Vivid Online March 2005

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STATE OF THE NATION
Divisions raise questions over government's long term future

by Mark Percival
March 2005

It has not taken long for the first tensions to appear in the new administration. Having appeared a bastion of the Alianta as manager of the election campaign, lobbying against the fraud in round one and frequently filmed alongside Traian Basescu, Cozmin Gusa has now been ejected from the PD and is at loggerheads with the president. Events have moved rapidly since his interview in Romania Libera in January in which Gusa argued for a strengthening of the Alianta going beyond a simple merger of the PD and the PNL, to bring in also the PNCTD (Christian Democrat National Peasant Party) and the small URR (Union for the Reconstruction of Romania), with the aim of creating a consolidated movement of the centre right.

Gusa’s political future is now unclear, as an independent deputy with only his semi-political foundation Initiativa 2003 to fall back on. He will have an uphill struggle to remain a significant player in the long-term, particularly in view of his ideological somersault from social democrat to centre right, and trajectory through the PSD and the PD in the space of just a few years. Gusa must set out clearly what he stands for if he is to retain credibility, and demonstrate that his disagreement with Basescu was based on more than frustration at not being given a cabinet position.

The split was provoked by the leadership contest within the Democratic Party to replace Traian Basescu, who as president cannot be a member of any party. While Gusa was toted as a possible candidate at one point, his ambitions were quickly thwarted by the PD’s old guard, including Basescu, and by those who could not stomach his rising to head the Democrats so soon after his defection from the PSD. When seventeen PD deputies signed a motion in support of Gusa’s candidacy, Basescu quickly intervened, stating that it was a mistake for “groups” to form within the party. Gusa, in turn, issued a stern rebuke, pointing out that the president is not supposed to become involved in party politics, comparing Basescu’s declaration with former President Ion Iliescu’s involvement in the affairs of the PSD. Gusa’s marginalisation was reinforced by the PD’s vice president, Adrian Videanu, who claimed Gusa could not run for the leadership because he had not been a member for the required three years under the party statute, using the same argument which had led earlier to Gusa’s ejection as head of the party’s parliamentary group.

Gusa is certainly an enigma, who has spawned numerous conspiracy theories, based around the idea that he is actually a Trojan horse for the PSD within the Alianta. Zoe Petre has even come up with an intriguing view in an editorial in Ziua that the infighting within the PD is actually a transposition of the Iliescu-Nastase power struggle within the PSD. The scenario is based on the widely circulated rumour whereby Iliescu and Basescu have come to an understanding on certain issues, with Gusa representing the younger generation within the PSD striving to escape the former president’s apparently eternal controlling influence on the Romanian political stage. The real allegiances are actually likely to be far more complex and less well defined than Petre suggests, though the analysis of Iliescu’s continued power from behind the scenes is highly credible.

At the same time as Gusa’s marginalisation has pushed PD away from a rapid fusion with PNL, the Liberals’ own leadership contest (to replace Theodor Stolojan) has likewise moved them away from merger as a political priority. It was unsurprising that Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu should have been elected unopposed as PNL leader in early February, in spite of rumours that the controversial Viorel Catarama might stand against him. Catarama would never have had the credibility to mount a serious challenge, and consequently, a bid for the leadership would have been futile, while his arguments at one stage that the prime minister should not also be party leader lacked logic or credible precedent.

Once elected, Tariceanu quickly consolidated his position by putting former party president Valeriu Stoica in his place, criticising deals made with the PSD in 2001 under his leadership. An important effect of this has been to indefinitely delay fusion of the PNL with the PD. Stoica’s motion at the Liberals’ congress for an explicit merger was rejected in favour of a much vaguer statement initiated by Tariceanu, which emphasised the primacy of fulfilling government objectives. Tariceanu’s concern that the Liberals should not lose their identity was backed by the declaration of Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal-Democrat group in the European Parliament, who was invited to the PNL’s congress. Watson warned the Romanian liberals against joining the mainly Christian Democrat European Peoples’ Party, and instead urged them to remain in the Liberal International - to the evident delight of Tariceanu.

A disturbing aspect of these developments in both parties is that they delay the evolution in Romanian politics of a modern system based on alternation of centre right and centre left ideologies. The consequences of this could be serious, and so the effort to transform the Alianta into a coherent centre right force must not be abandoned. If successful, a second or even third mandate for the present administration is likely.

This in turn would force the development of a real social democrat alternative, perhaps based on an entirely new party. The PSD, whose membership is almost entirely based on opportunism, is probably unreformable. Yet if the Alianta fails to define itself more clearly, it risks being defeated by a largely unchanged PSD in 2008, or perhaps even sooner if the government loses popularity and the PSD uses its strong parliamentary position to force early legislative elections. The nightmare scenario involves the present administration becoming a prisoner of its weak position in the legislature, unable to fall back on popular support due to lack of clear ideology, and hence repeating the experience of the Democratic Convention government in 1996-2000, with the variant that this time it might not even last four years.

Meanwhile, if the PSD re-emerges to head a government in 2008 or before, it would perhaps be cosmetically different, if younger figures like Victor Ponta gain more influence, but in practice the same, since most of this younger generation joined the party for the real or perceived material advantages which membership offered, rather than a genuine belief in social democracy. They consequently have few real principles to differentiate them from Iliescu or Nastase. The emergence first of a coherent force on the centre right is a precondition for a redefinition of the social democrat left. Yet developments in the PNL and PD over the last two months have demonstrated that Romanian politics still have a long way to go before the electorate will have a real choice between policies rather than personalities.