Ioana Lupea: "The Bucharest vote is a victory of the form over the content."
The voters from Bucharest preferred the utopia of the practical solutions, the deers of the circular rings,the suspended highway of the subterranean passages, the cunning imposture of the pootechnicians. They stamped on the caricaturization copy of Traian Basescu, and not on Traian Basescu's man assigned to the Capital City Hall.
Sorin Oprescu was chosen against Adriean Videanu's rims, because he is looking good, because he is cunning, because he is a doctor, because he is, as it were, independent and anti-system, because he is someone else. Vasile Blaga wasn't chosen because he is frowning, because he is "Basescu's bulldog" and Videanu's follower, but mainly because he couldn't mobilize his electors with a vision. He couldn't manage to gain altitude, looking at Bucharest from the ground level.
The Bucharest vote is a victory of the form over the content. The electors were paying attention to the physic and language of the candidates, not to programs or solutions, and sensitive to their adaptation to Bucharest's daily landscape. Negative informations on the candidates passed with the speed of sound besides their ears. Oprescu's childhood at Securitatea's chest didn't matter either, nor his political development under the careful surveillance of the professor Ion Iliescu, nor the frauds from his files of candidate for the Capital City Hall, of professor and revolutionizer. Oprescu is one of us, Blaga comes from another planet, far away, where they speak another language, with "insights", "spreadings" etc.
Sorin Oprescu's victory shows us that the Bucharest voters doesn't responds by reflex with a negative vote to political messages that had dominated the post-communist transitions. Mineriads, communism, corruption, Iliescu, leftist, doesn't resuscitates the old times fears, are history. In any case, not in such a large share that a candidate of the right, no matter who he is, to win the local or general elections by principle. The magical words that were fooling the Bucharest inhabitants and turned them from citizens to militants of the right have lost their power after four years of usage in the presidential and PDL speech, without certain effects. A similar evolution had the miraculous formula "the reform of the political class": Traian Basescu and PDL discounted at Bucharest candidates like Gheorghe Falcă, at Arad, or Dorel Onaca, at Constanţa, or Ionel Manţog, at Gorj.
Even though the vote for Sorin Oprescu was anti-politic, it will produce severe political consequences. It will change the force balance in PSD in favor of Ion Iliescu, who's historical after-game on Bucharest brought again the smile on his face since 1990. And it will shake PDL's structure before the parliamentarian elections in autumn. It's hard to believe that Adriean Videanu and Vasile Blaga, the in facto rulers of the party, will keep their places after the results from Bucharest and the country. PDL needs a head and it will probably put it over Traian Basescu's shoulders. Finally, on the basis of Sorin Oprescu's victory, the future governing alliance between PSD and PNL will be founded, Dinu Patricu's golden dream.
Sorin Oprescu will not stop at the mayoralty. Soon we will probably hear from his mouth and the revolutionary yell: "Today in Bucharest, tomorrow in the entire country!".
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