PN?CD, UFD, ANCD and the Moldavians' Party have been negotiating their electoral lists for a few weeks now. Many people are struggling for each spot, according to the principle "our strength is in our number." But they ignored the other saying, "how two split two straws to three donkeys," and now are dying over the problem. PNL and ApR each had an internal crisis at the very beginning of the pre-electoral campaign.
Liberals wasted energy and time to rid themselves of the Remes group. The ApR people had Balanescu & Co. to deal with. The PD leader, Petre Roman, in his stead as a Foreign minister, engaged in a lively dispute over SAPARD funding with his peer in Agriculture, the Peasants' Ioan Muresan, and with the Government head himself, Mugur Isarescu, who has become a preferred target for parties in government now that he is running for Cotroceni.
UDMR was the only one to sit on the sidelines and watch, and when it realised that the coalition was only a curtain concealing a genuine battlefield, it launched, in an orderly and disciplined fashion, a candidate to represent its own interests.
Throughout this time, PDSR, although ceaselessly producing electoral attacks, is focusing its energies on building its arrival in power.
Unlike the other parties, PDSR's efforts are not channelled exclusively toward winning the electorate. On the contrary, opinion polls show that Ion Iliescu's party holds the supremacy of votes, and has a chance to collect as much as 51% of the voters' options.
Furthermore, no other party is threatening its leadership position. PDSR leaders are thus confident about November 26. Had it not been so, they would not say so often that PDSR cannot be avoided in negotiations for the near future.
For this reason, Ion Iliescu and Adrian Nastase are in no rush to trod the country far and wide, although their opponents have been doing so for quite a while. Their most fierce battle is on the foreign front, as they seek the vote of the West.
Adrian Nastase had an almost three-week run through Great Britain, Canada and the USA. Few details of what he did there were available, in spite of the press releases. For the press, Nastase's conclusion after the tour was that PDSR is no longer ill-regarded in the West. Now it is Ion Iliescu's turn to meet with American politicians.
Another flank in PDSR's open war to conquer the West is its entry into the Socialist International. Turned down for ten years, Ion Iliescu's party apparently pulled a winning ticket: its forthcoming merger with PSDR, producing the Social Democratic Party.
The new party, at least in the words of PSDR leader Alexandru Athanasiu, has every chance to be accepted in the International, as the descendant to the Romanian Social Democratic Party.
On the third flank, PDSR is beginning to look for a partner in the future government. Even UDMR has not been ruled out. The condition is that the future ally should buy as much international recognition as possible.
The last flank, extremely important, concerns the touchier points in PDSR's résumé. The best example is the issue of property.
PDSR has asserted itself in these ten years as the main opponent to the retrocession of nationalised property. After a refusal to deal with the issue while in power, in the opposition it focused every effort to block the coalition-proposed draft.
The last episode of this sad soap opera of Romanian transition was consumed in the very first day of this session, when PDSR managed to pull the law off the Senate agenda, for more negotiations.
According to party leaders, the law just had to have a provision that real estate now in public property will not be returned but compensations will be paid instead.
In fact, PDSR's goal, once in government, is to avoid amendments to the houses law, as it has been warning for so long, namely to avoid accusations of not respecting property, an issue so sensible in the West.
This is why PDSR cannot have the draft law pass Parliament on this last run, in the formula desired by the power.
Since the coalition seems to have completely forgotten its purpose, preferring electoral boxing, PDSR stands a good chance of dragging the law into the future legislature, or to amend it now, to its own liking.
Anyway it goes about it, PDSR will not give up the buildings law entirely. Once it takes the shape it wants, it will display it in the West as proof of its interest for private property.
In conclusion, by contacts with Western politicians, by strategic moves on the domestic political stage and by bending delicate laws to its concept, PDSR is building its way to power via the West. What will the other parties do if they see Ion Iliescu's party solving its image deficit they used to blame so often?
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