more conservative than their parliamentarians.
Nicușor Dan's movement
For example, at the theme of “Teachers' Authority in Schools”, traditional parties have the position to give more freedom to students, while society is focused on a speech of restoring the teacher's authority.
When it comes to migration, family, the use of referendums and other non-economic themes, the same differences are kept between the consecrated parties and the “popular will”.
What Nicușor Dan is now trying to be exactly: the president uses the presence at the church, the revaluation of the Romanian landscape and themes such as the past of the anti -communist fighters to respond culturally to the public expectations. He tries not to offer the right -wing radicals and the generic camp entitled “Călin Georgescu” The total domination of the topics related to tradition, belonging and safety.
My hypothesis is not based on information from within, but on observing an older concern of the Romanian establishment entitled Democratically not to leave the “patriotic aisle” free for the populists.
Asked by the mother -in -law's husband
Beyond any doubt is the huge factual change. The mayor who was locked up in his office as long as he led Bucharest became the candidate who mobilized his mother-in-law to speak Moldovan in the television first time.
In front of the cameras and the nation, the wise mother -in -law asked “Nicușor” to take her as a “wife with documents”, a scene of great emotion in the times of political consultants inspired by Creangă and Ispirescu.
To the church and in the hay caps
Later, became the president, Nicușor Dan did not slow down, but to accelerate. The head of state and the introvert mathematician appeared intensely at church services, at the “wolf festival” and was photographed with his children in the hay, promoting Romanian tourism.
According to the journalist Emilian Isila, from Spotmedia, the president aroused a dissatisfaction at the top of the army, after missing from the Marine Day, in exchange with a job at the foot of the Fagaras Mountains, on Sâmbăta de Sus.
A few years ago, the politically multiplied presence of a candle-enlightened president would have opened a debate on the state-bishop's separation. But exactly themes of this kind, cultural, are the places where the classic parties have lost the fight. And not from now.
“Patriotism and tradition”
Eduard Hellvig was among the first to say something. Towards the end of his term as the head of the SRI, Hellvig had some positions on two topics that, in the years 2022-2023, did not seem to be immediate.
In a speech at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj in October 2022, the director of the SRI warned that “a false thesis is built, of an artificial dispute between national and European identity.” What the SRI did and those who had the information, another discussion, important in turn.
Two years before the “Georgescu phenomenon” would reward society, refreshing half of it and hoping for another half, the tendency was known.
Since then, the need for a new patriotism has been spoken. If you leave patriotism “to be just the apanage of extreme speeches or approaches”, you will lose as society. When you say you are a democrat, but you have “the wrong tendency to move away from topics such as patriotism or traditions”, you will lose, said the SRI chief. Specifying that, normally, a company does not discuss this predilect through SRI.
Nicușor Dan's proposals for SRI and SIE, thinking, are of the same category of the “new patriotism”.
From fake-prrogressism to fake-conservatism
For years, society reward you if you presented yourself more progressive than you were. Not only in Romania, everywhere in the West. A recent study by two professors at Northwestern University in Chicago showed that nearly 90 of the students said they were pretending to be more progressive than they are in reality to be academic or social.
This era was pained. Now a more populist attitude than your own faith about the world is encouraged by vote. The planet of leaders in love with the architecture of Trump Tower hotels was filled.
But it may not be the case of Nicușor Dan. He left the USR when it seemed to be a useless theme that of the progressive opposition to the “family referendum”. Maybe what “plays” in the image campaign is not only a game, but even defines it, as a civic conservative.
And if someone was really interested in Nicușor Dan's faith about the world, then the solution was not to have given him the position of president of Romania, the most risky place to say what you think.
