The concrete landscape is as follows: Klaus Iohannis has extended his mandate as president. Nicolae Ciucă is also the second man in the state, as president of the Senate and, together with Lucian Bode, took a new mandate as parliamentarian. Rareș Bogdan continues his mandate as a member of the European Parliament. Marcel Ciolacu was again proposed by the PSD as prime minister, Grindeanu and the other basic social democrats are in the government or are preparing for the new government, Tudose is a member of the European Parliament. Does it sound like a policy change that citizens in both camps have been crying out for?
“The president, the army and the church call for calm,” Antena 3 CNN wrote on Sunday. It was a monolithic announcement, Cuban style. The authorities feared the protests.
These did not happen, after George Simion kept his word. He explained to Romanian and foreign journalists present on the steps of the closed polling station that AUR will continue the fight through legal channels. The foreign press came in droves, because the leader of the main opposition party in Romania was speaking.
For now they saved themselves
As a radical nativist party has become the main opposition party, this is the contribution of those who today present themselves as saviors: many politicians plus “the president, the army and the church”. An interesting element: among the secret documents from CSAT, a report from the secret service of the Army does not appear. Did the Army notice anything? Or did he not make the report on time and came later? We don’t know, it’s a state secret.
It proves once again that when the leaders of an incompetent and corrupt state talk about “national security” the citizens have to keep their pockets closed. With a financial precision, for now they saved themselves.
Is time measured in months or weeks?
Two weeks after the shock of Round 1 and three days after the simultaneous rescue and pyrotechnic solution to cancel the elections, they returned. They are in the same, if not better, position of power. From Iohannis to Ciolacu, they have been preparing to continue for months, and some even years, in frontline positions. Does Romania have this time available?
“People want to see new, educated figures with serious careers behind them,” he writes Ioana Ene Dogioiu in Spot Media. The journalist believes that we have a truce of several months. I think that if you want to say a reorganization shoot, yes, there are a few months.
But I don’t know if we have honeymoon months with those who leave the Soviet inside us. I don’t think people are going to put it on. It’s an opinion, nothing more.
Is there no other solution than to extend the mandate of Klaus Iohannis?
The lawyer Diana Hatneanu advanced on Facebook the opinion gathered from the discussions of a complete sphere of lawyers. He is the lawyer who has defended us in dozens of free speech lawsuits, so I may be biased when I quote him.
In moments of crisis, the Constitution provides for a balance between the president and the parliament, argue these magistrates and lawyers. So that Iohannis comes to say that he remains the president, this before the publication of the reasons of the CCR, is a model of imposition, not of negotiation and control between the powers of the state.
Is it not, asks the lawyer, the case for the president and the parties to make an effort of “negotiation, coordination and cooperation between the parliamentary political forces, however elected by the people?”. It is about the old parliament, but also about the new, newly elected parliament.
If from this effort it turns out that it is better for democracy that President Iohannis leaves and goes with an interim president, a new leader of the credible Senate, why is this possibility not discussed? It would, perhaps, be a step towards reconciliation with the anger of a distraught electorate who could not vote. An interim with Ciuca, however, would be even worse.
Of course, all those who discuss this can be categorized as destabilizers, but if we lower the level of arguments here, then the problem is even bigger than we think.
The danger is chaos
When Călin Georgescu started talking like God, his voters didn’t like it either. But even for Iohannis to behave like a king does not work. And the public that does not vote with Georgescu is unhappy.
No one from the Romanian state has apologized to the 50,000 people from the diaspora who voted when the CCR decided to cancel the elections, nor to the millions who had prepared to vote. Some concrete commitments, at the price of scepters and positions, will show the citizens that their voice has been heard.
Otherwise, as Professor Alexandru Gussi wrote in one of the most painful opinions needed these days: “Nothing is more dangerous than a humiliated crowd without an alternative, which must remain under Iohannis for a few months.”
And what is the danger? The rise of radical right-wing parties for the spring elections? Not alone. It is the choice of the voters.
First, the risk is chaos. Not immediate anarchy in the streets, but quiet, emotional disorder at the mass level. A silent decline that will lead to even less democratic participation next time around. And pure chaos cannot be anyone’s choice.
If a dictatorship is the persecution of one against all, chaos means the threat of each from each, as a great researcher of societies and the risk of anarchy in Eastern Europe and the Near East said: Robert D. Kaplan.
In Romania, now, the risk is the disorder manifested not through violence, in the first instance, but through the erosion of the feeling that we have a common denominator, authority and social norms to believe. Only then comes gang violence, at the corner of the street and anarchy as the absence of the state.
“Shall we work together to reduce the world of disorder and develop the world of order?”
The topic of social disorder has become topical in more and more countries.
Starting from what is happening now in Syria, Thomas L. Friedman testified yesterday in The New York Times that he talked at length with the Chinese. “After spending the last week in Beijing and Shanghai, I repeatedly said to my Chinese interlocutors: ‘You think we are enemies. You are wrong. We have a common enemy: engagement. History will judge us both for how we work together to reduce the world of disorder and develop the world of order.” “I’m not sure they understand, but they have to,” he concludes.
We, in Romania, live in such a moment of disorder. It is difficult to assess whether you can talk to the bear from Moscow, the one that entered our garden to cause chaos. They are unlikely to understand that chaos is always like a cracked, two-way street. It will also turn against Putin. States do not participate in massive cyber attacks, precisely because the responses can be devastating. Imagine what campaigns against banks or health systems would look like.
As for the Russians, we can talk to our own: you have failed. I don’t want you as people, it’s nothing personal, but in political and leadership roles, at least lately, you have not been able to give the results that your elected or appointed positions asked of you.
“The president, the army and the Church appeal for calm”. And people appeal to reason.
