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Tipătescu's love letter to Zoe, wife of party boss Trahanache, is lost, picked up by a drunk citizen, and pocketed by the opposition lawyer Cațavencu, who uses it to demand the deputy nomination. The letter is lost again in the brawl at the nomination meeting, and the drunk citizen finally delivers it back to Zoe. Across the play, the letter's power shifts with whoever physically holds it at each stage.
A private letter becomes a bearer instrument: whoever holds it can extract an office, and its value changes hands with physical possession, not with any merit of the holder. Because each faction also holds dirt on the others, such as the forged promissory note, mutual blackmail produces a balance of terror rather than exposure. That balance keeps secrets buried and keeps everyone inside the system.
All the provincial scheming turns out to be irrelevant, because the party leadership in the capital imposes its own candidate by telegram. Dandanache wins because he holds a bigger blackmail letter against someone higher up, and he admits he keeps it for future use. Local actors fight over leverage while real power is allocated upward by whoever holds leverage over the centre.
Dandanache boasts that he never returns a compromising letter after using it once, because he may need it 'for another occasion.' Blackmail material that is spent is gone, but material that is held can be used again. The rational blackmailer therefore never actually exposes or surrenders the secret, and that permanent latent threat is what keeps a corrupt equilibrium stable.
The drunk citizen keeps asking whom he should vote for, and Zoe settles the question for him by having his ballot prepared. He does not choose his vote himself, but he does choose to return the letter: acting on his postal sense of duty, he delivers it to its addressee. The voter whose ballot others arrange is the one character who acts from his own scruple.
Cațavencu's patriotic speeches collapse into self-contradiction, as when he calls Romanian industry 'admirable, sublime, one might say, but completely lacking.' Farfuridi's platform is 'revise, I accept, but change nothing; or don't revise, I accept, but then change things here and there.' Borrowed liberal vocabulary is performed for its emotional register while its propositional content cancels to zero.
Police chief Ghiță Pristanda is paid for forty-four flags, but Tipătescu estimates that only fourteen or fifteen were hung, and Pristanda pockets the difference. He excuses himself with 'big family, small pay' and fawns on his superiors. The play shows his petty graft as ordinary behaviour for an underpaid, servile functionary.
The play closes with no one exposed or punished. Once the letter is back with Zoe, Cațavencu is let off and gives a celebratory toast to the winner Dandanache, the forged note is set aside, and Tipătescu and Zoe's affair continues undisturbed. The comedy ends in a shared festivity rather than a reckoning.