By Cristian Preda, University of Bucharest.
This article was first published in the review Comunitatea liberală 1848 on the 26th May 2025. Link to the original article in Romanian: Cea mai grea problemă pentru noul președinte – Comunitatea Liberala.
Ion Iliescu was born in 1930, Emil Constantinescu nine years later, Traian Băsescu saw the light of day in 1951, and Klaus Iohannis in 1959. Nicușor Dan is ten years younger than his predecessor. The numbers speak for themselves: the new president belongs to a different generation. The one that took to the streets during the Revolution. In other words, those times recounted in “The New Year That Never Was.” Times that the young people voting for the first time now know very little about, since they were born the same year, their country joined the EU. I recently overheard two of them talking on a trolleybus: one claimed that Romania had been part of the USSR, while the other tried to convince him that the “communist bloc” included several states, and that the RPR and RSR were never Soviet republics.
N. Dan’s term will end shortly after we mark forty years since the fall of Ceaușescu. That is, when the number of years since the Revolution will roughly equal the duration of the communist regime. Or around the hundredth anniversary of Iliescu’s birth. But I’m not writing these lines just to point out how short a century can seem. Rather, to highlight the fact that the main political issue Nicușor Dan will face is very different from those his predecessors confronted.
Indeed, Iliescu had to manage the (re)birth of democratic parties; Constantinescu embodied the double alternation of power; under Băsescu, political parties were integrated into the European networks of conservatives, socialists, and liberals; and the Iohannis decade saw the rise of party cartelization — parties that had brought Romania into NATO and the EU, now seeking, as a reward, at least two uninterrupted decades in power. N. Dan disrupted that dream.
But the fifth president now faces a challenge that Western politicians first encountered in the mid-1990s or early 2000s: the backlash against the cartelization of pro-European and pro-Atlanticist parties — a process that, in Romania, began in 2016[1]. Nicușor Dan was himself part of the anti-cartel movement in 2016, as founder of USR. But USR is not the only party that has, in recent years, resisted the attempt by the NATO- and EU-era establishment parties to dominate the political scene: the PSD–PNL duopoly has been challenged by AUR, as well as splinter parties from that ultranationalist formation, led by D. Șoșoacă and A. Gavrilă.
As president, N. Dan now faces a difficult choice. In other EU member states, delegitimizing cartel parties has drastically reshaped the political landscape: Italy’s Christian Democrats and Communists disappeared; in Germany, the two-and-a-half party system (CDU–CSU, SPD, plus the “half” of the Liberals) gave way to one that includes the Greens, Die Linke, and AfD; in France, the Gaullists and Socialists have been decimated, the far left and far right run rampant, and Macron’s centrist party is forced to build coalitions with a growing number of mini-parties; in the Netherlands and Belgium, the far right has become the main political force, and so on.
Lacking a party of his own, the new president must build a government that takes into account both the anti-system vote (Romania’s shorthand for opposition to cartel politics) and the extreme fragmentation of the political spectrum, now composed of eight distinct factions (PSD, AUR, PNL, USR, UDMR, SOS Romania, POT, the group of national minorities other than the Hungarian one). N. Dan cannot ignore the clearly pro-Western stance expressed in the presidential election, nor the need for stability after the Iohannis decade, during which nine prime ministers rotated through Victoria Palace. He must also weigh the immense cost of snap elections, the need to restore Romania’s credibility with international creditors, and the urgent necessity of containing political extremism — which now blends Ceaușism and Legionary rhetoric with Putinism and Trumpism.
The choice he makes in shaping a new government border on tragic — in the sense Robert Kaplan gives the term in his most recent book, also published in Romanian by Humanitas[2]. If PSD is included in the new majority, power alternation will lose its meaning; if USR joins the three parties from the Ciolacu cabinet, then anti-system voices will be confined exclusively to the sovereigntist camp. A minority government might result in nothing more than patchwork governance, liable to unravel quickly, while a technocratic formula could see the parties competing in populism and isolating the president completely.
The most difficult challenge for Romania’s fifth president is to define the kind of majority he wants to build. Because he may very well need resources that he currently doesn’t have.
[1] I discussed this process in the essay “A New Faked Democracy?” included in the volume I edited for Humanitas, titled How Romania Ended Up Without an Elected President. 7 Possible Answers.
[2] Robert Kaplan, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, translated by Iustin Mureșanu-Ignat, Humanitas, 2025.
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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.