Votes are not made, they are taken from others.

The most recent INSCOP poll for the parliamentary elections, from the end of October and the beginning of this month, shows AUR in first place (38%), PSD at 19.5%, and PNL at 14.6%. In recent months, but after the elections in May 2025, the most visible change has been in the standings of PSD and PNL. If in June PSD was below PNL – it seems that governance has eroded it, in these unstable times, faster than the liberals. Is PSD satisfied, under these conditions, with such a petty victory (an increasingly plausible thing considering the behavior within the coalition…)? What is certain is that even so, it is still half of AUR's score, something unimaginable four years ago, let's say.

Of course, PSD's idea is that getting out of the rut, at least a little, and flirting with some sovereignist themes, could bring back the lost electorate. It is not clear if that will be the case. Until now, Marcel Ciolacu's failure in the presidential elections, a leader quite attentive to the voice of the common man and to public discontent, has shown that highways, subsidies, and ceilings no longer meet the standards. The migration of a portion of the public from PSD to AUR is not just linked to what AUR says, but rather to how AUR says it. As a result, reversing the migration might not be that simple. All the more so as the mainstream parties, all of them, have had a slight deficit of charismatic personalities for some time now.

The other major question about the figures we are discussing is whether this 38% of AUR is a decrease compared to that 40% with which they have accustomed us from June 2025 until last month, or is it just the result of a small variation explainable by the usual margins of error of probabilistic samples. After all, anything is possible. Of course, the estimate we are discussing now is theoretically better than the one from the beginning of October (larger sample, smaller maximum allowable error, shorter questionnaire, a smaller and more credible percentage of people expressing a voting opinion). Percentages are relative measures, not absolute. If we remove the undecided and those uninterested in voting from the calculation, after all, to decrease someone's percentage, others' percentages must increase. The crisis of mainstream parties remains, and 2-3 percentage points up or down does not mean that they have recovered after the shock from the long electoral year 2024-2025.