Lasconi said Georgescu, who has campaigned on reducing imports and increasing Romanian domestic food and energy production, wanted to unhitch Romania from the European and international financial mainstream and NATO, leaving the country at Russia’s mercy.
Accusing Georgescu of wanting Romania to be isolated like before the 1989 revolution, she summoned up images etched into the Romanian collective memory from the last years of Communism — poverty and cold apartments without heating — to sketch a dark picture of what a Georgescu presidency would bring.
Lasconi also referred to her own modest upbringing, talking about her mother’s hard work as a dishwasher at several restaurants in the small western town of Hațeg, where Lasconi grew up. “All of her life she washed glasses, with cold water, for 12 to 14 hours a day,” she said, adding that she and her family knew what it was like to work hard for a living without benefiting from political privileges.
Before her presidential run, most Romanians knew Lasconi as a news presenter on the television network PRO TV, where she worked for 25 years. Her time at the network included stints as a war correspondent in Kosovo and Afghanistan, as well as winning Romania’s version of Celebrity Masterchef in 2013.
Lasconi left journalism in 2020 to run for mayor of the small city of Câmpulung with the USR. She won a four-year term and was re-elected in June this year, boasting of bringing tens of millions of EU funds to the town. That same month, she was elected leader of USR and became the reformist party’s presidential candidate.
Her political career has not been without controversy. She opposed same-sex marriage and announced in 2023 that she voted in favor of a 2018 referendum to prohibit it. Her stance, which was at odds with her party’s, led to her removal from the USR’s list in the European Parliament elections this year and a public rebuke from her daughter, though she has since said she supports civil partnerships for same-sex couples.
