By Cristian Preda, University of Bucharest.

This article was first published in the review Comunitatea liberală 1848 on the 4th of April 2025. Link to the original article in Romanian: Nori negri la startul campaniei – Comunitatea Liberala.

We have five candidates for Cotroceni who could, in principle, exceed 10%. In alphabetical order, they are Crin Antonescu, Nicușor Dan, Elena Lasconi, Victor Ponta, and George Simion. The pre-campaign period has changed the November landscape.

First of all, out of the three clearly separated electoral blocs from the fall – the governmental, the sovereigntist, and the liberal – only the second has managed to put forward a single candidate. Anamaria Gavrilă, leader of POT, withdrew from the race to allow Simion to also claim the votes given to Călin Georgescu on November 24. Together, the two had gathered 36.8% back then. Simion now appears far from having recovered all those votes.

Secondly, a coalition has formed which we might call Seychelles, if we consider the colors of the parties it comprises: PSD (red) – PNL (yellow-blue) – UDMR (green-red-white). It presents a new candidate – Antonescu – rather than one of the three who had previously represented each party in the current government. The unity of this bloc is contested by Ponta, who is in fact seeking to gather the PSD vote and chip away at the sovereigntist one.

Meanwhile, Lasconi has remained the USR candidate, hoping to repeat her qualification from November 24 and make it to the much-dreamed-of final. Published polls place her at about half the percentage she received back then. Her supporters dispute this. They are now bitterly opposed to the USR founder, who entered the race attempting to gather not just USR votes, but also liberal ones – particularly from those who didn’t support Lasconi’s party in the European or parliamentary elections, instead choosing like-minded parties or independents.

It seems, then, that some tectonic plates are shifting, threatening to rattle the surface the Seychelles coalition portrays as an almost touristy paradise.

Three scenarios seem likely:

One, already presented by N. Dan as the darkest, is the scenario in which G. Simion and V. Ponta recover the sovereigntist and PSD vote (56% in the presidential and 55% in the parliamentary elections), split it almost equally, and face off in the final. Such a development would clearly lead to a PSD-AUR-SOS-POT government.

The second scenario is one in which one of the opponents of the AUR leader and the « dottore » gathers 30% to secure a spot in the final, uniting the liberal and USR electorate ahead of a runoff against either Simion or Ponta – assuming the two divide the PSD-sovereigntist electorate unequally. N. Dan would likely be closest to achieving this, but Antonescu doesn’t seem ready to let go of the fantasy of PSD support, and Lasconi doesn’t seem willing to make the same gesture Ludovic Orban made in November to allow her to reach the final. Thus, this scenario appears less likely than the first.

The third scenario involves C. Georgescu organizing a broad protest movement, asking his voters to spoil their ballots by writing his name on them. The idea is already circulating in sovereigntist circles. It is encouraged by those who interpreted the pro-Russian candidate’s silence as a refusal to support either Ponta or Simion. Such a protest would disrupt the political scene. Russian interference and TikTok would do the rest, and the result could be as unpredictable as last year’s Georgescu-Lasconi final.

Dark clouds loom over the political sky as the campaign begins. The problem is, we don’t know what kind of storm is brewing.

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Cristian Preda is a professor in political science at the University of Bucharest and a former MEP (2009-2019). His research areas are large, from political regimes, to political history, elections and party politics.