PSD’s fate as the Romanian democratic left-wing’s sole party affects the structural balance of the political stage in Romania and because of that it concerns us all. In the following period PSD’s main problem won’t be Traian Basescu, PD-L or PNL, but PSD itself.

Any organism reproduces according to its genetic program, passing on its traits to its descendants. For a change to occur a mutating factor is needed. In what concerns PSD, it has ended up being a regional party without a territory, an army led not by general staff members but by frontline generals. Since such a political operator cannot plan on the long-term and cannot coalesce the electorate around a strategy that has a clear ideological identity, PSD stakes on the negative vote.

The working concept of such a party is based on two theses. One of it concerns internal order and affirms the local party leaders’ preference for a national-level leadership that they can control. Another concerns the national context and claims that the party fares so much the better the more poorly the country fares. However, in this sense they see the guarantee of PSD’s return to governing Romania in PD-L’s impossibility to avoid a dramatic error caused by its management of the crisis instead of seeing it in a good opposition and in an electoral victory that would follow the sincere and convincing presentation of some Social-Democrat solutions for the nation’s problems.

To wait for the failure of the PD-L government in order to easily get to the fruits of power is an error. Governing in a Romania devastated by the crisis is a poisoned fruit. PSD will thus only partially exercise power while being at the same time forced to resort to last-ditch solutions that will not allow it to protect its loyal constituency but that will antagonize the rest of society.

A drastic electoral defeat would have been the mutating factor most efficient for modifying the aforementioned genetic message. That did not occur. The chance of avoiding it could turn out to be the mischance of inadequacy to the political environment. Subsequently, PSD will have to rely on spontaneous mutations. The voluntary retirement of Mircea Geoana, the one that implicitly admitted that since he was disputed by his peers and since he could not accept to be controlled by them he decided to admit the local leaders’ control, would be a solution. Geoana however stated that he wants to remain in the game, something that implies the reproduction of the old shortcomings.

The last hope is represented by the local leaders themselves. Understanding that a fragmented party can win local power but not national elections, and that in the context of a neo-Caesarean regime local interests cannot be protected in the absence of a national governance obtained through a positive vote, they could admit that PSD needs a new dynamic of victory secured by a firm central leadership, not by a referendum-like decentralization that wastes its energy and coherence. Nevertheless, revolutions are initiated by the elites of the contested systems, not by their victims.