Romanians will be in an angry mood on Sunday for general elections in which they are expected to vote overwhelmingly against ruling centrists and to bring back the party of the left-leaning former president, Mr Ion Iliescu.
Ten years of failed economic reforms, declining living standards, runaway corruption, joblessness and grinding poverty have worn tempers to the bone in this country of 22 million people.
"I have a pretty good salary of nearly three million lei ($120) per month but it's very hard to survive when you have only one wage, two children and a husband who has been jobless since 1997," said a hairdresser, Ms Stela Radu (32).
Voters in a mood to punish whoever is in office are expected to hand the mantle of power back to Mr Iliescu, voted out for similar reasons four years ago, in this country still trying to find its way since the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was bloodily overthrown.
All opinion polls show that Mr Iliescu, a former communist functionary who was Romania's first post-communist president from 1990 to 1996, and his Party of Social Democracy (PDSR), will top Sunday's first round.
With 20,000 candidates from some 80 parties seeking 467 seats in the upper and lower houses of parliament, the electoral landscape in Romania has been described as democracy gone wild.
But most opinion polls show the PDSR getting at least 40 per cent of the vote, which would make them the dominant party in parliament and able to form a government in coalition.
"My guess is that it will actually have a negative impact on reforms," said an economic analyst, Mr Alan Smith of the school of Slavonic and East European Studies at London University.
"Romania has to positively do things. . . they really do need structural reforms, imposition of budget constraints on (state) enterprises and so on and my feeling would be that an Iliescu or PDSR-led government would be unwilling to do that."
Late opinion polls have shown a hardline nationalist, Mr Corneliu Vadim Tudor, whose weekly publications have been accused by local Jewish groups of anti-Semitism, moving into second place for president, with about 18 per cent in the polls.
Mr Tudor is running neck and neck with the Prime Minister, Mr Mugur Isarescu, a soft-spoken technocrat who professes to be an independent but has the backing of the centrist coalition.
If, as seems certain, no presidential candidate wins the required minimum of 50 per cent of the votes of the entire registered electorate of about 17.7 million, the presidential contest will be decided in a second round on December 10th.
Likely to fare worst in the presidential and parliamentary vote are the ruling centrists and their sometime allies, the liberals. Led by incumbent President Emil Constantinescu, who declined to seek re-election, they were swept into office in 1996 in a massive vote against Mr Iliescu.
The PDSR had been seen by voters as corrupt and not up to the task of tackling the huge economic problems created by Ceausescu's grandiose and ruinous push to turn this former massive exporter of grain into an industrial superpower.
Now, ironically, the technocrats who won in 1996, but who immediately fell to bickering and in-fighting which stymied reform efforts, are being punished by voters in their turn.
Mr Calin Anastasiu of an independent market research company, IMAS, said one of the few things Romanians felt any enthusiasm about was the distant prospect of EU or NATO membership.