OPINION. What kind of mayor do we want to take care of Bucharest? “He stole, but he did it” is not just a joke, it is a reality of the Romanian electoral mentality

Nicusor Dan relies on reason in the fight with Piedone. But elections are primarily not a matter of reason, but of emotions.

I know that some Romanian election polls distort the reality and manipulate the data a bit like a samsar of cars from the Vitan market, but I was still speechless at the following information: about 41% of Piedone’s voters for the Capital’s mayor’s office would betray him in favor of Nicușor Dan, if Piedone would give up his candidacy.

Someone tells us, then, that a bunch of Bucharest residents with relatively all the tiles on their house would go to the hands of the current mayor Nicușor Dan, for another four years. But, because this Rambo of urban planning from Ferentari and Berceni appeared in the landscape, with the school of life completed at the “faculty” in Jilava and the Baccalaureate taken at the age of 32, these people feel saved: the hero-owner has come to them .

Let’s keep in mind that the miracle comes from a survey done by Mr. Pieleanu’s Avangarde, a person of great political commitment, with companies strongly plugged into the PSD area and surveys that sometimes flew very far from reality, so we should serve it in portions little ones, don’t bend to us.

A fight for two?

However, from all the polls released so far on the market, only one thing is clear: the fight for the Capital’s mayor’s office is between Nicușor Dan and Cristian Popescu Piedone, the mayor of sector 5. The PSD-PNL attempt to bring to the world an electoral clone of to the sinister Sorin Oprescu (now a fugitive through Greece, to escape prison), in the person of surgeon Cătălin Cârstoiu, it seems that he will have the fate of a rabbit fighting for 3rd place.

Which makes me wonder what mayor the people who go to the polls in Bucharest want anyway, when they don’t necessarily vote politically – theoretically, neither Dan nor Piedone are decisively politically incarcerated, even if they practically have some forces or political pasts behind them .

Be useful or take eyes off. Let it 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. A parking lot, a bush, a park, a passage, a paint.

Anything, but that can be seen and be useful, as much as possible, to the locals. Or at least take their eyes. It doesn’t matter that he pulls his share with all his family and friends behind, that he divides contracts and functions based on pretty eyes and parandara. “He stole, but he did it” is not just a joke, it is a reality of the Romanian electoral mentality.

Voting is not primarily a rational business

In this chapter, Piedone is a champion, and Nicușor Dan seems that only now, at the end of his mandate, he realized that it would be appropriate to beat his chest a little, coherently, with what he made visible to the people of Bucharest. And if we’re being honest, he didn’t do much that showed. Of course, for reasons as rational as possible (one being the legacy of a failed administration hostile to change, in which PSD left disaster).

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

My experience is irrelevant, because I’m the type who sits and calculates when voting, plus I rarely like people, let alone politicians. However, let me tell you. I also lived under Piedone in sector 4, and under Nicușor Dan in the Capital. I don’t have good memories with any of them.

Out of nerves, I put a boiler in Nicușor Dan’s mandate

Emotionally speaking, in a life of living in a block of flats, I gave in nervously and put a water heater in my bathroom, so that I could wash myself with hot water whenever I wanted, at my own expense, only in Nicușor Dan’s mandate.

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

Hot water and missing heat are Nicușor Dan’s fatal millstone, no matter how hard he tries to explain things rationally, in kilometers of pipes and millions of European funds.

If he loses, Nicușor Dan will die with the rational on his neck

Emotionally, I don’t like Piedone, because I feel he talks you down, like a con artist. Empathy makes me able to understand the emotion of other people: when you have lived a life in misery, ignored or mocked by all the authorities, and in a live on Facebook Piedone comes and gives you justice, notices you, puts you on a bench at the staircase of the building, he draws a line on the asphalt, gives you a broom, you feel like a man.

Rationally, you should know that this means nothing on the scale of running a city. Rationally, you should think about Mr. Piedone’s track record. A mayor criminally convicted for giving contracts and land to his own children, who imposes on his son through various local forums, and now practically bequeaths him sector 5.

A mayor under whose leadership and under whose signature we experienced the biggest public tragedy after the Revolution – the fire at the Colectiv club, but who considers himself innocent, and indeed there are enough fooled with the idea that he was unjustly imprisoned.

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

On the one hand, you have in front of you a demagogue who smashes onions on the newspaper with the workers, kisses the hands of the little girls who sell parsley and brings order and justice among the blocks. Time in which he puts forward God, the national interest, the homeland or cardboard justice, done by verbal abuse to the subordinates he yells at through the walkie-talkie.

On the other hand, you have a Nicușor Dan who fits easily into the typology of the misunderstood genius. He solves your math problems at the Baccalaureate or the Olympiad in two steps and three moves, but he wears shoes when he goes out on the street. He’s the kind of likeable professor, with whom 12th graders would go out for a beer, but more to laugh at him, not with him.

A guy who runs the capital of the country, but remembered to talk to the citizens only at the 12th hour, and that probably driven from behind by the desperation of the councilors.

A fool who doesn’t know how to communicate and a sinister with an impeccable populist rhetoric

Emotionally, that’s about where we are. Rationally, it is not wrong to think that the fight is basically between two characters. An idiot who doesn’t know how to communicate in public, but who doesn’t steal, tries to fix Bucharest’s historical holes and has no criminal and political strings behind him.

Against him – a populist crucible, in which everything that is most sinister from PSD, PNL and AUR is decanted to the point of homogenization in one place, both at the rhetorical level and in terms of grabbing public money.

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

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