Aș propose that we no longer be surprised...

There was a joke before 1989 about a man who says, at one point, on a quasi-political subject, that he has an opinion, but he does not agree with it. I start to wonder if such a response option should not be included in the questions of sociological surveys. Why?

If we think over a longer period, from the summer of 2025, the voting preferences of Romanians for parties have not changed much. In May 2026, there was a slight advantage for PNL, in the context in which the censure motion seemed an unfair blow to the Bolojan government from his red coalition colleagues. Caught between a certain overlap of electorate with AUR (a party that already has a much larger market share regularly) and a rather weakly motivated withdrawal from governance due to the quarrels in the coalition over negotiating, probably, the most delayed budget in the country's history, PSD nevertheless navigated suspiciously well through the May-July 2026 period. AUR has maintained its score over a relatively long period, going in these last three months strictly on the idea that it wants early elections and would not participate under other conditions in any effort to unblock solutions for governance.

It is a war of positions, in which no one gives in and the public no longer expects much. It’s August, we’ll talk again in September. At the moment, even this perpetually outraged public no longer feels like revolting. Only even the parliamentarians, who are known to work very hard (why are you laughing?), have already gone on vacation. Not that it would be a problem, but effectively in three months they have not been able to vote for a government. It is among the few things they really need to do, beyond the daily activities that serve them more than those who sent them there.

As I said, it is interesting that there has been no major erosion of anyone since last summer until now, even taking into account the behavior of the parties in the last three months. We have finally reached the point where no one is surprised that we do not have a government. Like in those fairy tales with a spell hovering over the empire and because of that something is not going well there. But no one knows what and from what everything started. You realize that in the fall, when they will probably somehow put a government, the public will not say, "Hey man, good news, we have a government." No. They will rather say, "Look, they can’t get enough of the parliamentary functions. We needed a government now, on the threshold of winter?" When you go a quarter of a year without a budget and you are heading towards already four months without a government (and you, as well as the political class, do not seem to think it is a big problem), there is a risk that these voters will one day say, "What if we try without Parliament?" And thus, the consultative ghost of the unicameral parliament with only 300 members, possibly with half a norm, has been haunting our political culture for 15 years.

So, even though this already extremely difficult half-year has put our political mechanisms to the test, it has not yet shown any serious results in terms of party erosion, I fear that the real erosion is where we talk about the trust that the current political mechanisms can make society function. After a 2024 in which it was proven that our beautiful democracy is vulnerable to clips of less than a minute generated by AI and distributed by bots on social networks, after a 2025 in which Romanian society waited in vain for a complete report on what happened in November 2024 (the irony is that TikTok published something more substantial on this subject in April 2025), after half of 2026 in which the parties seem to suggest that our political system is incapable of providing solutions (and the report mentioned in the previous point still has not appeared), let’s at least propose not to be surprised anymore…