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HUMAN RESOURCES
A politician without a home, Cozmin Gusa
By Paul Wood
April 2005
The Athenee Palace's ghosts were exorcised when it became a Hilton but the lobby of the Intercontinental breathes with spirits from the recent past, when the hotel was a strange oasis of forbidden luxuries and ersatz Westerness in the middle of communist Bucharest: black marketeers, spies, deluxe women, cold warriors and arms dealers. Cozmin Gusa chose this conspiratorial location for our meeting and somehow it seemed to match the Byzantine tenor of a discussion about Romanian high and low politics. Not far from us a well-known politician was drinking coffee with a man reputed to be the representative of a foreign secret service.
Cozmin Gusa, a young journalist, was Adrian Nastase’s
surprise choice for secretary-general of the PSD after their 2000 victory.
He acted as the PSD’s rottweiler, of whom Traian Basescu was a frequent
victim. When in 2003 Gusa resigned from the then seemingly invincible PSD
he took Romania’s political world by surprise. Some suggested he was
playing an abstruse political game on Nastase’s behalf but he silenced
these speculations by spilling embarrassing beans about Nastase and President
Iliescu. He surprised the chattering classes again when he accepted a position
from his old sparring partner Basescu. Considered by some as the architect
of Basescu’s Orange Revolution last December, he was not given a cabinet
position and left the Alliance several weeks later, carrying two parliamentary
colleagues with him.
At 35, he is one of the most interesting young politicians, has been very
close to both Nastase and Basescu and has no reason to be polite about either.
But the political figure for whom Gusa reserves his deepest antipathy is former President Ion Iliescu. Are the rumours true that Iliescu and Basescu are much closer than the public believes?
“That used to be my assumption too, that Basescu and Iliescu are too close, but I never thought that Basescu would be so close to him after he won the election. I fought for the Alliance so that the system represented by Iliescu would not be repeated. Iliescu represents the old figures from the bureaucracy, the police, the judicial system, that will have to change as younger, more professional people come up through the ranks.”
Iliescu even out of office is still a man with immense power. “The four most powerful figures in Romania are Iliescu, Emil Constantinescu, Radu Timofte and Virgil Magureanu.” The two former presidents are powerful because they receive the reports from the secret services. Magureanu was the eminence gris who led the secret services after the Revolution and Timofte is his very powerful successor whom President Basescu has confirmed in office.
Why is Basescu close to Iliescu?
“We presume that Iliescu knows a lot about Basescu’s past, as do the other three. Iliescu rose to power in his political career by gathering information about someone’s past, and then threatening to make use of it.”
Gusa has no doubt that had the story been made public during the election of how Basescu acquired a house from the municipality of Bucharest, Nastase would be Romania’s head of state. So why didn’t Nastase use it? “Because he didn’t know about it. I asume that Iliescu didn’t want to give that information to him. In this way Iliescu could remain the president of the PSD. I doubt that Iliescu would be the president of the PSD if Nastase had become the president of Romania.
“We have two alternatives: after EU accession Romania being led by the right people, a new class of political figures and of bureaucracy, a professional one. Or the second alternative, ruled by the former Securitate which I presume will happen if the first alternative fails. This is what Iliescu desires, about what Silviu Brucan used to say in 1989, that we will need 20 years. He knew that the plan would take 20 years.”
I asked Gusa to compare and contrast Basescu and Nastase but the contrast didn’t seem to be very marked. “Both of them are very clever and they have great intuition. Both are afraid to act, and wait for the last minute to do so. They like the trappings of office and living in luxury - Basescu as much as Nastase - and both have a very big ego.” Neither is a team player, both are dictatorial. “As politicians each of them has good and bad points. Basescu is a better politician in the streets, Nastase behind closed doors. As a manager Nastase is better than Basescu. Basescu has to prove that he can be a better Romanian than Nastase.”
What does the future hold for Adrian Nastase? “In the future he can be very useful for Romania if he will work in Europe for a political organisation, perhaps as a lobbyist - he is good at this. I don’t think he will play an important role in internal politics in Romania.” He is likely to remain in the PSD, rather than walk out to form his own party.
So his curious, almost sado-masochistic relationship with Ion Iliescu looks set to continue as it has done for 15 years, based on mutual need and reciprocal benefits.
Cozmin Gusa assured me that “Early elections are not possible right now. Basescu does not have enough power. Parliament has the power and they don’t have any reason to do it. Even the PNL do not need early elections. They have the prime minister.” The possibility that the Alliance might increase their majority at early elections is, according to Gusa, “a dream.” The electorate will quickly become disillusioned by the new regime but Gusa does not believe that they will turn to the PSD.
Will Basescu ever have the will or the power to fundamentally reform the secret services? “He has the power but he does not understand the way in which the secret services can be reformed. He uses dictatorial rather than democratic methods.”
Why didn’t the last government steal the second round of the election? “It wasn’t possible. A lot of people from Britain, Italy, and from the United States prevented it.”
If it is true as Gusa contends that the key to the victory was the loud complaints about election fraud from Basescu and others (and not to mention very vocally from Gusa himself) then Cozmin Gusa does deserve to be considered one of the main architects of Traian Basescu’s Orange Revolution. We shall hear more of this mercurial young man. As Churchill said “Anyone can rat once, but it takes a man of character to rat twice.”