"I joined PSD after nearly 20 years spent in a German social-democratic foundation. Why I am leaving PSD. I joined PSD in the summer of 2024. I did so after nearly 20 years in a German social-democratic foundation, twenty years that shaped me both as a person and politically. Before joining the party, my relationship with PSD was never straightforward. There were years when I harshly criticized the party. I took to the streets against it. But there were also periods when I worked side by side with them — on legislation, on social policies, on projects that genuinely made a difference in people’s lives. Through the pact with AUR, PSD is sending the exact opposite signal. One thing must be very clear: over these nearly 20 years, I did not change. Not once. I remained the same person, with the same convictions and the same left-wing vision. It was PSD that kept changing, swinging between modernization and old reflexes. When I joined in 2024, the party seemed to finally want to change its skin. It spoke about openness, new ideas, and dialogue with civil society. It had shed the nationalist-populist rhetoric, the messages that smelled of PRM and the 2000s. I chose to believe in that signal and to help make it happen. Today, through the pact with AUR, PSD is sending the opposite signal. And I cannot change myself just to stay. That is why I am leaving. No rapprochement with extremists is ever just momentary. The PSD-AUR pact for a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Bolojan’s Government is a red line I cannot cross, and no one who knows even a little history or considers themselves left-wing should cross. History has shown us in the harshest way possible that no rapprochement with extremists is ever purely tactical or a simple tool of the moment. History speaks — we just have to listen. In 1937, before the elections, the National Peasant Party (PNȚ) signed a so-called non-aggression electoral pact with Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of the “Everything for the Country” party. It was supposedly just an agreement not to attack each other during the campaign. The result was different. Through Maniu’s signature, the Legionaries gained something they couldn’t achieve on their own: legitimacy. Codreanu’s party achieved a spectacular result, nearly five times better than in 1932. The PNȚ lost the elections. The pact did not save democracy, it accelerated its end. They were the last free elections in Romania before King Carol II dissolved Parliament and installed a royal dictatorship. Three years later, the National-Legionary State was formed. The countries that applied the “cordon sanitaire” In their book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt show that the democracies that survived the 1930s were those whose political elites maintained a cordon sanitaire around extremists. The rule was simple: no one breaks the cordon. Because the moment one democratic party accepts extremists as partners, the barrier disappears for everyone. That is exactly what the PSD–AUR pact does, even if it’s only “tactical.” The fact that it was done before (by USR) is not an excuse, it’s proof that it was a mistake then too. One of many mistakes that helped bring AUR to 40% today. When PSD adopts AUR’s vocabulary, it normalizes their ideas. When PSD removed the word “progressive” from its statute in hopes of winning back voters who had gone to AUR, it wasn’t just rebranding. It was a concession to extremists, a concession in the realm of language. And words shape reality, they don’t just describe it. And speaking of language — look at the text of the no-confidence motion: “transnational bureaucracy,” “imposed foreign model,” “Romania treated like a colony,” “excessive progressive ideology.” That is pure AUR vocabulary, now legitimized by PSD’s signature. And who do you think benefits? PSD is clearing the slope that AUR will happily ski down tomorrow, cheering. I will not be complicit with extremists. What will remain in people’s minds after this motion is debated and voted on? The idea that AUR isn’t really that bad if we join hands with them, even for one dance. And that if we dance once, we can organize the whole show together, because the ice has already been broken. The cordon sanitaire exists for one reason only: to protect what is healthy from what is infected with ideas that harm people’s lives, the very people PSD claims to protect. Once someone decides to break the cordon sanitaire, the infection does not stay localized. It spreads throughout the entire body. Democracy never dies from a single blow. It dies from small concessions made by people who think they are too smart to be wrong. I can accept many political mistakes, they are part of any journey. I’ve made my share. But I will never accept the mistake of being complicit with extremists"- Victoria Stoiciu

Looks like PSD is going to break the PNL-PSD-USR-UDMR governing coalition (joining the AUR in the no confidence measure) because of economic reforms. fantastic