Romanian presidential candidate fights her own party to stay in election race

Romanian presidential hopeful Elena Lasconi finds herself in a weird position.

Not only is she running in a controversial election do-over, but she’s now battling her own party just to stay in the race.

The leadership of Lasconi’s center-right Save Romania Union (USR) pulled support for her last week to swing behind independent Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan, whom they see as more likely to make it into the election runoff next month.

Polling currently shows Lasconi running behind Dan and two nationalist candidates. Those standings sparked a crisis of confidence among USR leaders as to whether their candidate could repeat last year’s successful result, when she qualified for the second round before the election was annulled. 

USR leaders now want the party to coalesce around Dan as the pro-European candidate in the race. Otherwise, they fear, Romania’s pro-EU centrist votes will be split between Lasconi and Dan, risking catapulting two far-right candidates into the runoff: Alliance for the Union of Romanians leader George Simion, and the former center-left prime minister-turned-nationalist Victor Ponta.

Lasconi, who is actually president of USR and mayor of Câmpulung, a town of 30,000 three hours from Bucharest, rejected that scenario as “a false path” in an interview with POLITICO.

“I have the exact same chances as last year to make it into the runoff,” she said, even though polls currently show her running in fifth position with around 5 percent support. 

Holding out hope

At stake in the seismic election is whether Romania will turn hard to the right by electing a president who would align the country with the agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump. A win for Simion or Ponta also threatens to bring another Eastern European contrarian to decision-making in Brussels, from a country of 19 million people that has been a stalwart member of NATO and the EU for years.

But Lasconi, a 52-year-old who spent a quarter century as a TV journalist, says she doesn’t entirely believe the polls.

After all, no survey predicted that Călin Georgescu would win the first round of last year’s presidential ballot, before the country’s top court canceled the election over allegations that the ultranationalist had run an illegal campaign with potential Russian backing.

Indeed, as Lasconi pointed out, many polls saw her coming in fourth or fifth in that race too. She ultimately finished second with 19 percent of the vote.

Lasconi argues that her personal appeal exceeds that of her center-right party, claiming the data shows that some women who voted for far-right parties in last year’s parliamentary elections actually chose her in the presidential vote.

This time around, she’s again counting on some of those votes.

Most of the roughly 40 percent of undecided voters are women between 33 and 60 years of age who live in small towns or villages, she noted, as well as young people — both groups that voted for her last year.

“In 25 years of journalism and five years as a mayor I dealt with vulnerable people, women, victims, children. Who’s fighting for these people? I can do that, that’s why I’m so confident that I’ll become Romania’s president,” she said. 

Campaigning without money

Lasconi has taken her party to court to force it to restore funding for her campaign, which USR cut after withdrawing its support.

“It’s a big injustice, a major abuse,” Lasconi said of the decision to pull backing and funding.

She insists that the party’s membership chose her as a candidate, and that the USR leaders who reversed course just weeks before the first round of the presidential election on May 4 don’t represent the whole party.

USR is legally barred from steering Lasconi’s campaign funding to Dan, who is running independently. Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau said on April 12 that USR cannot campaign for Dan because the deadline for any candidate to drop out of the race was March 19, meaning that Lasconi remains USR’s official candidate.

The USR leadership has challenged the electoral authority’s decision in court. Party leaders, meanwhile, said they would campaign for Dan on the streets and on their personal social media accounts.

Lasconi, who has condemned the USR leadership figures who turned against her as “traitors” and “losers,” said in the interview that their actions were dangerous. “I’m afraid that some institution would take notice and say that USR is trying to rig the election,” she said.

Unless a court decides to restore her campaign funding, however, Lasconi says she’s prevented from competing on an equal footing with other candidates.

“But people see it, and even if it now looks like they took everything away from me, they didn’t take away my voice.”

Lasconi has also accused her party colleagues and Dan of playing the same games that plagued the old mainstream political system in Romania — in which backroom deals subverted the democratic order — abuses that both Dan and Lasconi claim to be running against.

“People started to understand that I am truly the independent candidate — I don’t play games with anyone,” Lasconi said.

Following the Polish example 

Should she overcome the odds (and her own party) to become president, Lasconi aims to unite the nation. 

“You cannot imagine how much anger there is in society. I feel it when I am among people,” Lasconi said.

That anger comes from injustice, she said, from retirees struggling to make ends meet on a €250 monthly pension. “There are so many who go to work for 25 lei (€5) a day,” Lasconi added.

In her own town, Lasconi said, she was instrumental in building parks and playgrounds where people can get together instead of sitting around on their phones.

“I invested in education and health from European funds,” she said of her record as mayor, explaining that the money had gone to renovating hospitals and schools.

On foreign affairs, Lasconi doesn’t believe her country has to choose between the EU and the United States.

While she admits she doesn’t understand the purpose of Trump’s trade war with the EU, which is affecting business on both sides of the Atlantic, she does agree with the U.S. president that Romanians and Europeans need to do a better job of taking care of their own security.

“We relied too much on someone taking care of us, of our security, and I think we should follow Poland’s example, which made important progress in the last few years,” Lasconi said.