#WTA has recently confused #Romania anti-#corruption #rezist #protest with people coming out in the streets to welcome and congratulate Simona Halep in her recent Grand Slam triumph (gsp-tnr). It’s not only foreigners not getting what’s going on, but even some of those protesting.
For the past few years, I’ve been living a poor man’s life. I no longer live in my uptown house with the backyard into a ravine, but I moved downtown. I’m arguably out of my previous bubble. I rent and have been dealing with landlords in a landlords’ housing market (tst-neigh). I see a lot more poverty and crime (tst-horr) on the streets. And as before, I see tons of corruption and dysfunctional government here in Toronto, but I now have to deal with it myself.
Though I haven’t been there in a long time, I still have Bucharest in the list of cities for my weather app. I like the spring weather in most Canadian cities, with maximums in the low 20s, and minimums in the low teens, making for a good sleep even when sleeping outside in a Hennessy hammock (US). I never liked Bucharest in the summer – way too hot and now car polluted.
There’s been a recent election in Ontario, where the party that did not provide a fully costed platform won and everybody seems to have forgotten about fiscal discipline. Still, a comparison with Romania would be next to impossible, even with updated stats.
From my vantage point, the current political battles in Romania seem pointless, and so is the outdated left/right dichotomy.
- On the so-called “left” we have Dragnea/PSD & friends. This is a party having its roots in the post-1989 confusion of Communist Party aparatchiks who were left directionless. They have no understanding or belief in communism or Marxism (though they had learned the language that came with it), have co-opted the Orthodox Church as a state institution, and have a stranglehold on rural Romania. (Rural Romania is more or less anything outside the large urban / university centres of Bucharest, Timisoara, Cluj and partially Constanta, Brasov, Iasi etc.) The Romanian “left” has much in common with the “illiberal” Eastern Europe and it is not firmly oriented toward the West. It obviously has more in common with fascism than with communism, much like Russia.
- On the “right” we have several parties, such as PNL (the “Liberals”) and PD or PDL (Basescu’s former and it’s factions) that play an increasingly marginal role. Only a shrinking urban minority votes for them. They promise to fight corruption, but in Romania “fighting corruption” has become synonymous with austerity and cuts to “entitlements” and social services. While this might make sense from an accounting perspective, this is unappealing to the millions of poor in rural Romania. Furthermore, the urban elites and their reps often talk about “votul cenzitar” and other stupid schemes, which are thinly veiled attempts to exclude rural Romania from voting, rather than coming with a platform to win support in the country side.
The “right” voters look down on PSD voters wondering why the latter don’t see the beauty of their “intelligent” programme and continue to “sabotage” it by being alive and fighting for their own interests. Indeed, in the videos shown, the protesters brought to Bucharest by PSD with buses from the countryside come across as uninformed and either unemployed or pensioners, seemingly unaware that PSD is the governing party and placing all the blame for their situation on the PNL President Iohannis.
The poor are getting poorer and in choosing the left, they choose someone who at least “talks the talk” even though nobody (left or right) walks the walk. PSD is deeply implanted in the countryside and that, as always in politics, was at least partly accomplished with what we’d call “corrupt means”. Instead of trying to compete, the right has unleashed a hurricane of corruption prosecutions on the left, failing to grasp that this, in the absence of an attractive program and foot soldiers in territories, cannot go on forever and will sooner or later fail. Prosecutors cannot annihilate PSD for corruption any more than they could remove Bill Clinton for wiping his d*** off the red button, and it’s a shame that they’ve even tried.
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Comfortably sitting in its popularity and parliamentary majority, PSD has been trying to put a stop to prosecutorial fervor and return the Romanian political system to a semblance of normality (just as corrupt as that is everywhere else). But the system has showed some remarkable resilience, and in their frustration, our glorious kleptocrats have made use of seemingly the same PR machine as the alt-right and/or Trump in the West. They keep talking about the “parallel (or deep) state”, politically-motivated prosecutions, show trials, etc. One doesn’t even have to look hard enough to find some kind of proof for all that.
To that end, PSD has passed (or tried to pass) laws to neuter prosecutors, but was forced to retreat by huge #rezist demonstrations in Bucharest. They continued their attempts, focusing on the removal of the star Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi. When President Iohannis refused to rubber stamp PSD’s order of removal, and PSD got the Constipational Court to order him to do so. Though he has so far not followed, he is running out of options. He could call a Referendum (that’s what his predecessor, Basescu did when faced with a similar gambit), but he does not have the stomach for it and it’s not clear that it would be helpful.
Caught in the krossfire, a bunch of pensioners who share Dragnea’s lack of functional teeth, as we can see in the video shared by a friend on Facebook (fb-eprovid) or another. What nobody mentions is that the people bussed in Bucharest from across the country were somewhere around 420000, and although not the brightest tools in the shed and some clearly bought, presumably at least some were there with the legitimate purpose of defending their interests and letting the urban elites know that they exist and won’t quietly disappear.
In what may be another front opening, or just a simple mediatic diversion, Oreste Teodorescu, seemingly a “Realitate journalist” attacked PSD’s favorite entertainer, Mircea Badea, revealing that his mother used to be a Securitate informer under the code name “Vrabiuta” (which sounds a lot like veverita). We’ve discussed Mircea Badea at nauseam on this blog.
toDo
There is no substitute for votes and doing the necessary work in the countryside to get people to vote you. This is why PSD keeps winning while PNL is marching toward a footnote in the history books. Winning politics is dirty and will continue to be irrespective of Kovesi’s actions.
One potential “way out” from this corrupt and corruptive stale mate is direct democracy, to be introduced first in local politics, then gradually higher, with a corresponding weakening of parliamentary prerogatives, but that requires for the urban elites to start extending the countryside some credit, both political and economical.
Sources / More info: gsp-tnr, bkiT-RoRG18, fb-eprovid, hn-infra, hn-ki, tst-horr, tst-neigh
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