SHE is a campaign organiser's dream: charming, charismatic and equipped with both impeccable intellectual credentials and apparently limitless energy.
But as she cast her vote in the final run off of the Romanian presidential elections at the Romanian embassy in Dublin on Sunday evening, the poet and leader of the opposition Democratic Convention, Ana Blandiana, reiterated both her unshakeable support for her party's victorious candidate, Mr Emil Constantinescu, and her implacable refusal to run for political office herself.
"I will never be a presidential candidate and I will never accept any political role," she said.
It is no easy task to get Ana Blandiana to change her mind, as the organisers of her poetry readings in Belfast and Dublin over the past couple of days were to discover. They expected her to cancel in order to be by Mr Constantinescu's side at Sunday's run off poll.
Instead she insisted on fulfilling her long standing Irish engagements, winning Belfast over with an electric reading of a set of poems which had been reworked in English by Seamus Heaney - with an actor standing in for the unavoidably absent Nobel Prize winner - and then descending like a whirlwind on the normally sedate Romanian embassy in Ballsbridge, where the ambassador, Dr Elena Zamfirescu, pledged to keep the polling station open until Blandiana and her party arrived.
In the event they made it well before the nine o'clock deadline and cast their voting papers into the embassy's enormous electoral box, which was duly carried off to a remote part of the embassy for the votes to be counted by an independent electoral commission and the result faxed back to Bucharest.
It emerged shortly afterwards that of the 45 expatriate Romanians who had voted in Dublin, all but two had given Mr Constantinescu their blessing - a landslide which delighted Blandiana, though not, presumably, as much as Mr Constantinescu's eventual victory which, allied to its rout of Mr Iliescu's Party of Social Democracy at recent parliamentary elections, sees Romania finally move away from the last vestiges of Communist rule.
Blandiana, whose work was "banned" three times by the Ceausescu regime, was plunged into the political arena after Ceausescu's downfall in December 1989. Watching the proceedings on television, she discovered to her consternation that she had been nominated as the "vice president" of a caretaker government - by none other than Mr Ion Iliescu.
"The more I refused, the more Mr Iliescu insisted," she recalled amid the excitement at the embassy on Sunday night. "And at one point he said to me - the last thing he should have said, actually, in order to convince me to work with him - he said, `You have no right to refuse, because we need someone who is greatly loved by the people.' That was when I knew the whole thing was just window dressing - so I stayed for two weeks and then I resigned."
Now Mr Constantinescu will have his chance to tackle the huge problems Blandiana says need to be addressed urgently if Romania is to achieve real democracy - complete reform of the judicial system, dismantling of the secret services, and a myriad others, not to mention the rebuilding of a distinctly shaky economy. Blandiana is confident he is equal to the task. "Normally I'm uneasy with big words," she said, "but I can honestly say that this is a historic moment - a symbolic moment - in the sense that Romania can finally enter the European mainstream."
