Regulars
FOREWORD
It’s got to be Basescu

November 2004

There is a circus in town, one that does not feature the grotesque spectacle of performing seals or bicycle riding bears. Yet the view from here is no less hideous. We have arrived at that point when, having turned their backs on Romania’s hapless voters for 47 of the last 47 months, the country’s barrel load of unspeakably disingenuous politicians attempt to sweet talk their way into the hearts and minds of voters once again.

We look at the US elections by way of comparison, and lament that the choices locally are not anything like as clearly defined. Rough parallels can however be drawn: voters have a choice between a vote for continuity and a vote for change.

There are three main candidates for president, and two of them do not inspire. Let us first dismiss the least substantial of the trio, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, who we see as nothing more than a ringmaster leading the pack of clowns that it is his party, the PRM. We question the motives of the widely disliked and untrusted PSD candidate Adrian Nastase, whose tenure as prime minister has dominated his cabinet in the same way that Tony Blair ran roughshod over his cabinet in his first term in government, with major decision making capacity being delegated to few other cabinet members. There have been some positive characteristics of Nastase’s term in office. For one, there has been nothing of the infighting and squabbling that paralysed the effectiveness of the previous government, and all other political parties have yet to prove that they are as well organised as the PSD.

We do not question Nastase’s strength in leadership, but feel that he has set a poor example as prime minister. The PSD’s overwhelming victory in the 2000 elections gave it an absolute mandate to bring much-needed reform to a country desperately in need of it. Nastase has had ample opportunity to implement wide-ranging change in any number of neglected areas: tax and foreign investment, the judiciary and the police, sales of state-owned assets, child adoptions, the media and the environment, to name but a few. We have winced as yet another law on its way to implementation has become tangled up, lost and eventually forgotten in a debilitating fuzz of bureaucracy. His refusal to properly pursue and prosecute the assailants who have attacked journalists for speaking their mind betrays the fact that, for a reformed communist, he is not quite as reformed as he would like us to believe. Similarly his willingness to pardon the tax debts of state owned companies rather than sell or close them is not the hallmark of a committed believer in market economics. His is a largely wasted mandate.
Re-election for the PSD will see the government run by Mircea Geoana, who looks to be more comfortable high-tailing it with other diplomats than getting out on the stump amongst the people. Geoana has spent much of the last four years acting as an outrider for Nastase without attracting the ill feeling that many voters harbour for the government that has let them down. The main reason we would not recommend a government led by him is the influence both Nastase and Ion Iliescu, the outgoing president, could wield on it from Cotroceni Palace and the senate, respectively.

All roads then should logically lead to the PD-PNL combination, but as Mark Percival indicates elsewhere in this issue of Vivid, the skeletal manifesto it has put forward gives voters precious little idea as to what they actually stand for. That does not matter too much to many people, as it is likely that, just as there has been in the US election, many people will vote for the devil they don’t know.

Despite the PD-PNL’s ill-documented plans for governing, there are strong reasons to believe that Romania will be better off with Basescu at the helm. While we hope to see the party’s nominee for prime minister, Calin Tariceanu, raise his profile a whole lot more in the weeks leading up to the election, we regard the reformist, can-do zeal Basescu brought to the office of mayor of Bucharest as precisely what Romania needs. Basescu has said his party’s top priority would be to ‘clean up Romania’: to improve Romania’s business climate by reducing taxes, punishing tax evasion and shutting down companies that owe huge debts to the state are precisely what was expected of the PSD four years ago.