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Polling currently shows Lasconi running behind Dan and two nationalist candidates. Those standings sparked a crisis of confidence among USR leaders as to whether their candidate could repeat last year’s successful result, when she qualified for the second round before the election was annulled.
USR leaders now want the party to coalesce around Dan as the pro-European candidate in the race. Otherwise, they fear, Romania’s pro-EU centrist votes will be split between Lasconi and Dan, risking catapulting two far-right candidates into the runoff: Alliance for the Union of Romanians leader George Simion, and the former center-left prime minister-turned-nationalist Victor Ponta.
Lasconi, who is actually president of USR and mayor of Câmpulung, a town of 30,000 three hours from Bucharest, rejected that scenario as “a false path” in an interview with POLITICO.
“I have the exact same chances as last year to make it into the runoff,” she said, even though polls currently show her running in fifth position with around 5 percent support.
Holding out hope
At stake in the seismic election is whether Romania will turn hard to the right by electing a president who would align the country with the agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump. A win for Simion or Ponta also threatens to bring another Eastern European contrarian to decision-making in Brussels, from a country of 19 million people that has been a stalwart member of NATO and the EU for years.
But Lasconi, a 52-year-old who spent a quarter century as a TV journalist, says she doesn’t entirely believe the polls.
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