Politics May 2005

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POLITICS
Ole Ole Ole Iliescu nu mai e!

by Paul Wood
May 2005

“History,” said Karl Marx, “repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.” Marx’s comment sprang irresistibly to mind as Ion Iliescu was removed in an unexpected internal coup from the leadership of the PSD, the party he founded and dominated for 15 years even when, as Romania’s president, he was required not to belong to a political party.

The parallels with the way in which he removed his predecessor Nicolae Ceausescu from power were irresistible. “Ole ole ole Iliescu nu mai e!” sang the front page of Libertatea, the country’s best read newspaper, a paraphrase of the euphoric chant of the crowds in the 1989 Revolution: “Hurrah hurrah Ceausescu is no more!”

Fifteen years ago Iliescu and his fellow Gorbachev-style communists took over the Oedipal popular uprising against Ceausescu. For most of those 15 years Ion Iliescu – educated at Moscow University in Stalin’s time and now 75 – had presided over Romania as it made the slowest progress of any former communist country in Eastern Europe towards democracy. During those fifteen years the former communists ran a kleptocracy which surpassed the excesses of the oligarchs in Yeltsin’s Russia or Luschenko’s Belarus, while the government begrudgingly adopted chapter by chapter the requirements of entry to the European Union.

Now the younger generation of Social Democrats whom Iliescu had nurtured have turned on him and at last cornered the consummate political fixer. It was Iliescu who to his surprise and horror found himself losing control of the party congress of 21 April. This time we witnessed a coup de theatre rather than a coup d’etat. And marvellous theatre it was.

In the four months since PSD Prime Minister Adrian Nastase snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the presidential elections, Iliescu had given effortless master classes in how to outmanoeuvre your political rivals. He had checkmated Nastase and Mircea Geoana in the same way that he had sidetracked in turn Petre Roman, Teodor Melescanu and every other rival for power within his party.

Nastase had discovered that he wasn’t strong enough to stand against Iliescu for the leadership of the party and was touchingly grateful to be earmarked the specially created position of Executive President. Iliescu was confident enough to humiliate his former disciple Geoana by describing him as a prostenac (eng: dunce) for making an alliance with the Hungarians in the second round of the presidentials. In so doing he precipitated Geoana’s decision to gratify his injured pride by making a seemingly unlikely bid himself for the leadership.

But Geoana’s candidature was no mere marker for the future. The tectonic plates within the party were shifting. An alliance had been secretly put in place that was strong enough to topple Iliescu but secrecy was vital, just as it was for the conspirators of 1989.

Geoana only announced a firm decision to stand for the leadership at the last possible moment and by then had secretly built alliances with Miron Mitrea, Viorel Hrebenciuc and with Ioan Rus’s Cluj group. On Wednesday night these party elders secretly directed their followers to switch support from Iliescu to Geoana. Immediately before the start of the congress the three visited Iliescu to offer him the chance to stand down gracefully and be elected honorary party president. Iliescu’s reaction was one of blind fury and he angrily turned them out of his office.

When the congress opened, Iliescu was voted to chair it. This kept him on the platform and out of contact with opinion amongst the party delegates, the PSD barons from the local party branches, in the corridors of Sala Palatului and in nearby restaurants where the deals were being made. Nastase who at lunchtime praised Iliescu fulsomely to delegates - who knew the two hated each other - began negotiations with the conspirators and by the afternoon was describing Geoana as “A team player with whom I always collaborated very well.”

Just so did figures in December 1989 like General Victor Stanculescu play a double game until the end. As did Talleyrand during the French Revolution of 1830, who went to the window, observed the streetfighting and said, “I see our side is winning.” Someone asked him “Which side is that?” and Talleyrand replied, “I shall tell you tomorrow.”

The conspiracy would not have succeeded so well, and might not have succeeded at all had not a shaken Iliescu made a terrible mistake. Calling Nastase to the podium he said, “I now invite Comrade Nastase to speak.” A shocked murmur reverberated amongst delegates. Sala Palatului’s walls might have blushed. The word tovarasi (eng: comrade) has been unspeakable except in black jokes since December 1989. Immediately Iliescu added that “comrade” was regularly used by Social Democratic parties elsewhere in Europe but the word once uttered, could not be recalled.

At that moment Iliescu lost the delegates and the party. None of his supporters could provide an excuse for him. Either Iliescu was still a communist or he was becoming senile and no longer knew what he is saying. Or of course, both. Either way Iliescu belonged to another age. Fifteen years after the Revolution had been hijacked by Iliescu everyone realised, irrespective of the backstairs political deals being struck and unstruck, that the party needed a new leader.

It is strange, that moment when power suddenly passes from those who have long held it securely. It happened with Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and with Mikhail Gorbachev a year later. During Ceausescu’s now famous speech from the balcony of the Central Committee building, he sensed the hatred of the crowd after his promises of increases in rations and salaries. That was the moment when his power was broken.

Iliescu was left alone on the podium in the hall while power shifted elsewhere. In this case power did not fall in Lenin’s phrase into the streets. It fell for the moment into the manicured and improbable hands of Mircea Geoana. Corina Cretu, Iliescu’s devoted spokeswoman and Senator Nicolae were almost the only supporters who by midnight remained loyal to the old man. It was Ms Cretu’s melancholy duty to keep her mentor informed of how the conspiracy against him was unfolding. The whole second tier of the leadership had forgotten their rivalries and grudges and momentarily united against him.
Recent weeks have been full of gripping events abroad (the death of a Pope and the election of another) and closer to home (the Romanian hostage crisis) but for drama the PSD’s party congress eclipsed for the moment anything else. Iliescu kept his lonely place on the platform until 3 in the morning but he left before the result of the vote was announced: Geoana 964, Iliescu 530.

Geoana was elected President (leader) of the party, Nastase Executive President, Mitrea Secretary-General. Iliescu was a rank and file party member. Of his supporters only Corina Cretu, Vacaroiu and Dan Ioan Pascu were elected as Vice-Presidents. Cretu had threatened to resign from the party if Iliescu were not chosen leader. Nastase’s people tracked her down in the confusion to ask her when she would resign, so that a new vice-president could be chosen in her place. (Corina Cretu did not resign as a party Vice President and she is now one of the leading supporters of Mircea Geoana – ed.)

When he knew defeat was unavoidable Iliescu’s reaction was to cry out in a rage worthy of King Lear: “I do not need a position in order to continue to lead the party.” But in fact for Iliescu there is no way back. He has not been shot by firing squad, and so unlike his former leader he will be able to make scathing and damaging comments about those who betrayed him, but his political importance is over. In the words of Enoch Powell, “All political careers, unless cut off by untimely death, end in failure.”

“From now on the party is democratic,” announced Mircea Geoana as he accepted the leadership of the party, but the truth is that like the takeover Ion Iliescu led in December 1989 this was a palace coup pretending to be a revolution. The man at the top changed but the people beneath have mostly stayed the same.

Geoana is a good-looking, well-dressed figure who looks and sounds acceptable to other European leaders. But he has been content to be a leading figure in one of the most corrupt governments since the Phanariots ruled in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He himself has been less dogged by scandals and less dishonest than many of his colleagues but there is nothing in his record or in his character to suggest that he has the strength or political skills to be leader in fact as well as name.

A party dominated by figures like Adrian Nastase and Miron Mitrea has a very long journey to go to become a modern European left-of-centre party. Indeed corruption is not the issue here. Iliescu was probably justified in boasting that he himself was poor but honest. No one ever suggested that he himself stole. Even the men in his camp were usually less egregiously corrupt than the so-called modernisers in the party who grouped themselves around Nastase and Mitrea.

But even the PSD must like all mortal things change and develop. The party activists joined the party to enrich themselves and they did so from fraudulent privatisations and by embezzling banks. That era, as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi has pointed out, has come to an end. Today the biggest source of money in politics is European Union grants. The wind blows from Brussels and to align themselves with Brussels the PSD has to camouflage itself in European colours.

With the final passing of Ion Iliescu, a PSD apparently led by Geoana will be a more formidable rival for the present government. Whether the PSD manages to return to power or whether it continues to decline along with its natural constituency, the pensioners, the workers and the peasants, will depend on what always decides political success or failure: events.

Paul Wood runs Apple Search and Selection, an executive search firm.