Ioana Lupea: "Basescu will maintain his status of warrior for justice and morality, while leaving PDL the freedom to close punctual agreements with Vadim."
Traian Băsescu will play in the general election campaign in 2008 with more caution. We will not see his stature of pricipal on any electoral poster, we will not see him on TV out for a coffee with any PDL candidate and, most likely, we will not hear from him that PDL is the holy maiden of the Romanian policy. The President is already trying to leave the impression that he does no longer engage in the actions of the party. But not because he has taken a dissaproving distance. The cold is a tactical one: Basescu will maintain his status of warrior for justice and morality, while leaving PDL the freedom to do whatever is necessary to win the elections, including punctual agreements with Vadim Tudor against Tariceanu government.
Traian Băsescu's absence from the party's summer schools may be interpreted as a first signal. After two consecutive years, the head of state used the dispense with equal distance amended by the Constitutional Court, just with a few months before the general elections, the head of state has not responded to the invitations of PDL. Last year he gave the demoratic women a nice party at the Presidential residence in Neptune, and in 2006 he attended at two youth schools, of PD and PSD. Summer Schools were the tribunes from where the head of state launched his political messages for the autumn-winter perod and has strengthened the association with the party from which he was part. Those from 2008 would have been a fantastic opportunity to put into circulation the major themes of the electoral campaign for the PDL, the missing of opportunities is not usual for the head of state.
The pathetic excuses of Vice President Cezar Preda in front of Traian Băsescu for the involvement of his name in the "Vadim" business, as the empty communication of the President that he will not be mixed together in small things as the negotiatiation of posts in the parliament strengthen the hypothesis that, formally, in the relationship between the head of state and the party chief have occurred some doubts. Both positions send us, that for the first time, the party has acted independently of the will or the approval of the head of state. Most likely, however, "the strong and unambiguous gesture" of disancing from the President, expected by Mircea Cartarescu, will not be done. If the removal is only show, then Traian Băsescu's position can only be ambiguous, so it will not suggest the voters his distancing from the party.
The presidential intransigence isolated PDL, the PNL condition for post-electoral collaboration with the party led by Emil Boc was just the distancing of Basescu. And the PDL mistakes, such as the application for the local elections of people who did not fulfill the criteria of integrity, have been accounted for Traian Băsescu also. The tactic cold helps both sides: in this way, not one of them will have to suffer from the actions of the other. Which does not mean that Basescu and his party were surgically separated, but that their relationship will no longer be consumed in public. It will be only an implicit one.
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