Some wounds run deep in politics, as the leader of Romania's National-Liberal Party Crin Antonescu showed on November 23, the day after he found himself out of contention in the presidential election.

Antonescu finished third with 20.25 per cent of the vote, according to preliminary data with 85.9 per cent of the ballots counted. Incumbent Traian Basescu, standing for a second five-year term, received 32.74 per cent of the vote, a slim margin over Social-Democrat leader and speaker of the upper house of parliament, Mircea Geoana, who had 30.16 per cent.

Basescu built high public approval ratings for most of his term on the back of his highly-publicised spats with former National-Liberal prime minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu. Despite the closer ideological similarities between the political platforms of Antonescu's National-Liberals and Basescu's Democrat-Liberals, the bad blood between the two parties prompted Antonescu to throw his support for his party's traditional rival, the Social-Democrats.

In a statement on November 23, Antonescu refused to extend an olive branch to Basescu. "Listening to all the talk about horse-trading and different proposals, I want it to be clear. Any co-operation between myself and Traian Basescu is excluded, as is any support for Basescu from my voters," he said.

"I did not and will not negotiate with Traian Basescu. Basescu is not a man of the [political] right, that is only a contrivance."

Antonescu's support for Geoana was conditional on continued support for the nomination of Sibiu mayor Klaus Johannis for prime minister, a candidate that Basescu has refused to endorse.

The National-Liberals and Social-Democrats have the votes in parliament to invest a government or block it. The two parties have supported Johannis since the minority cabinet of Emil Boc was ousted in a vote of no confidence in October.

Geoana went further than, saying that his party's commitment to Johannis' nomination has not wavered, but also that he was in favour of turning the current ad hoc alliance between the two parties the building block of a coalition that would back Johannis's cabinet in parliament.

Geoana, a former ambassador in Washington and foreign minister, became the leader of the party in 2005, after former prime minister Adrian Nastase lost the presidential elections to Basescu in December 2004 and became the target of a corruption investigation.

Opinion polls consistently gave Geoana a lower public approval rating than his party. Traditionally, rural areas have been the Social-Democrats' stomping ground, but Geoana attempts to appeal to rural voters often looked contrived when compared to Basescu's populist appeal, local analysts have said.

In a bid to further boost support for his campaign, Geoana said on November 23 that he welcomed every vote and courted the mayor of Bucharest, Sorin Oprescu, saying that Romanian capital needed more investment.

Oprescu, the former head of the Social-Democrat party in Bucharest, won the mayoral seat as an independent in 2008 and was seen by some observers as Basescu's most dangerous rival in the presidential election as the only one able to match the incumbent president in the populist arena. However, the mayor of Bucharest finished a distant sixth with 3.26 per cent of the vote.

Turnout was 54.5 per cent, electoral authorities said.