A man walks into a café, listens to the orderly dissension a few tables down, and prepares to order. Of course, this is no sleek, sterile coffee chain; cynicism is better served with faded wallpaper and souvenir ashtrays. He orders coffee without cream and, apart from engaging in superficial appraisal of his environment, waits in silence. A few minutes later, the waiter returns and politely states that, having run out of cream, he may only serve coffee without milk.
This joke, from the 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka, is perhaps not the most humorous of paradigms that illustrate stupidity, nor is it phrased as such—intellectual, sanitised slapstick always commits the sin of high-nosed posturing. There’s a reason why profanity, even if mal-intended, never fully fails. Still, we may not overlook the distinction between the two negations: coffee without milk is not coffee without cream. Certainly, this antithesis is embodied to an extreme in our sanitised society, free of the occasional hedonism one finds in transitory pleasures. Coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, sweets served sugar-free.
However, as with all pleasures, coffee without milk has found its way into politics. It is always a terrible idea to define a political movement by lack, especially when it is unassuming. The recently deceased Jimmy Carter knew this all too well. He was the un-Nixon, the man who could fill the void left by the Watergate scandal with the embodiment of yet another. A decent man—yes—but politics is rarely moved by decency alone. And yet, gazing—or scorning—at today’s political landscape, absence again seems abundant. Take, for example, the case of the centre-right “Save Romania Union,” abbreviated USR. A party that, according to its members, is not confined by ideology, seeks to eliminate corruption, and strives to live up to its slogan: A Romania without theft. As seductive as moralistic one-liners have proven themselves to be throughout history, most rely on comparison. USR, notwithstanding, gives no alternative to theft; they attempt to kill the symptom, not the cause. Without resorting to cynicism again, it is noteworthy to mention that the social democrats—who themselves got into a marriage of convenience with the national liberals—accused Elena Lasconi, USR’s president, of hypocrisy for having made her “perspectiveless” husband a party counsellor, a position compensated for by public funds. The thief cries: “Thieves!” The marriage of convenience itself, a futile compromise, has ended in a lukewarm divorce. And, as recent events have unfolded, it looks to be a divorce where friendship after the fact remains an unavoidable act of preservation. Not of emotional residue, of course, but of their own existence.
Romania’s new foreman-to-be, Călin Georgescu—Fascist sympathiser, moon landing and climate change denier, and, ironically, environment policy adviser—is perhaps the facilitator of this preservation. As an independent, he received almost 23% of the first round vote, implying a rather drastic drift from party politics. As plosive as “party politics” may sound, his paraphrased statement that “bottled water brims with bits and it packs microchips” trumps it the same way he has weirdly managed to overtake every other faction in the country. His campaign, whose diffuse catchphrase “balance and verticality” still conveys as much verbosity as any other political mantra—despite his appeal as an alternative—has been defined by TikTok, abandoning traditional media even more vigorously than Donald Trump. On the same platform, Georgescu has curated a digital altar to paranoia, packaging conspiracy theories as self-evident and masquerades of mediocrity as revelations. His followers are served a steady diet of half-truths and unintentional self-parody, with anti-establishment gestures that cater more to TikTok’s algorithm than a coherent ideology. For Georgescu, his medium of communication is precisely what constitutes his ideology: rapid, reductive, and conveniently transitory.
Just like coffee without milk, Georgescu operates in the realm of absence. His pompous, nationalistic promises—along with his vacuous slogans and absurd conspiracies—are irrelevant. His messages are a glaring void that perfectly encapsulates modern politics: not a desertion from traditional media, but simply media without media. Subscribing to Georgescu’s “ideology” is not to choose bottled water over the establishment’s paralysing hard liquor, but to embrace an illusion of liquid altogether. It may slosh loudly in its bottle, but it evaporates as you pour it. The triumph of the empty over the tangible, a classic of political theatre. The audience is starved for meaning while shallow rhetoric is disguised in philosophy. A paradox—an appeal to both tradition and transformation, wielded with the poise of a statesman and the urgency of a provocateur. Yet, for all its fervor, the enterprise faltered not in scandal or revolt, but in procedure. The election has been annulled, leaving only questions where certainty once stood—or at least claimed to.
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