POLITICS - February 9th 2005 The formula of the future structure of the SDP (Social Democratic Party) leading board and the date of the party’s Congress are the hot issues of today’s meeting of the SDP Central Executive Bureau. by LAVINIA DIMANCEA

The report, a very thick one by the way, contains the self-examination of the party’s behavior until the elections, the causes of the electoral failure, as well as the party’s future strategy. In the last four years, SDP took a few wrong steps, Nastase admits in the report, and one of them was the almost exclusive focusing on governing and the lack of any supported measures regarding the reform and the party’s modernization. The party has been looked at as a "necessary evil" with etiquettes like arrogance, parade, corruption, bureaucracy, centralization. The party has lost because even those who benefited the most from the positive results of the SDP Government voted against it. The example most at hand for SDP is the one of the voters from a NAH (the National Agency for Houses) block of flats that the SDP Government built. 60% of them voted against SDP. The public communication excess proved to be a bug as well, because it produced an informational saturation for the electorate and this added up to the feelings of manipulation and rejection. "The quantity drowned the quality". SDP made a major strategic mistake by talking to its supportive group of electors only.

SKIDDING The local elections were the first event to signal the party’s autumn failure. At that time the party started to have lower percentages in the polls and "the leading board’s firm intervention was the only thing to stop it from skidding". "That moment could have meant the beginning of an accelerated fall that would have led us to disastrous defeat", Nastase’s report reads. The annulment of the Permanent Delegation has be