How European is Nicușor Dan? “I see the failure, but I can't blame everything on the president”

“The reshaping of Nicușor Dan as a neoconservative and the idea of ​​a presidential party that would take votes from AUR seem like projects of thinkers of the same caliber as those who produced Ciucă and took Georgescu to the second round”, writes Alina Mungiu-Pippidi in an opinion for the HotNews audience.

I don't know how others spent Europe Day in 2026. I received, apart from the message from the Presidential Administration that Europe Day was cancelled, a bunch of unsolicited messages about “a year with Nicușor Dan”. Much less than if I had Facebook. I don't, because I've never had political ambitions.

Rebranding the President

A year of Nicușor Dan in my mailbox looks bad. The pro-European coalition fell apart, the government fell, interest rates went up again. All these were the president's priorities, while nothing was done in strictly presidential areas: neither the reform of the secret services, nor the meritocratization of foreign policy.

Something was tried in court, but it turned out badly.

And the presidential message of May 9 showed us two more things: that Nicușor Dan is not an orator and that the nationalist-conservative rebranding did not bring him any sympathizers from the AUR area, but he lost almost all of ours.

As an observer with distance, I see the failure, but I can't blame it all on the president. The anti-PSD camp never accepted that without the PSD we did not win the elections and there was no pro-European majority. Liberals have had minority governments before, which produced only fiscal deficits. This is the definition of a minority government: you pay in Parliament so that no motions pass.

Who is the anti-corruption officer of the Bolojan government?

You can't say you want fiscal discipline and minority government at the same time. We fall with Bolojan in the Parliament, but we want to vote with him in the same Parliament. Hard to understand.

PNL-USR cannot claim to be the anti-corruption camp, but the Bolojan government has neither strategy nor responsibility for anti-corruption. No one has dealt with the two big problems: the doubling of preferential auctions in the last decade and VAT fraud. Accession to the OECD is another missed opportunity, it's like under Iohannis.

Without compromises there is no coalition

Yes, the president had to mediate until the motion, but Bolojan's decision not to submit his mandate after he no longer had majority does not sound altruistic either. I appreciate him, but I can't believe that only Nicușor Dan is to blame for the motion, when the real conflict is between PSD and Bolojan.

If Mr. Bolojan cannot compromise, he was not the right man to lead a coalition. Are military and service pensions the problem? Then why did we dig for months only the credibility of the magistrates, as if only they had special pensions?

The pro-European coalition no longer exists and was probably never the goal of the PNL and USR. They are not fighting for Simion's electorate. They want to rule the country without ever having 51%.

I'd love for the motion to bring Bolojan popularity, but he's probably still in our camp, so we gain nothing. PSD took the hand of AUR and blacked out in Brussels for alms. It was a victory if they got rid of Bolojan without alliances with AUR and brought down their own government. So, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Coalition rebuilding: an act of faith rather than a realistic hope

The depository of pro-European votes remains Nicușor Dan, who says he wants to rebuild the coalition. Correct objective, but after the chaos of judicial intervention and the poor negotiations at Cotroceni, it seems more like an act of faith than a realistic hope.

There is no political adviser with access to the parties we want to reconcile who works 24 hours a day on this goal.

The strange moment of the speech

So far not good, but predictable. Weirdness follows. The May 9 speech and Marius Lazurca's interventions are inadequate, if not worrying. They seem like unfinished ideas, coming from people with no European background. They gave up on conformity, but they didn't put anything solid in place.

They look like amateurs improvising on the stage of a professional theater, not realizing that the curtain is up and the audience is watching in amazement. They managed to place themselves next to the PSD in the competition of who is more destructive to our pro-European image with only clumsy words. At least Diana Soșoacă does things that the world remembers, she breaks flags. You are not serious contenders for her.

How do you justify that while Donald Trump made a mistake in Iran and is asking the Europeans to fix the problem he created, the presidency chooses Europe Day to criticize Europe? Who benefits?

I am not against criticizing the EU — I refused to sign the Team Europe contract, even though I worked for three presidents of the Commission (it explicitly said that you can only speak well of the EU, so it violates academic freedom).

But the moment chosen is absurd. If we want Călin Georgescu's voters, we don't take them like that. Crin Antonescu's approval does not help us. Trump's endorsement? To what? Does it lower our rates? Does it make our diesel cheaper?

The recasting of Nicușor Dan as a neoconservative

The issue with Ukraine is entirely the American responsibility. The Bush Jr. administration unnecessarily escalated relations with Russia, while Merkel was cautious. The Trump administration abruptly withdrew aid to Ukraine and is now making Europe pay for US weaponry for Ukraine, as if the EU is to blame for the situation. We want EU-US alignment, but not in the formula where the Americans are wrong and the Europeans pay. The EU can no longer function like this, and we are not the 51st state, but the 26th.

Do we want a greater role in European policies? Correct. But with whom? Nicușor Dan's manifesto was just a label, not a program. After a year, the follow-up is this unsavory and bizarre speech of May 9?

The reshaping of Nicușor Dan as a neoconservative and the idea of ​​a presidential party that would take votes from the AUR seem like projects of thinkers of the same caliber as those who produced Ciucă and took Georgescu to the second round.

Perhaps if the promised report on the responsibility of the institutions in the case of the fraudulent candidate and the annulment of the election had appeared on time, we would have avoided such “innovations”. At least in part.

Times are hard. Our position on the EU should have been nuanced a long time ago, but not through ill-timed confusion that only shows everyone that we are adrift and nobody is in control.