The latest INSCOP survey, published last week, confirms an increasingly visible trend from the end of 2023. GOLD reached its peak of popularity in the autumn of last year and since then its percentages have been falling, month after month. On the intention to vote for the European Parliament, George Simion’s party landed from 20.6% in March to 16.7% in April. In the same time frame, the AUR score has “thinned out” and related to local voting intention, from 17.4% in March to 14.4% in April. A first to be noticed – not only AUR has lost confidence, but also the “grandfather” of the populist family, SOS. If at the beginning of the year the AUR minus turned into a plus for Diana Șoșoacă’s party, the INSCOP survey records a cumulative decrease of 6 percent for both parties.
Normally, these adjustments should sharpen as we enter the election campaign, and themes of local interest will eclipse slogans about sovereignty and the global occult. In fact, in the big cities we can claim with a high degree of certainty that AUR has already lost the election. All polls assumed by the parties or published in the press “by sources” have a single common denominator – in Bucharest, Iași, Cluj, Timișoara, Oradea, Sibiu or Brașov, the AUR candidate for the City Hall is credited with single-digit percentages, and that closer to 5 than to 10. In cities like Ploiesti or Constanța, Simion’s people exceed the limit of 10%, but without really counting in the competition for the mayor’s seat. A question naturally arises: will AUR, established (still) in the polls as the second largest party in Romania, succeed in winning at least one of the 41 county seat cities?
In the survey findings published last week, INSCOP sociologists attribute the dilution of the AUR score to the fact that the electorate traditionally becomes more responsible as voting day approaches. It is certainly about the maturity of the voters, but also about the political immaturity of the AUR leadership. For several months, George Simion applied the same recipe that proved bankrupt for the anti-system parties in Romania – trasesism. Since he started the recruitment drive, entire branches have defected from the party, disappointed that they will be shooting for newly arrived polytricks in the organization, who get everything ready. Somehow, the AUR mirage consisted in the fact that the party had no “face” for its own electorate beyond Simion’s Facebook Lives. It was more of a depersonalized formula of revolt, born from the frustrations of the pandemic. In recent times, AUR has acquired not one, but hundreds of faces. And what do you see, they are the same people from the parties that have been in power for the last 30 years. Not even the best, but the “losers”, those whose “list” was closed in their noses. It’s a paradoxical effect. The more “heavies” clung to the core of the party, the more the gravitational force began to decline.
It is still too early to sing the AUR prohod. At least in the case of the European Parliament elections, it is possible that a strong mobilization of the diaspora to vote will keep Simion’s party around 18%, a healthy score in the perspective of the polls in the second half of the year. But AUR seems to have lost that sparkle necessary to attract new categories of voters, to have reached its maximum threshold of magnetism. If on June 9 it gets below 15% – both in local and European parliaments -, Simion’s party will become an irrelevant player in the parliamentary and presidential competitions in the fall.
