Now that the European results are known and Euroscepticism discussed, after a short detour through Canadian visas for Romanians, we will finally take a look at the Romanian politics.

Today I met another European woman. Originally from Spain, she told me she worked in the Czech Republic for a while as a translator. Upon learning I'm Romanian, she also felt the need to share with me that there were "a lot of Romanians" in the Czech Republic who wanted to come to Canada but couldn't, because there is no visa treaty. When I told her that there were some problems here with Czech Roma getting visa through fraud and the visa had been suspended, her reaction was to remove her Czech work experience from her resume, out of fear that “Czechs now had a bad name.”

In this episode I was going to discuss the Romanian MEP 2014 results. Instead, I will rehash one of the first quotes published on this blog. It’s an article written by one Bogdan Ionescu, requesting that Canada keeps the visa for Romanians. In case you don’t know, this is a big sticking point between Canada and Romania, as the former keeps a visa requirement for the latter. Canada has nonetheless a reciprocal visa elimination treaty with most other Eastern European countries, such as Hungary (with its own proportionally large Roma minority) and Czech Republic, even though these countries have encountered, over the years, massive visa abuse issues. As you should be able to infer from the links above, it is antiziganism that prevents Canada from entering in the same reciprocity treaty with Romania as it has with Hungary or Czech Republic. That, and the attitude of many in the Romanian community, who feel they need to be protected from other Romanians.

Then as now, I replied with Jon Stewart Unleavened musings on immigration.

The problem with this “isolationist” approach is that it doesn’t really work. The European propensity to blaming Romanians / Gypsies (no difference in manymost people’s minds) for everything that’s wrong with Europe, including climate change and childhood diabetes has spread, by contagion, well beyond Europe. The Canadian bureaucracy and political elite already had a deeply racist mindset coupled with a serious deficiency in general knowledge (esp European history and geography) making this Romanians=Roma connection inescapable.

The way Romanians attempt to deflect “Euroscepticism” (i.e., nationalism / racism / xenophobia) by claiming it applies only to Gypsies and not to ethnic Romanians is idiosyncratic. It is not even sufficient to call it what it is and use existing legislation and institutions to combat it, we need to do that and also change Romania’s name to Dacia. Yet none of it is happening, which is why I’m claiming Dothraki asylum.

Here’s a summary:

1. Assume discriminated Roma to be Romanian and stop trying to emphasize the difference when any gets arrested. (Except when they’re not, as was the case a while back in Britain with South East Indians working in some meat processing plant illegally, with fake Romanian passports and claiming to be Roma.)
2. Call prejudice for what it is. Lodge protests, use existing anti-discrimination laws
3. Change country name / brand to Dacia

Going back to the MEP 2014 saga, these are the election results in Romania:

• USD (PSD-PC-UNPR) - 37,60%
• Unified Right (PNL, PDL, PMP si FC) - 36,04%
• Mircea Diaconu - 6,81%
• UDMR - 6,3%
• PP-DD - 3,67%
• PRM - 2,7%

What the above shows is that the electorate is relatively split in half between left and right (see also brain and Nolan). It is far easier for the left to coalesce, mostly because the lion share goes to PSD, a party that governed the country in the high-visibility years after the 1989. Communism is a religion of envy and until 1989 it was the real state religion in Romania. Most people are docile and fell into it by default. A small minority resisted (the real right, the conservatives) and died in communist prisons, but most learned to hide. Today’s crypt-communists (i.e., PSD) share with Western conservatives a certain social conservatism, they are only united by the demagogically professed desire to spread an inexistent wealth and the populist drive to put Basescu in jail for the sin of not saving Adrian Nastase from jail.

That is why PSD is popular and will stay popular for most of the foreseeable future: it replaced in people’s minds PCR without them even realizing it; it is now the default, the sweet smell of home, the security of the good old times when money was not a problem.

Because the left in Romania is essentially one single party, PSD, while on the right we have an entire aquarium of egos swimming in a diarrheic mix of egoes and hoes, the right will almost never be able to present a united front to the PSD behemoth, even though the latter is obviously cracking at the seams and is led by a plagiarizing dumbass with no political future, at least not on the world stage.

I still find it difficult to believe that he has not resigned. Romanians will keep voting his party in office, for the poor people they represent don’t dream to even plagiarize their way to a degree, but any world leader, prior to meeting him, gets a bio that includes a mention of his plagiarized diploma. They will be polite because he is representing another country, but there is very little opportunity for the personal friendship that Basescu was able to establish with other leaders. Also, there is no equivalence with Basescu’s punching of that child – that was simply not the big deal they tried to make it to be. And again, Basescu’s friendships, though as good as any, are sunsetting, simply because he himself is departing. The real estate marketing scandal that might land him in jail is also very similar to Clinton’s Whitewater.

And Basescu’s last days in office will very likely be as sad as Clinton’s final days. Or happy, if he has a Jon Stewart.

Sources / More info: hn-results, plus-ionescu