GOLD appeared in 2020 almost by surprise. Of all the public opinion polling institutes, only one, Sociopol, indicated the presence of AUR among the parties that will enter the Parliament. The others hadn’t even heard of AUR, hadn’t included this party among those polled, didn’t take it into account. About a week or two before election day (December 6), in a semi-concerned tone, Pieleanu also mumbled something about a party that would be a surprise, but he couldn’t say more, because he wasn’t allowed.
AUR grew up clandestinely, going from town to town, village to village with a yellow coach and an almost tired speaker, talking about seizing people in their houses, about thieves in politics and hell knows what else. He stole voters from USR, PNL and PSD. Not equally. He took many from USR, those people who had believed that the scandal could work miracles. Now the scandal had new faces and had been augmented. It was more than those disappointing gargles that had all too quickly become part of the system.
The party led by George Simion and Claudiu Târziu came seemingly from nowhere and obtained 9% of Romanian votes. Enormous for a party that no one in the Old Center of Bucharest had heard of. But we didn’t worry, because AUR looked like a new PP-DD, a party that makes a nice appearance once, then quickly fades away.
It didn’t happen that way. Not only did AUR not drown in the waves of self-created ridiculousness and embarrassment, it began to rise. Solid, thorough, step by step. At the end of last year, AUR had reached, depending on the polling house, scores between 18% and 22%. And the trend was one of growth.
In polls from December 2023 – January 2024, AUR often appeared as the second party, right after PSD and sometimes far ahead of PNL. Nasty moment for both parties in the ruling coalition.
This is how the idea of common lists, at least for the European Parliament, and merging elections was born. Several scenarios were studied and almost all of them were bad. Because almost every merge variant drove GOLD very high. The local elections held on time, at the same time as the parliamentary elections, awarded AUR with many positions of mayors. The parliamentary combined with the presidential almost made Simion president. And everything was related to the momentum that AUR was going to take at the European Parliament elections. About the same one that the USR-PLUS alliance took in 2019. Launched in the European Parliament, where it could have quietly obtained over 25%, AUR would have been unstoppable in the fall.
No one seriously thought of merging the European parliamentarians with the local ones, as it is impossible to legally shorten the mandates of mayors and local councilors. It’s just that the version of the elections appeared, after which the mayors take their mandates with a delay of several months. It’s weird, it will cause a lot of syncope, but they finally found a way to do it. It’s on the edge of democracy, it’s aberrant, but that’s what it is.
And it was, in the end, the only option in which AUR could be stopped as a party. Because the practical European parliamentary elections have disappeared from the discussion. They were swallowed up by the local elections. And at the local level, where AUR has no structures, no people and has barely found candidates for some of the constituencies, Simion’s party will get an extremely low score compared to the aspirations of the leaders. He will get about the same score in the European Parliament elections, and it will hardly pass, if it passes, 10%. Most likely, however, the AUR will not get even a single County Council president, no mayor of the municipality that is the seat of the county, no mayors of big cities, and so on. If it gets 9% overall, it will be a miracle.
Raised with the stories of some old security guards, who convinced him that he has all the data to become a great politician, Simion will wake up on June 9 under a damn cold shower. Either way, this will be a welcome thing. Because for about three or four months, whenever he tries to take a public bath, Simion is left without water, because the soap dries on his skin.
