Stolojan, "Warranted by Basescu"

Some say the combined forces of the Democrats and Liberals matched or even outranked PSD in the elections for county councils. Specialists say that the votes cast in county elections are political votes because they express an option for a given political party and not for the persons on the lists of candidates for aldermen. This is why the outcome of county elections is quite significant for the parliamentary elections scheduled for this fall, considering that the elective mechanisms are similar. Which means that, had the parliamentary elections been held last Sunday, PD plus PNL would have crossed the finish line shoulder to shoulder with PSD. Amazing!

No matter how critical I have been of PSD and the results of its administration, no matter how skeptical I was about poll readings, I would have never thought that PSD could fall so abruptly and that voters would give the opposition so much credit!

Poor Adrian Nastase! He was right to press for early elections! He must have sensed something...

The premier knew that the years 2003 and 2004 would pass without major political achievements comparable to NATO accession and that, moreover, he would only be able to come up with economic progress on paper and not in the voters' pockets, too. As a matter of fact, Adrian Nastase is not much of an economist, and he admits it, too. However, when he promised to double wages and pensions a few days ago, it was not lack of economic competence that he illustrated, but political despair.

The outcome of the local elections terrified the premier. To have the entire State administration in your hand, to control the media, to have plenty of money, to control poll makers and leading political analysts, to have an elite campaign management team, to have all these advantages on your side and to be defeated by a crazy sailor and his stunts... Terrifying, indeed!

And his horror mounts even higher when he dares imagine what would have happened had The Central Electoral Bureau (BEC) announced the real results of the elections, the results that should have been made public within 24 hours after then closing of the ballot, the results as they were before the 48 hour delay that BEC took beyond the legal deadline just to be able to sweat long and hard to produce incredible differences - even as large as ten percent against exit polls readings sometimes (professionals say the maximum error margin of an exit poll is one percent).

On April 29th, the last IMAS poll on political party popularity before the elections credited PSD with 48.2 percent of the votes. Too little for the premier's expectations. However, PSD's actual score in the county elections was by 15 percent smaller than that particular poll indicated. Two months had passed between the date of the poll and the date of the elections. The big question is: would it be really possible that a party so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic life may have lost seven-to-eight percent in each of these two months?

Well, yes, it would be possible. But only if someone caught Adrian Nastase with his hand up Monica Lewinsky's skirt (well, I may be wrong about that, because that may actually increase his popularity), or with his hands full of bribe money from Alro, or Sidex, or Romanian Tobacco, or... Or, in a different fantasy, if someone caught Mircea Geoana hand in hand with Finance Minister Tanasescu and his godson Adrian Sirbu... Or if someone caught Dan Ioan Popescu red-handed in some other cockamamie fantasy...

But no one caught anyone with their hands in the cookie jar during those two months. So, how come PSD fell so abruptly?! It was spring, the weather was nice, the inflation was decreasing, there were no strikes, unemployment was decreasing and the country was registering extraordinary economic growth... How could anyone explain that 15 percent difference between the IMAS poll and the actual outcome of the elections?

How could anyone explain PNL-PD's rise from 25.3 percent in that poll dated April 29th to 33 percent in the elections? Did Traian Basescu or Theodor Stolojan do something remarkable in the meantime? Did they come up with a strategy superior to PSD's? Did they come up with some economic program endorsed by serious investors? No! They didn't!

Could it be that polls were rigged for the purpose of manipulating voters by creating a pro-PSD current? I don't know if I should be saying that: I am not a sociologist, and I do sympathize with sociologists as I have graduated from a school related to theirs, in the same building, actually. But what else can I think?

If we regarded polls as accurate, we would have to be dazzled by the amazing fluctuations in the political parties popularity levels. It is important to bear in mind that the equality between PNL-PD and PSD is only a circumstantial appearance resulting from two distinct charts revealing electoral trends for the general elections this fall: while PSD is collapsing, PNL-PD is rising high. The conclusion is that the local elections occurred at the time when the two diagrams intersected: PSD's downward line met PNL-PD's upward line. So, if we were to believe in polls, the next Parliament could be dominated by PNL-PD.

If Basescu managed to build the passageway at Basarab Station by that time, it would probably suffice to seal the victory. The project itself is not much: a bridge, wide enough for a car or two. If there is not enough money in the City accounts, Basescu could finance it himself... even a small wooden bridge fit to sustain a goat would do...

The whole country would see it and it looks like Basescu may be able to overthrow Nastase with a fillip. Then, the only thing he has to do next is stamp Stolojan with the "Warranted by Basescu" sign and we are going to have the Liberal leader for president...