Andrei Cornea: The Unpredictable Mr. Nicușor Dan and the Resentful Mr. Funeriu

Mr. Daniel Funeriu responds (“How? Here’s how”) to my article in Dilema (September 3, 2026), “How, how, how?” From the outset, he describes what I said there about the paradoxical situation in which most of Nicușor Dan’s electorate found itself after more than a year in office as “an intellectual sleight of hand” that he is determined “to correct.” Two objections seem to me to be raised by Mr. Funeriu against the “sleight of hand”: first, although I admit that I knew quite a few somewhat negative things about Nicușor Dan, I preferred at the time (as did many of those who proposed him and then supported him in the 2025 presidential campaign) to turn a blind eye, and now I am groundlessly lamenting that things have gone in a different direction from the one I expected. “This is not a description of a deception, but of a rejected deduction... You did not lack the data, but the conclusion.” In other words, President Dan was consistent, while we, his supporters, mistook our illusions for realities. The second objection is that I did not subject the candidate (or candidates for the presidency) to a test, an examination, together with other candidates, in order to know whom we were dealing with. He reproaches me for the “absence of a selection procedure,” on the basis of which he seems to believe that someone else would have had far better chances than N. Dan of becoming a good president. He also offers a domestic model: the 1992 procedure within the Democratic Convention, which designated its president. He concludes sternly that we, those who proposed and/or supported N. Dan, have no excuse and must accept the president with everything that comes with him—good and bad. I cannot fail to note that Mr. Funeriu is not in the best moral position to make such reproaches: he ran for president in 2025 and obtained 0.53% of the votes in the first round. (Nicușor Dan obtained 21%.) The truth is that frustration and resentment scream from every letter of his text. Still, I would recommend that this local Cassandra show more indulgence toward human fallibility: in 2014, he was in the PMP, even hoping to win the party leadership against Elena Udrea, for whom Băsescu had broken that party away from the PDL. Now that was political blindness!

The question is: in 2025, would we have had solid grounds to suspect that Nicușor Dan would “go off the rails,” ignoring or contradicting many of his electorate’s expectations? My answer is that there were no such grounds. At most, we could have feared that he would fulfill too little of some expectations, but not that he would flagrantly contradict several of the most important ones. I wrote in the article that many of us were aware that Mr. Dan had certain defects—for example, he was stubborn, a poor communicator, slow in making decisions, etc. But it by no means follows from this, as Mr. Funeriu unfoundedly assumes, that we should have deduced that he would refuse to appoint quality people, that he would use wooden-language writers for press releases, that he would invoke the argument from authority before the press, or that he would flatter Trump. The man could have learned something new, progressed, and matured as a politician. After all, he was intelligent and had been surrounded during the campaign by a multitude of intelligent and capable people who were ready to help him. Nor was it at all necessary to assume that his well-known “conservatism” would have remained frozen in the 2000s, when the future politician recommended books by the neo-legionary Răzvan Codrescu. On the contrary, it was rational to believe that two decades of civic and political activity, public offices, contacts with numerous people at home and abroad, reading, as well as his own reflections would have changed the way the current president understood national and international history and politics. And there is something else essential: the rule (both here and elsewhere) is that a politician victorious in elections—especially in a first term—seeks to respond, even if only partially, to the expectations of his own electorate. That is what Constantinescu, Băsescu, and even Iohannis did in their first term; that is also what Iliescu did with regard to his own electorate. To contradict important expectations of one’s own electorate from the very first months in office is at least unusual and merits an explanation—even if no remedy is found. (Of course, Mr. Funeriu can pride himself on having known everything from the very beginning, but we are not equal to his omniscience.)

Would testing the candidate before an ad hoc committee have helped? I doubt it. Let us imagine the following dialogue before a committee of wise men. Question: “Mr. Dan, as president, will you keep Mr. Pahonțu, who has remained unchanged for more than 20 years, as head of the SPP, even if it is proven that he participated in the repression of December 21, 1989, as a Securitate officer?” “No!” “Will you support Ms. Lia at the helm of the Justice Ministry, despite criticism from civil society and some magistrates?” “Nooo!” “Will you appoint people of questionable standing as chief prosecutors?” “Noooo!” “Will you try to destroy the PNL by appointing a party vice-president as prime minister without his consent?” “Noooooooo!” “Will you wink at the neo-legionaries, trying by every means to block the Wexler law?” “Nooooooooooooo!” Etc. The irony is that the supposedly positive example from 1992 that Mr. Funeriu gives me is rather a counterexample: indeed, several candidates were tested then for the position of president of the CDR and candidate for the presidency of Romania. The final contest was between Emil Constantinescu and Nicolae Manolescu. The former won because he allegedly promised Corneliu Coposu (who decided the outcome) that he would restore the monarchy. We all saw what happened.

I therefore maintain that Nicușor Dan’s “turnaround”—unusual in its scale, scope, and speed—was, to a large extent, unforeseeable on the basis of the general information available to the public. “I did not refuse the deduction,” as Mr. Funeriu claims, but merely estimated what was probable under the very confusing circumstances at the time (canceled elections, a rising sovereigntist candidate, a divided center). I made a choice that was not at all sentimental. Under those circumstances, it seemed reasonable. Somehow or other, I was wrong. What followed was not what we hoped for, what we expected, and above all what we believed would be useful to the country. That is what matters, not the rancor of the Zero-point-fifty-three-percent candidate.

P.S. Mr. Funeriu is scandalized that, in my article “Hunting for Sorosisms,” published in Dilema in 2025, I allegedly labeled him an antisemite for “a remark that was not even critical of Soros.” Here is the “not even critical” remark, which I quote in that article: “Soros is rightly criticized [by Elon Musk] for wanting—and partially succeeding—to carry out some very nasty social engineering: to make our young people believe that a man is a woman and a wolf a sheep...” After which I comment: “The statement, pure nonsense, is yet another among the multitude of systematic and anti-Semitic-sounding attacks (only someone who does not want to can fail to sense it) against the Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist. In fact, what these detractors—beginning with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and continuing with Elon Musk and the entire international far right—are trying to do is slander and discredit the fundamental concept and purpose of George Soros’s philanthropic actions—namely, ‘the open society’ (a concept devised, naturally, with the alleged aim of destroying ‘Christian’ societies).”