THE ONLY ACCURATE FORECAST OF THE OUTCOME OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION "BURSA" predicted the exact results of the second round of the elections, six days in advance

• Not only did our daily have no doubt that the score would be tied, but it predicted the scenario of the challenging of the elections and the danger of anarchy

The exceptional performance of the BURSA newspaper, in which it predicted the tie between the candidates, six days before the elections, must not go unnoticed.

Beating polling institutes, without spending anything, (apart from intellectual effort), through a simple reasoning, published on November 30th, in the article called "Idiocracy", the BURSA newspaper concluded that Traian Băsescu and Mircea Geoană would be tied after the second round of elections.

We reprint below our initial reasoning, giving social-democrat Viorel Hrebenciuc the credit he deserves:

• "Second round, fifty-fifty

Hrebenciuc said he expects the second round to end with a score of 52% - 47% for Geoană (I don"t know why his numbers don"t add to 100% - could it be a slip of the mind? in any case, he mentioned the optimistic alternative of 54% -46%, which is out of the question right now).

Viorel Hrebenciuc wasn"t making predictions just to hear himself talk - he is an experienced strategist, he is the Ostap Bender of PSD, Romania"s largest political party.

Saying you"re only going to beat Băsescu "52 to 47", when you"ve got the backing of the National Liberal Party with 20.02%, The Democratic Union of Hungarians with 3.83%, and Gigi Becali and PRM with 7.47%, and on the other hand you have the 33% of your party"s voters (which gives us a total of 62.47%), this proves realism.

But the first round of elections invalidated his calculations, even though Hrebenciuc bragged that the models he uses in his analysis are so complex, that no one else can understand them in Romania.

If we were to add the 2% by which Hrebenciuc missed his numbers for the first round, and if we credit Băsescu with the 1% that Hrebenciuc subconsciously took from him, then the final results would be 50%-50%.

• Fifty -fifty"

The article ended with a slogan : "Let"s vote! Everything will work out fine."

The accuracy of the forecasts made by BURSA goes even further.

Long before the night were all TV stations were dumbfounded and they were broadcasting images of Geoană jumping for joy because he thought he had won the elections, and Băsescu announcing his own victory, BURSA had already sent the edition for that evening to the printer, announcing the tie between the two candidates, in an editorial called the "The dangerous fifty-fifty demands a clear victory", which appeared on the morning of December 7th.

Any journalist in the newspaper business, will confirm that in Romania it"s virtually impossible to publish such an editorial after 21.00 and get it on all the newsstands the next morning.

But, even without having such expertise, you can notice the analysis is in line with data which the Central Electoral Office only released to the public on Monday morning, when our editorial had already been published.

Gathering documentation, conceiving and writing the article would take at least three hours even for an experienced journalist (in fact it took us eight hours).

I don"t any other newspaper succeeded in doing anything similar, on such an important event as the presidential elections.

It is also worth reminding that the article published by BURSA on Monday morning (read it, its content still applies), predicted that the outcome of the elections would be challenged (which has already happened) opening the road to anarchy: the Parliament would suspend Traian Băsescu for the duration of the recount of the votes, and replace him with Mircea Geoană as interim president, the appointment of Klaus Johannis as Prime-Minister, the creation and validation of the new Cabinet in just one day.

This scenario is already making rounds among politicians (Corneliu Vadim Tudor publicly said that "The Parliament needs to suspend Băsescu!", and Viorel Hrebenciuc is rumored to have promised Geoană "he would be president no matter what, even as interim president").

In our opinion, the scenario will not come true if politicians heed the lobby of businessmen and the pressure of foreign factors.

But perhaps our opinion is biased because of what we want ourselves... avoiding an exhausting crisis.