With the priceless help of our political class, a new combat front has been created in Romania, a front which is going to exhaust even those people who might have offered our country a second chance for a better future. If things follow the tendency that has already been established, the two personalities who are not politically involved – Isarescu and Stolojan – will become part of political combinations that will place them on different sides of the barricade. Consequently, instead of doing their best together in order to accomplish a necessary solidarity for promoting reform programmes and for making government’s actions more coherent, the two technocrats will waste their efforts in useless disputes, which are not theirs after all, being in fact generated by the political forces acting in the backstage. These two personalities will try to demonstrate, whenever they have the opportunity, how credible they are abroad, instead of using their joint credibility for helping Romania.
The force and credibility these two technocrats enjoyed were due to their lack of political involvement. They have been “helped” along by the attitude of political parties that, irrespective of their political orientation, proved to be incapable to efficiently administrate our state affairs and always served people the same humiliation deriving from poverty and frustration deriving from corruption.
From now on, by simply being associated with a political party, both Isarescu and Stolojan will have to share the destiny of the respective political camps, and eventually to be treated by the population exactly the way political parties are being treated. Those who tried to ally with Isarescu and Stolojan only wanted to increase their own popularity by using people’s trust in these two personalities. We will soon find out who won and who lost. After all, it is possible that Isarescu and Stolojan should lose their credibility before they manage to increase that of the political parties they have adhered to.
Theodor Stolojan’s exigency as far as political alliances were concerned ended up by a wrong choice. He said once that he would join only a political party or coalition that would have Parliament majority and the capacity to make up a Government. Eventually, he chose the tandem PNL (Liberal Party)-ApR (The Alliance for Romania), whose electoral percentage stands bellow 17% and whose candidate in presidential elections Teodor Melescanu has only 10% of Romanians’ potential votes. Who’s going to pull whom and to what direction – up or down – is already obvious. Moreover, a potential co-operation between PNL, ApR and Stolojan would be based on some kind of – watch this! – social-liberal programme! What a perfect oxymoron! We have heard Ion Iliescu as well speaking about “social” market economy but this nonsense was not enough! The same old theoreticians who tried to figure out some kind of doctrine, that is Roman and Iliescu’s FSN (National Salvation Front) leaders, are now inventing “social-liberalism” as a representative doctrine for Stoica and Melescanu.
However, it is hard to believe that Theodor Stolojan could jump into a cart drawn by such a creature, half horse, half donkey, as he is known as a politician who embraces market economy ideas, taking into account, at the same time, the necessity to assure real social protection which has to be effectively applied not only used as an opium-like drug to make the electorate dizzy.
As far as Mugur Isarescu is concerned, he seems to have chosen a political association whose popularity is similar to the one enjoyed by Stolojan, but the percentage points are a little reversed: less than 10% for the parties and 17% for presidency. The question remains the same: who’s going to pull whom, and where, up or down? It is not difficult to guess the answer to that question. At least Mugur Isarescu does not hide behind some kind of doctrinaire mutant. He prefers to follow the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, just like his tandem partner Emil Constantinescu, who can only play the foreign card, after he was abandoned by his liberal friends and had to settle for his eternal PN?CD (Peasants Party) allies. We will soon find out what impact this situation has on the electorate.
The biggest problem of political combinations is, in every case, the partner that associations of political parties, presidents and technocrats will chose in order to have access to Government. The only ally that can lead them to the Victoria Palace is PDSR (Party of Social Democracy). In that case, the candidates-presidents of the tandems representing the respective political associations will have to be sacrificed. Resorting to PDSR is the only solution for the two political parties, which, even together, do not have the necessary votes to make up a majority. If they ask for PD’s (Democrat Party) help as well, they will be simply devoured, in spite of their presidents and former technocrats.