The last speech delivered by NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoană at the Land Forces Academy in Sibiu was like all the others in recent months: a kind of country project presented by a clever politician temporarily disguised as a career military man, with an eye on the 2024 presidential elections. „I’m not saying I’m not interested,” Geoană said of a possible candidacy, in an interview with Turnul Sfatului.

Geoană has for months been using his important NATO post to campaign in Romania on the alliance’s dime. His visits to various military units or cadet schools in Romania are just a pretext to attack purely political issues.

A NATO official told G4Media.ro that „for his official visits the travel costs are borne by NATO, while his private trips are self-financed”. Only Geoană mixes them up. He ticks off a visit to a military unit, the rest of the day’s actions are self-promotion.

Geoană titled his speech in Sibiu „Power and National Security in the Age of Great Transformation”. In essence, he says that visionary leaders are needed to cope with big changes and wonders whether the Romanian state is ready to face them.

„One question naturally arises: What is the strength of the ‘body politic’ called the Romanian state and how prepared is it and Romanian society to cope with the greatest transformation in human history? What we could call the period in which we live and will live, my young friends, the Era of the Great Transformation”, Mircea Geoană told the young cadets and students, but the question was not necessarily addressed to them, but to the general public.

The unspoken question is perfectly understandable: Who will lead Romania in the Great Transformation Era? Someone like Ciolacu or Ciucă, people with questionable education and limited understanding of the world they live in? To whom will you hand over the fate of the nation at a turning point in human history? Who, apart from me, Mircea Geoană, a successful Romanian with a fine international career, has the capacity to understand the complexity of planetary changes?

The answer to these unspoken but strongly suggested questions comes, without false modesty, from Mircea Geoană himself, at the end of his elaborate presentation on „The Age of Great Transformation”:

„We are recovering. Mircea Geoană, Romania’s first Deputy Secretary General of NATO and the first of the newcomers to NATO, tells you this. I would like you to see my personal example as an encouragement to remove from your hearts, from your minds, from what we may have learned throughout history, any inferiority complex or provincialism. We are as good as the best in the world, if we do our job. We are learning and we are human. Serious people. I see at NATO those we recruit from Romania, incredibly good Romanians.

It’s incredible that you can win the recruitment competitions. So my advice, as a man who has seen a lot, life has been up and I’ve been down. There are harder times in life. Know that I didn’t always have happiness and cheerfulness. Have faith. Trust that you represent an important country. Leave any inferiority complex at the door. Confidence and a lot of patriotism. Fatherland, honour, duty.”

We all recognize the Geoană candidate of 2009: slightly pathetic, bordering on the ridiculous, talking about everything and nothing, very elaborate and sophisticated, expert on global issues, the most talented actor able to sell platitudes and platitudes with the air that he has just unraveled the mysteries of the Universe.

But anyone who has the patience to listen to him all the way through with their mouths agape can’t help but be a little puzzled: interesting, brilliant, very clever. Still, what did the author mean? What does the visionary, former five-minute president of Romania propose?

Essentially nothing. What the audience needs to remember is that this time he really deserves to be president of Romania. Resigned to his important position at NATO, Mircea Geoană has himself entered the Age of the Great Transformation. For younger people, with a political memory of no more than ten years, a successful Romanian, a cultured, intelligent politician, far removed from what the political class offers today, is on parade before their eyes.

The more experienced ones remember the former candidate in 2009, who thought he was Romania’s president for a night, happily hopping around with his wife (Mihaela, my love). They certainly remember many others: the visit to the home of Sorin Ovidiu Vântu, then a big media mogul, later sentenced to prison in several criminal cases, or the visit to Moscow a few months before the elections. Some may also remember the party launched with Marian Vanghelie after they were expelled from the PSD, from which he received three luxury watches worth €100,000 as a gift.

All the above evokes a weak politician, without substance, surrounded by dubious characters like the former mayor of Sector 5, ready at any time to make great compromises for the sake of power. Only Marian Vanghelie and former PSD senator Cătălin Voicu, also convicted of corruption, know exactly how many vulnerabilities the former PSD president has.

Geoană’s brother-in-law was recently sentenced to six years in prison in a corruption case and has been placed under international arrest, but it is obvious that the presidential candidate is not responsible for the actions of close family members. But there will be an inevitable theme in the campaign: a presidential candidate and his brother-in-law fleeing prison.

Geoană has failed to recover politically after his defeat 14 years ago, which he still considers a stolen victory. But time has passed, fate has smiled on him, and in next year’s elections he sees the perfect opportunity to get his revenge, the chance of a lifetime, a perfect alignment of the stars, now or never. Since last year, he has meticulously prepared his campaign team to organise his visits to the country, he forced the PNL and PSD to support his candidacy, arguing that he is the „chosen one” of the Americans, he lobbied intensely in Washington and managed, after a year of turmoil in Romania under the NATO flag, to soar in the polls if nothing else.

What we see now in some rankings is called speculative sociology, since the real presidential candidates are still unknown.

Mircea Geoană’s problem is that, in the Great Transformation Era, no one in Bucharest wants to hear about him, neither the PSD, nor the PNL, nor any other party. His biggest supporter remains Mihaela, his love. Geoană therefore has no electoral vehicle, without which, whatever the polls show today, his chances of winning the presidential election as an independent are close to zero.

The Deputy Secretary General of NATO’s biggest problem, so far minimised, is that he is using the resources and platform of the North Atlantic Alliance to campaign in Romania. It is only a matter of time before this ticking time bomb explodes, if the military organisation further agrees to tacitly support a politician campaigning in his country on NATO’s dime.