PSD and the confusing week

Since we are in the week of the no-confidence motion reading, I noticed that this Monday, colleague Remus Ștefureac published some very interesting figures. Our survey from the first week of April shows that only 4% of AUR voters trust Sorin Grindeanu and only 12% of PSD voters trust George Simion (https://informat.ro/opinii/neincredere-alianta-psd-aur-votanti-118406). The discussion was framed in the context of the inadequacy of a PSD-AUR alliance from the perspective of their own electorates.

The story is very interesting, especially since, for several months now, without PSD and AUR politically displaying together (on the contrary, with PSD in the governing coalition and mutual rejection statements from both parties), on many issues, the PSD audience and the AUR audience showed relatively close opinions – and clearly different from those of the PNL-USR audience. This is in the conditions where, socio-demographically, there are still clear differences between the segment of PSD supporters and that of AUR. I have written about this phenomenon repeatedly in recent months.

Of course, several AUR and PSD leaders have stated that the no-confidence motion episode is simply an episode, not an alliance, the two parties having declared different objectives: theoretically, PSD wants more the change of the prime minister than leaving the government, while AUR wants early elections. Of course, depending on how the political struggle goes until the vote on the no-confidence motion, anyone can get upset with anyone, but also a lot of negotiations are possible. So many things can still happen, and in an electoral system where coalitions are mandatory, no one is surprised by anything anymore.

PSD cannot fail to see that many of the issues of its own electorate are common with those of the AUR electorate. What I said in the immediately preceding sentence is not exactly a great scientific discovery. Since the spring of 2024 (even before, but that’s another story), PSD has rapidly lost supporters (sometimes even conceding them on its own) to AUR, with AUR thus entering electoral areas where it was not present, for example, before the fall of 2024.

So if PSD makes a proper calculation that can recover this electorate by distancing itself from the austerity promoted by Prime Minister Bolojan in one way or another (either from outside or from within a pro-European governing coalition in the long term – we cannot know that now), the initiative is debatable.

In the conditions where the two electorates we talked about above have many common themes, but three times more PSD voters accept the AUR leader than AUR voters accept the PSD leader, it seems clear to me that there are more chances for PSD to continue losing electorate to AUR than to have the prodigal sons return. At least in the current political configuration. And the submitted no-confidence motion, if we take into account all the public communication gestures around it, is more likely the AUR-PSD motion than the PSD-AUR motion.