In countries with some measure of tradition, election campaigns are times of hot economic dispute, often of the highest academic standing. In the last years, candidates’ economic advisors have been among the most influential people in orchestrating election campaigns in the United States, and things tend to generalise in that direction throughout Western Europe. Despite their short-lived post-communist experience, countries in Central Europe are beginning to follow suit, and parties are shaping their political programmes with coherent economic concepts.
In Romania, however, elections this year will fail to bring any change in the economic statements of the major political parties. Their old platform programme will get a lift, slightly adapted to momentary needs, but will remain every bit as general and rudimentary in economic terms. It is easy to imagine what the prime-time debates will be about: agriculture – support the Romanian peasant and give land back; industry – industrial mammoths plus some privatisation; tourism – a strategic sector like agriculture; social protection – care for our elderly and children; plus issues of attracting foreign capital as strategic investments. Having signed up for the medium-term development programme, parties will be even less motivated to come up with an economic policy concept of their own.
Even a superficial analysis of economic programmes presented in the previous election campaigns, and of the general electoral statements, reveals a polarisation among parties in the matters of most concern (agriculture, privatisation, foreign capital, social protection). On the other hand, the range of things discussed shows a rudimentary standard of the electoral or less electoral dispute around the Romanian economy. While the shortcomings in addressing economic issues are explicable in electoral or even political terms, and are sometimes reparable, in terms of strict professional economic appearance, things can turn out much worse during periods beyond the electoral cycle.
Polarisation of the camps
A survey of the economic issues debated today immediately reveals two distinct categories – the “taboo” subjects, which enjoy anonymous agreement (with predictable exceptions), and “bipolar” subjects, which the two camps will never discuss because they take them as absolute truths. The “taboo” category is best illustrated by consent on the European Union, NATO, a generic rejection of socialism and acceptance of capitalism. The second category includes subjects less political, such as the shutdown of mines and dissolution of state farms, the role of foreign investment, incentives to foreign investors. The purely technical issues, with a bearing on how the proclaimed goals will come to life in the short, medium and long-term government programmes, are in the second line in the political statement, much less in the electoral one.
In both situations, apparently so different, the same covert mechanism is at work. It is the lack of a theoretical economic foundation underneath the political speech. Lacking this, political and social considerations are what directs the development of economic programme, which are apparently easier to address. It is therefore a genuine democratic process, at least from this standpoint. The opinions of the simple citizen are taken in the most direct way possible and inserted into party programmes, extracted from ideas discussed on the streets or in Western literature that popularises the economy. Polarisation in the latter subjects arises because parties target a different category of voters.
What’s wrong with that
Since this is exactly what parties are looking for – organised support of their interests in social categories that have varying perceptions as to the country’s development, apparently there is nothing wrong in the way economic theory is drawn up directly from the voters. But consider that the same parties must be most professional in the way they represent the interests of these categories, and the triviality of economic issues in a country where these subjects have been absent in the last decades gains new proportions.
Even in countries such as the United States, where each family invests on the capital market in one way or another, where the mortgage interest rate is of immediate interest and where the Fed Chairman is a familial character, economic theories are not generated by the mass of voters in a collective effort. On the contrary, in a process that does not dent democratic life, these are produced by economists that often have long-standing academic records.
About the taboo subjects
Every discussion, not only economic, originates in the great capitals of the world and is then transferred more or less formally to the rest. Is it therefore wrong when politicians take proven answers from the West in cases of “taboo” subjects? Even with communism, Russia was the country that took over a concept, developed an entire system and then forced it on the countries we now call “formerly socialist.” Debate over communism has been held in the great capitals of the world. East-European countries have rather been laboratories, extensions of the Soviet Empire, but never participated in any way in drafting those concepts. Why, then, can we not copy the structure generically called “capitalism”? Beyond the detail that the term “capitalism” itself has vanished from the Western economic and political debate, copying proven answers, while not harmful in itself, has very harmful effects. The lack of the theoretical infrastructure that would lead to those answers, proven in the West, makes it impossible to find answers to the questions the West did not have to work on, since it had no transition to go through. Communism has been a curse, parties will say in unison (with a few known exceptions), but justifications will not go beyond the effects. The lack of control over economic mechanisms makes it impossible to solve concrete problems, specific to this period.
The source of economic opinions
In fact, the polarisation of viewpoints in matters that are not taboo betrays the lack of solid, argued explanations, to justify the answers. In this case, rejection or support to a given idea is strictly political, or random. Support or rejection of socialism, or of some vague laws such as “the social market economy” are argued almost exclusively with “it used to be better before” and “it used to be worse before.” Never have the advocates of socialist concepts brought up arguments from the arsenal of theoretical socialism, and right-wing forces have never done more than point to the success of the contemporary West. Another instance of rudimentary economic approach is the issue of the currency board. Although very few know when a solution like this is enforced, which are the variants and what an economy can expect when it goes this way, we have seen an impressive number of opinions from political forces. The most frequent argument, both for or against this, is Bulgaria – which recently enforced a currency board. Privatisation, the fate of industrial mammoths, agriculture and tourism, have in turn been the subjects of similar rudimentary approaches at best, but often with an electoral, populist and even biased flavour.
In fact, here is the root of the vicious circle the Romanian economy has been swirling in not since 1990, but since the ’50s, when the incipient industry was blown to pieces, and on its ruins was built something without an inner logic, under principles imported from the East as mechanically as fragments of neo-liberal concepts are imported now.