Monday 17 November 2014

Deutschland über alles - why Victor Ponta lost

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"The people's voice is odd./It is and it is not the voice of God." Alexander Pope
"Ponta meet karma - she's a bitch." Placard in Piata Universitatii.
1.00 a.m.

Victor Ponta, the favourite to win the presidency - everyone assured me he would win - has conceded defeat and I am surprised how emotional I feel. Just like when Traian Basescu beat the favourite Adrian Nastase by a whisker in 2004 and the euphoria in the streets of Bucharest the next day was palpable. Where did ten years go? 


I always had a feeling that the German would win it - largely because he's German. Romanians trust Germans more than other Romanians. They usually trust foreigners more than other Romanians, so long as the foreigners are white.

Romania makes a habit of these cliff-hangers. The exit polls showed Basescu losing in 2009 but the diaspora saved him then. This time the diaspora won the election for Mr. Iohannis not because of their votes, which in the end were not crucial, but because of the pictures posted all over the social media of queues a mile long in Munich, London and everywhere else, queues of people who stood eight hours in the cold on a Sunday and in some cases were, even then, not allowed to cast their votes. This happened in the first round of voting two weeks ago and again in the second round, because Mr. Ponta's government had arranged insufficient polling booths. 


These pictures were the best advertising materials Mr. Iohannis could have had. You can't buy that kind of advertising. This was another revolution won on social media.

Viscount Whitelaw, Margaret Thatcher's long-serving deputy, said at one point in the sorry life of James Callaghan's administration, which preceded hers,
"We should certainly not gloat. This is no time to gloat. But I can tell you, I am gloating like hell."
So is half Romania tonight - roughly speaking, the better, more informed and idealistic half. 

Mr Ponta conceded defeat within an hour, while the exit polls showed the result too close to call. Presumably his own polling, much more reliable than any exit poll, showed him he had lost. Did he also fear violence in the street had he stayed? People say half a million votes were rigged by electoral tourism and other malpractice and the votes of the diaspora as always were certain the be strongly anti-PSD. But I wonder if he received calls from the State Department instructing him to concede defeat, as Adrian Nastase is said to have done in 2004.


Victor Ponta's campaign slogan - 'The President Who Unites' - proved almost true, but not in the way he wanted. He united (enough) Romanians against him. For a moment Romania - or Bucharest, anyway - is suffused by a glow of solidarity, as it was after the centre-right victories in 1996 and 2004. What a shame that it will not last long.


Victor Ponta is still Prime Minister, the job I am sure he wanted more than the presidency, and in theory there is no reason why he should lose it. Only his own party can get rid of him and if they do so their mortal foe, President Băsescu, will get to choose his successor. After Mr. Iohannis is sworn in next month it will be Mr. Iohannis who invites politicians to form a new government  - if a vacancy occurs. 

Yet, though Mr. Ponta got almost half the vote, I feel that he is probably a busted flush and not long for this political life. He always looked like a naughty schoolboy and now he has been thrashed, as naughty boys used to be in the days before corporal punishment was banned by the EU.

Note on Monday:

The final figures reveal that it wasn't even close - the figures look like 55% for Iohannis, 45% for Ponta. That's after the alleged malpractice and despite the people in the diaspora unable to vote. So there was never going to be any need for American pressure or social unrest.  

Why did the polls get it so wrong?

In Britain there is a well-known and marked tendency for Conservatives not to like admitting to pollsters that they will vote Conservative or, in the case of exit polls, that they have voted Conservative. In Romania no-one puts too much faith in polls but here too there seems to be a tendency for people not to admit that they are voting for the centre-right candidate. This may explain why the PSD candidate was expected to win the presidency in 2004 and 2014. In 2009 the exit polls said the PSD candidate Mircea Geoana had won.

Another part of the explanation is the influence of social media. Pro-PSD television channels showed Orwellian stories about Hungarian subversion yesterday, but mostly older people were watching. On Twitter and Facebook there was a relentless torrent of pictures and posts from Romanians abroad queueing in lines a mile long, camping out overnight to vote, being dispersed by French and Italian police with tear gas, because the government of Victor Ponta had not provided enough polling booths. And very emotional messages on the social media from the diaspora begging people in Romania to exercise their right to vote may have mobilised a lot of votes - and even changed many minds - as polling day wore on. The exit polls showed a big swing from Ponta to Johannis as the day progressed.


33 comments:

  1. Holy shit! Is this an April Fool joke? Merkwurdig, schrecklich, traumrig, unglaublich! Weiss ich nicht benutzlich worte? You must be pulling my leg here Paul...

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  2. Dupa alegeri, la sediul PSD vine unul si intreaba
    portarul:
    – As vrea sa vorbesc cu domnul presedinte al Romaniei, Victor Ponta.
    Portarul ii raspunde politicos :
    – Domnule, domnu’ Ponta nu e presedinte….
    Omul pleaca si se reintoarce dupa o ora la poarta PSD:
    – As vrea sa vorbesc cu domnul presedinte al Romaniei, Victor Ponta.
    Portarul, usor nervos, ii raspunde:
    – Bai, nene, Ponta nu e presedintele Romaniei…
    Pleaca omul si dupa 10 minute vine iar zice:
    – As vrea sa vorbesc cu domnul presedinte al Romaniei, Victor Ponta.
    Portarul iritat de-a binelea, zbiara la el:
    – Bai, nene, ti-am spus de o suta de ori ca
    Ponta nu e presedintele Romaniei!!!
    La care omul, cu gura pin’ la urechi:
    – Stiu, frate, da’ nu ma pot satura sa aud asta!

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  3. nice piece, Paul, and very fast after the fact.

    M

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  4. So the Jerry won it. I'm told -- by people who voted for him -- that his Romanian is terrible.

    He did great things in Sibiu, somewhat analogous to Basescu's success in Bucharest, one might say. I hope he doesn't Peter (Principle) out, as it were.

    If he's truly clean, I suppose he'll be assassinated soon by those in powerful positions who want a dirty government. Do they still do that in Europe, Paul?

    Tom

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    1. It's not that his Romanian is poor, he speaks perfect Romanian, as he is Romanian-born and raised. However, he does have an incredibly slow way of speaking (for which people in Transylvania are well known) doubled by an incurable shyness which most politicians here do not have.

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    2. Shy politicians are very black swans. He is a slow talking Transylvanian German schoolmaster. - just what is needed to take charge of the voluble politicians in Bucharest. As different from Messrs. Iliescu, Basescu and Ponta as can be imagined. And he's a devout Lutheran which is in my view better than an atheist communist or a nominal Orthodox with few principles.

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  5. Good work, Paul. And so true -- "Romanians trust Germans more than other Romanians. They trust foreigners more than other Romanians, providing they're not Hungarian, Jewish or non-white."


    Leslie Hawke

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    1. Romanians trust non-white who delivers the goods. Does Raed Arafat rings a bell (non-white, Muslim, Palestinian Arab)? Stop pontificating about the Romanian racism when in the fifties America black people were living in conditions of apartheid (I hope you know who Rosa Parks was). Romania never had such arrangements.

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    2. I totally agree with you and did not mean to attack the Romanians. Several Romanians have told me Romanians trust foreigners from developed countries more than other Romanians and I have observed it myself. There's also xenophobia but less than in most countries.

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    3. Paul, the dig was not at you ( I would have mentioned Farage) but at Leslie Hawke. She has worked long enough with the Romas to have heard of mahrime (marrime), the traditional Roma interdiction to integrate in the gadjo (Romanian) society considered unclean. Whoever tries to join the Romanian society is expelled from the Roma community. In these circumstances, her pontificating of Romanian being racists with non-whites takes really the biscuit, if you keep in mind that the America’s Southern states had an apartheid type regime until the sixties (hence the Rosa Parks mention).

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    4. Things that A. J. P. Taylor said are always jumping into my brain. I do not know if this is relevant."If the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbors, as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation.”

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  6. yes we are racists and antisemitic... and women... we are also mysoginistic...

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  7. Again - what we saw today is just mythology at work. Nothing more, nothing less. or, to put it other way, Romanians voted for Spiderman, made in Germany. (that does not mean that I mean that Ponta was the right man for the job. He wasn't. At least not for me).

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  8. I loved reading this article. It's very interesting reflection and I'm surprised, it comes so close to my perception.

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  9. Though I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome, I recall that this is not the first time the Romanians resorted to a German head of state.
    marc

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    1. It is 100 years and 5 weeks since King Carol I died and was succeeded by his equally German nephew, King Ferdinand. I was, of course, not sure but an intuition told me KI would win and I tried to convince others of this, with no success.

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  10. If there was one thing that united the Romanians after the revolution of "89 was xenophobia, their fear of strangers and the chanted slogan: "we do not sell our country to strangers"-- which all the politicians have done plenty since 1989. People do not trust Germans, people trust Iohannis because of what he has done until now and because of the stark contrast he poses to the endemic, dismaying corruption in Romania. Iohannis is not German, even if ethinically was born such, but he is Romanian. He was raised, educated, and lived in Romania. Always. So making him other than Romanian to explain this win is offensive. Ponta did not lose only because he made the wrong move to mistreat the Romanians abroad who were trying to vote, but because this last gesture, this utter, disregard for the simple person, was the straw that broke the camel's back. And now, for the holidays, we all hope that Ponta burns in hell.

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    1. I would add to that that the Saxon&Swabian German communities were loyal to the Romanian state from very beginning. At Alba Iulia on December 1, 1918, the Germans from Transylvania voted to unite with the Kingdom of Romania and not with Hungary. Without their critical vote, Transylvania would have never part of the Romanian state. Romanians have a debt of gratitude and trust towards them.

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  11. Brilliant and well documented - you start feeling like a Romanian!
    Valentin Cudric

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  12. "He united (enough) Romanians against him. (...) What a shame that it will not last long."

    Dear Mr. Wood,

    He has to play winning games in order to succed in the appropriate future. This is a hard job, but, hopefully, it represents also the German style of running things.

    I hope our paths cross again someday soon,

    Sincerely,
    Madalina ADAM

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  13. God works in mysterious ways, but for sure, it works! :)

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  14. Happy to see Johannis as new President; for sure he will be more decent and better mannered than his predecessors. And also happy to see Romanians going to vote in such numbers against those bandits from PSD.

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  15. Such a great analysis. You got a lot of the nuances that others seem to have missed. I was surprised that many in international media were calling Ponta clearly the favorite and calling him the "progressive" choice for future stability. Polls before Basescu's 2009 re-election were showing him down similarly at 54/46 and there was nowhere near as much palpable support for him then.

    Ponta over-played his hand and catered too much to his base, in response getting his often apathetic opposition out to vote. This continued on election day when Antena 3 (owned by Voiculescu currently in jail and full of Ponta propaganda) was claiming that there were no lines for voting abroad. My uncle, for example, heard that and then heard about how my sister was unable to vote abroad and went to vote for the first time in 20 years. How many more like him were there? Ponta's refusal to negotiate a balanced debate schedule and then calling Iohannis a chicken for not agreeing to his terms (including the dead chicken thrown at Iohannis' HQ). Ponta calling Iohannis "a thing". Ponta getting the Orthodox church involved. PSD local people threatening people with cuts in funding, even to cut water and electricity in villages if they did not vote for him. It all turned against him.

    Iohannis had a great line a few days before the election. When asked why he did not engage in a negative campaign against Ponta and his family (like Ponta's campaign had done) he said "Decat marlan, mai bine pierd" that is "I'd rather lose than do that". I've heard numerous people say they decided to vote for him after that line. He seems like a completely different type of politician, hopefully he won't disappoint too much.

    Interesting that you think Ponta was urged by external factors to admit defeat. Basescu had a cryptic response when called by a TV reporter that night and asked about the tear gas used in Paris and Turin against people trying to vote. He said something similar to "You worry about your things, in reality things are much worse". Maybe they were indeed afraid of violence in the streets.

    I'd be curious to see you analysis of the recent events after the election as well. The Parliament has already voted down the amnesty law, three MPs had their immunity revoked, Ponta is going on vacation until Monday, the new foreign affairs minister resigned (of course, what a joke that was). All the politicians seem afraid about what the election means for their political future. I hope the DNA keeps them on their toes!

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    1. I would think there are quite a few politicians in need of fresh underwear just about now!

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  16. Perhaps somewhat against the tide of opinion expressed above, my own observation is that Romanians did not so much vote for Iohannis as against Ponta. Sufficient people were so disgusted by the way their compatriots in foreign countries were treated at the polling booths that they felt an urgent need to ensure that the person who orchestrated this disaster should not be allowed to profit from the result. So Iohannis was the fortunate recipient of an anti-Ponta protest vote. Many of those who voted for him absolutely did not do so out of a conviction that he was the best man for the job, whether of Saxon origin or not.

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    1. The PSD were expected to win, rather than Ponta, but I think his defeat was not only a vote against PSD and Ponta but an anti-politics, anti-system vote. Iohannis was seen as and is an outsider. Crin would not have been the anti-politics candidate but Iohannis was. No, I don't think he won mostly because he is German but many people do hope being German he will be honest.

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    2. Yes - I entirely agree: this is how I see it too. And I also hope that Iohannis will prove to be honest. The initial signs are promising. The dawn of a new era in Romania?

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  17. I do not care, ! I'd rather see a British President of Romania !!
    Perhaps HRH Prince of Wales or one of his descendants !
    Or ...myself ! Take care and "cultivate" me !!!
    Ghiocel Alexandru

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    1. I do not want a president or prince or anything British in Romania, after the odious hate "crusade against Romanians" I was forced to endure in the UK. I hope that Britain will bring Farage into power, they fully deserve it.

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  18. As an Englishman living in Romania, I understand the last commentator's opinion very well, and I am very sorry that he had to endure anti-Romanian sentiments while in the UK. On the other hand, while it is not much consolation, I do know that many of my compatriots thought that the wave of anti-Romanian, anti-Bulgarian propaganda in the UK during 2013 was absolutely repulsive and unworthy of the British people.

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    1. Was there any propaganda? I read articles making an objectivr case against Eastern European immigration. One of my Romanian friends settled in London for about five years was ardently against letting her compatriots in I recall. But I do think if England needs immigrants - a moot point - then Romanians and other Eastern Europeans make excellent ones.

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    2. If there is anti Romanian prejudice it is about gypsies, I suspect. And Romanians are more prejudiced against gypsies by a very very long way than the British.

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