OPINION Politics mainstream, on the edge of the abyss: AUR is not the cause, but the effect

Dan Dungaciu, first vice-president of AUR, declared on Sunday evening on Realitatea Plus that the mainstream parties, PSD and PNL, will gradually disappear from Romanian politics and that the entire political crisis at the moment represents nothing more than the beginning of the end of these political formations.

The AUR leader's statements are harsh, but we believe that the mainstream parties are not dead yet. According to recent political polls, they are heading with rapid steps towards irrelevance, through their own fault. PSD and PNL have managed, after years of joint governance, to almost completely lose their political identity, to break their electoral promises and to transform the stability they have obsessively invoked into a simple formula for preserving positions and privileges. During this time, AUR has grown steadily, not because it has discovered some miraculous political recipe, but because it has occupied the space abandoned by the parties that have governed and that have refused to listen to what is happening in society.

The current mainstream parties are deluding themselves if they imagine that AUR can be stopped by labels or by a new cordon sanitaire. When a party reaches almost 40% in the polls on the voters' intention to vote, we are no longer talking about an electoral accident or a party on the fringes of society. We are talking about millions of citizens dissatisfied with taxes, inflation, inefficient administration, self-interest, the privileges of politicians and the feeling that Romania is governed without any connection to their interests.

Moreover, the reunion of PSD, PNL, USR and UDMR in a political formula intended only to prevent AUR from gaining access to government would only confirm the sovereignists' message: that all mainstream parties are, in reality, components of the same system. Such a cordon sanitaire could temporarily solve the parliamentary arithmetic, but it would not solve any of the problems that led to the growth of AUR. On the contrary, if the future government were to continue with the tax increases, the postponed reforms, the political appointments and the division of functions, George Simion's party could approach the absolute majority.

The solution to the recovery of the mainstream is not a new communication strategy, but a change in the way politics is done. PSD must decide whether it is still a social-democratic party or just a federation of local interests, PNL must demonstrate that it still has some connection to liberalism, and USR must get out of the electoral bubble of the big cities and understand that Romania does not end at the outskirts of Bucharest, Cluj, Braşov or Timişoara. All these parties must give up promoting obedience, bring competent people into the administration, eliminate privileges, reduce budgetary waste and provide public services commensurate with the taxes paid by citizens. At the same time, the current mainstream parties must stop treating AUR voters as citizens incapable of understanding democracy. You cannot recover an electorate that you despise and you cannot combat sovereignism only by invoking Romania's membership in the European Union. Pro-European parties must present more clearly what their representatives achieved in the Brussels negotiations, how they defended Romania's interests and what objectives they continue to pursue, because concrete results, not labels applied to opponents, can demonstrate that Europeanism and national interest are not mutually exclusive.

PSD, PNL and USR can still recover, but only if they understand that their main opponent is not AUR, but their own balance sheet. AUR is the effect of weak governance, broken promises and the growing rift between citizens and political power. If mainstream parties do not reform themselves from the ground up, there will be no need for sovereignists to destroy them. They will remove themselves from history, continuing to spin around the tail, concerned with finding governing formulas, but incapable of finding solutions for Romania.