Romanian democracy is breathing hard, but it is not surrendering. With every day that passes without the “Tomac proposal” convincing, the president of the country is told that it is tiring for the public and for the politicians to run after the daily majority and after power, but power without a majority, that's just unacceptable.
Nicusor Dan is a brilliant mathematician. But you only need an abacus to accept: if Eugen Tomac will be prime minister, then it is just as normal that the president will be elected not the first voted, but the one in the 9th position.
Number 9
In the November 2024 parliamentary elections, Forța Dreptei, an alliance where the party led by Eugen Tomac, PMP participated, received 189,878 votes and ranked 9th.
If Tomac is set to make a majority, then, following the rule, in Cotroceni it should not be Nicușor Dan, but number 9 from the presidential elections. In May 2025 number 9 was Sebastian Constantin Popescu.
Therefore, let Nicușor Dan allow Mr. Popescu to occupy his position as president, because he fought for the 9-10 places with Mr. John Ion Banu Muscel not in vain.
When UDMR and AUR say “No” to the same question
Nicusor Dan is a brilliant mathematician. But no abacus is needed to accept that this game of depoliticizing society is dangerous.
The game worked when Dan left the USR and won the mayor's office as an independent and was successful again when he became president supported by parties he had nothing to do with. But a dynastic apolitism, a genealogical technocracy, that is impossible to be effective.
Nicușor Dan tries to apply the formula of his own “apolitical” success to the other powers of the state. The President wants to take over the Government and subordinate the Parliament.
The signs sent by AUR, PNL, USR and UDMR are clear: no. Why did Parliament accept such a thing?
And there is no clearer symbol than when you have AUR and UDMR on the same list opposing you.
The condition of being a technocrat is to have clearly lost the elections
Through Eugen Tomac, Nicușor Dan sent a threatening message to the parties: if you don't vote for this government, I will also come with one of technocrats. What exactly do technocrats mean? Do those who fail the vote requalify as technocrats? It's like in the press: we became journalists because we couldn't be writers.
Nicușor Dan's strategy is to build his power as president by denouncing corruption and recovering the national mythology, presented not in a pastoralist formula, like AUR, but in a logical one.
He's banking on what a recent US political science article noted some Democratic candidates are banking on, exhausted by the MAGA outlet, which remains active despite all the setbacks. And then, the democrats want to build an anti-corruption and anti-system image.
The anti-system game
Following the same formula and following the populists, Nicușor Dan relies on the anti-system. Because the anti-system provides what partisan politics can no longer provide: an ethical superiority to mobilize society against the broken and corrupt system.
But this game is destructive when it ends up being practiced by all politicians. In other countries extremism is isolated, we end up isolating the Parliament. Nobody wants the mainstream anymore, except on election day. Then the system is good and the crowd is wise.
Today, it is not the parties that excludes Nicușor Dan from the Government, but the will of the people ignores it.
The president forgets that the Parliament is the result of the will of the electorate, dripped in elections to which it is increasingly difficult for people to come anyway. Like Caligula, who threatened to make his horse consul, the president of Romania tells us that he has an inexhaustible stud of advisers to make him prime ministers.
