Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

At the beginning of May, 2025, the first round of Romanian Presidential Elections took place. We voted here in Arizona, just like tens of thousands of Romanians scattered across the globe, clinging to hope, tradition, or just the thrill of checking a box and arguing online afterward.

As always, the ballot looked more like a party guest list than a serious political race. Too many candidates, some more corrupt than others (which, in Romania, is a real achievement in itself!), a handful who seemed decent if you squint hard enough, a few far-right regulars, and the usual suspects whose apparent job is little more than siphoning votes from anyone vaguely electable. In short: chaos. Actually, not past tense – it is chaos. We’re now headed for round two: a thrilling runoff between an independent and a far-right, Russia-friendly candidate. Romanian original democracy never disappoints. Unless someone expects it to work.

The three debates between the eleven candidates (actually ten, because one of them, fully equiped with a supreme confidence that he would win, ignored everybody else) have gone viral: on TV, on Facebook, in WhatsApp groups, even using the old paper mail, which created quite a storm. Friends are fighting, relatives are ghosting each other, and everyone suddenly has a PhD in political science.

A distinctly unsettling sense of déjà vu has come over me.

I’ve tried to stay neutral, zen-ish, above it all, but somehow I’ve ended up close to the eye of the hurricane. My mother-in-law’s TV is stuck on high volume, streaming endless Romanian talk shows, while political speculation wafts through the house like a seeping incense, courtesy of my wife, who has a genuine curiosity about everything from the Gaza conflict to U.S. diplomacy and, of course, Icelandic volcanoes.

My poor brain, fragile, over-informed, combustable, and already very close to early retirement was just about to take a break, encouraged by the hopeful announcement of “Mental Health Month.” That’s when, on Monday morning, a friend decided to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing discourse by bringing up… Sydney Sweeney’s breasts (Slate.com – 3/11/2004) and the absolute need for fact check.

What followed was an unexpectedly well rounded (well…), at times pointed (wink, wink), fulsome (hmmm…) exchange. In the end, we didn’t part ways with the usual strained “let’s agree to disagree.” No. We shook hands (digitally) across the ideological divide and uttered the rarest of phrases: “Let’s agree to agree.” Medium or large, peaked or not, we concluded, they are, without a doubt, very beautiful.