Vivid Opinion February 2005

Opinion
Brussels has the fate of reform
in its hands

by Tom Gallagher
February 2005

The honeymoon enjoyed by President Basescu and the PNL-PD Alianta will soon be over. Not only the media but large numbers of voters will start to look for tangible improvements resulting from the arrival of these parties in office. But it will not be easy to meet such expectations.

There are problems on numerous fronts. Establishing authority over some of the key institutions of state will be far from easy. The election results for the Supreme Council of Magistrates and the Constitutional Court's ruling against the holding of a second round of elections for the senior parliamentary positions, make this obvious.

It will also be an uphill struggle to ensure that the leadership of the PNL and PD do not become selfish and parochial in their concerns. This will mean minimising infighting and ensuring that rewards are delivered primarily to long-suffering voters, not to themselves or their retinues.

Driving too hard a bargain: British ambassador Quinton Quayle has led a chorus of recent EU criticism on Romania's failure to curb corruption. But why did the EU allow the PSD such an easy ride when it held the reins of power?

It is already possible to see a blurring of the divisions between those for and against a break-up of the old PSD system. Prominent figures in the media and branches of state that tried to prevent Basescu's victory, or else preferred to see the PSD remain in charge, appear to have made a truce with many top office-holders. Instead, it is exponents of radical action who are on the defensive, not Dragos Seuleanu, Valentin Nicolau, Radu Timofte or CT Popescu (though a few more heads may yet roll). Cozmin Gusa and his supporters can be compared with Yulia Tymoshenko, the iron maiden of the Ukrainian revolution. She had been an office-holder under the oligarchical system but broke with it and swung

in a very radical direction. That today she is prime minister of Ukraine while Gusa is in danger of being marginalised, shows the respective strength of radical-sounding voices in Romania and Ukraine.

Traian Basescu can probably make a good case, at least for a temporary accommodation between former enemies. There is the need to avoid political sabotage as the Alianta, and indeed the President also, are only now familiarising themselves with the corridors of power. He probably has advisers telling him that the best future for the PD is to remain a left-wing party in doctrine. Many Romanians respond much more instinctively to the social democratic message, based on social protection and an active state. It is one that the PSD sometimes preached but rarely practised. Electoral rewards await a party of government which makes the corpse of social democracy in Romania start to twitch or even come to life.

It probably means that the PD will open its doors to relatively untainted people from the PSD. But Basescu will need to be an alert mentor and ensure that any defectors from the PSD do not steal the party from its present owners. If PSD converts establish the strong influence in their new home that the ApR of Teodor Melescanu now enjoys in sections of the PNL, then one thing is certain: Basescu's former party will not become a solid party of the moderate left; it will become a neo-PSD.

There is one cloud that diminishes optimism about the evolution of Romanian party politics. It is the high expectations that the EU has for Romania in the next few months. Recently, Quinton Quayle, the British ambassador to Romania , quite properly has been the most vocal foreign ambassador about the future of Romania: Britain , after all, will take over the presidency of the EU in July. He expresses views that are probably shared by at least some other ambassadors.

In recent interviews, he has argued that reform must be accelerated. Concrete results are expected by the spring when the EU will meet to decide whether it is 2007 or 2008 that Romania joins the Union. But when he insists that the time for 'hard work is beginning now', in my view he raises unrealistic expectations. He is referring to opposition parties newly installed in office which probably did not expect to be there three months ago. They are expected to take over a state machine geared towards the interests of the PSD and somehow produce impressive early results. It is difficult to see this happening in Britain. Indeed Tony Blair and his team were not able to do anything dramatic on the domestic front during the whole of their first elected term (unless granting independence to the Bank of England is counted).

On 24 January Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission anticipated Quayle by delivering a stern lecture to Prime Minister Tariceanu about what he and his colleagues must do immediately to avoid the displeasure of Brussels. This kind of posturing from the EU reminds me of the kind of order Stalin would issue to his cadres in the provinces during the building of 'socialism in one country': quadruple steel production in three months or else. It is the delusion of anyone in charge of a bureaucratic leviathan who refuses to recognise reality.

Romania's new Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu. Undue pressure from the EU on the new administration could have disastrous long-term consequences for the country.

The Tariceanu government cannot produce miraculous results because the very same EU allowed his predecessor, Adrian Nastase, to carry out only cosmetic reforms. The weak Romanian state is a monument to the EU as well as to Nastase. Insisting on real miracles now when Brussels was content with cheap conjuring tricks from Nastase is unfair. It amounts to crude partisanship; indeed if Romania's credit ratings on the international money markets start to fall because it is unable to comply with EU advice, more sinister conclusions might be drawn about why Brussels is so tough with the new government.

Ambassador Quayle has also probably accurately reflected the Brussels thinking by urging that no vendettas be pursued against the PSD in the battle against corruption. But nearly all the big corruption scandals did involve the PSD, so it is inevitable that an anti-corruption government must see that justice is done against the most compromised PSD leaders. Otherwise voters will start to assume that the entire political elite is behaving like a cabal and stealing from them; exactly the message that has allowed the PRM to survive despite all its inadequacies.

Another unexpected disservice the EU is doing Romania is maintaining the same narrow timetable for the distribution of pre-accession funds. In 2005 far more money will arrive than in the previous year and the rate of release will accelerate in 2006. A new ministerial team lacking recent experience in government will probably be unable to absorb this funding and spend it effectively. The tight EU funding schedule, means that the Alianta is almost certainly going to be preoccupied with internal coalition affairs, filling key posts, especially the ones that will be flush with money. This only increases the danger that a government that is reformist in intention will be blown off course. The infighting of the algorithm years will be revisited. There could well be corruption scandals that eclipse any seen in the late 1990s. No programme to correct the abuses of the Nastase years will be drawn up or implemented because there is no time. Nor will EU funds get to the people who really need it thanks to the obsession of Brussels with carrying out a rigid timetable that pays no attention to the realities on the ground in Romania.

The PSD, instead of splitting up, or being marginalised, will be given a second reprieve. If the inexperienced Alianta implodes under the pressure of carrying out an unworkable EU agenda, Nastase will come back and the vicious circle will continue.

The EU never stops lecturing Romanian office-holders about what they need to do to remove the country from the post-communist twilight zone. Sometimes the advice is good but it would carry more conviction if Brussels examined its own record since 2000 when it has been heavily involved in the affairs of this country.

The time is overdue for an audit of EU strategy. Was it right to draw up a plan for Romania identical to that of other candidate countries when Romania 's problems are highly specific ones? Was it right to establish a partnership with the PSD and not one with Romanian society? Was it right to allow PSD office-holders to spend pre-accession funding in ways it was not designed for? Was it right to do nothing when Victor Ponta of the PSD ruled that there would be no action taken against party colleagues whom the EU believed had embezzled many millions of euros from the Phare programme? This far from exhausts the list of questions about the record of the EU since 2000.

There is still time to start again and build a proper relationship between Brussels and the Romanian people. But unless the EU stops demanding instant changes which the new government and the state are incapable of delivering, then the new government will be quickly destabilised. The initiative will swing to the small parties, PUR and the UDMR at which point it might be the Alianta and not they who could fear early elections. Despite opinion polls that say the Alianta will triumph, these elections might bring a very different outcome. It is the EU that is writing the history of Romania in 2005, not this government, not even the United States. It must improve its mediocre performance otherwise it will bring eternal discredit down on its head, as well as crush the hopes of millions of Romanians.

Tom Gallagher's Theft of a Nation - Romania since Communism was published this month by C. Hurst & Co. Ltd. Copies of the book may be purchased by contacting maria@hurstpub.co.uk. This article first appeared in Romania Libera.