Nikuzor Dan relies on his wits to fight Piedone. But elections are primarily not a matter of reason, but of emotions.

I know that some election polls in Romania distort reality and manipulate data like the samsar of Vitan market cars, but I was still speechless after the following information: about 41% of Piedone’s voters for the capital city hall would betray him in favor of Nikusor Dan , if Piedone withdraws his candidacy.

Then someone tells us that a bunch of Bucharest residents with almost all the tiles on their houses will go to the hands of the current mayor Nikusor Dan for another four years. But because this Rimbaud of urban planning by Ferentari and Bercheni has appeared in the landscape, with the school of life completed at the “faculty” in Jilaw and a bachelor’s degree obtained at the age of 32, these people feel saved: the owner hero must come them.

Let’s remember that the miracle was the result of a poll conducted by Avangarde of Mr. Pieleanu, a man of great political commitment, with companies heavily involved in the PSD field, and polls that are sometimes very far from reality, so we have to serve it in portions. children, do not lean towards us.

Fighting for two?

However, from all the polls published on the market today, only one thing is clear: the fight for the position of mayor of the capital is between Nikusor Dan and Cristian Popescu Piedone, the mayor of sector 5. The PSD-PNL is trying to bring to the world an electoral clone of the sinister Sorin Oprescu ( now on the run through Greece to avoid prison), in the person of the surgeon Katalin Karstau, it seems that the fate of the rabbit fighting for third place awaits him.

It makes me wonder what kind of mayor the people who go to the polls in Bucharest want after all, when they don’t necessarily vote politically – theoretically neither Deng nor Piedone are in a decisive political prison, even if they are practically have behind them certain forces or political past.

Be helpful or look away. Let there be something!

The Romanian electoral circuses/cycles of the last 25 years have shown us a simple thing. The recipe for success of any mayor in Romania is to do something visible and tangible for the residents of his yard. Parking lot, bush, park, driveway, paint.

Anything but something that can be seen and be useful as much as possible, local. Or at least divert their eyes. Never mind that he pulls his share along with all his family and friends, that he distributes contracts and functions on the basis of beautiful eyes and parandara. “He stole, but he did it” is not just a joke, it is the reality of the Romanian electoral mentality.

Voting is not primarily a rational business

In this section, Piedone is the champion, and Nikušor Dan seems to have realized that only now, at the end of his mandate, it would be appropriate to beat himself a little, consistently, by what he made visible to the people of Bucharest. And to be fair, he didn’t do much that showed. Of course, for the most rational reasons possible (one of them being the legacy of a failed, change-averse administration in which the PSD left a disaster).

It’s just that people rarely vote based on rational calculations, and are more guided by emotions and feelings. They vote either viscerally, out of anger, or because they don’t want someone to dislike them, or emotionally because they like someone.

My experience doesn’t matter because I’m the type to sit and count when I vote, and I rarely like people, let alone politicians. However, let me tell you. I also lived under Piedone in Sector 4 and under Nikusor Dan in the Capital. I don’t have good memories with any of them.

Out of nerves, I put the cauldron in Nikusor Dan’s mandate

Emotionally speaking, living in an apartment building, I nervously gave in and installed a water heater in my bathroom so I could shower with hot water whenever I wanted, at my own expense, only in the mandate of Nikusor Dan.

Rationally, I know it’s not his fault, I know the situation with the pipelines under Bucharest, and I’ve been told that no one has done more to repair and modernize them than Nikušor Dan. But how many Bucharesters do you think remain rational when they put a pot of water on the stove to boil to wash their children or their own soft parts in a basin?

Hot water and lack of heat are the fatal millstones of Nikusor Dan, no matter how he tries to explain things rationally, kilometers of pipelines and millions of European funds.

If he loses, Nicusor Dan will die with his mind on his neck

Emotionally, I don’t like Piedone because I feel that he degrades you like a fraud. Compassion allows me to understand other people’s emotions: when you’ve lived a life of misery, ignored or bullied by the authorities, and live on Facebook Piedone comes and vindicates you, notices you, puts you in the dock on the steps of the house draws a line on the asphalt, gives a broom, you feel like a man.

Rationally, you should know that this means nothing in the scale of city management. Rationally, you should consider Mr. Piedone’s track record. A mayor convicted of giving contracts and land to his own children, who imposes his son through various local forums, and now practically bequeaths Sector 5 to him.

The mayor, under whose leadership and under whose signature we survived the biggest social tragedy after the revolution – the fire in the Kolectiv club, but who considers himself innocent, and indeed, stupid enough to have been unjustly imprisoned.

Unfortunately, in the hopeless battle between the rational and the emotional during voting, Piedone has a lot of emotion on his side (positive or negative), while Nicusor Dan dies with the rational around his neck.

On the one hand, in front of you is a demagogue who, together with the workers, smashes onions against the newspaper, kisses the hands of the girls who sell parsley, brings order and justice to the neighborhoods. The time in which he puts forward God, national interests, motherland or cardboard justice, verbally insulting subordinates, at whom he shouts on the walkie-talkie.

On the other hand, you have Nikushor Dan, who easily fits into the obscure genius typology. He solves your problems in mathematics at the bachelor’s degree or the Olympiad in two steps and three moves, and he puts his shoes on the street. He’s the kind of likable professor that twelfth graders would go have a beer with, but laugh more at than with him.

The guy who manages the capital of the country, but remembered to talk to the citizens only at 12 o’clock, and even then, apparently, because of the desperation of the councilors.

A fool who can’t communicate and is sinister with impeccable populist rhetoric

Emotionally, we are about where we are. Rationally, it is not wrong to think that the struggle mainly takes place between two characters. An idiot who does not know how to communicate in public, but who does not steal, tries to fix the historical holes of Bucharest and has no criminal and political threads behind him.

Against him is a populist crucible in which all the worst of the PSD, PNL and AUR merge into homogenization in one place, both on a rhetorical level and in attempts to siphon off public money.

I won’t hazard a bet on who will emerge victorious from this fight, but at least for myself I know one thing: despite my great disgust with what we have on the tray for Bucharest, I will again leave the house, vote with my head, not my heart.

Andrej Luka Popescu is the deputy editor-in-chief of Panorama.ro and the author of the weekly newsletter “Panorama cu ALP”, which you can subscribe to here.