Playing the race card in the Romanian presidential elections

The first round of the Romanian presidential election on Sunday produced a result more or less as expected. The Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, from the PSD, the party which is in effect the successor to the Romanian Communist Party, scored 40%. His centre-right PNL (Liberal) challenger Klaus Iohannis scored 30%, a bit better than expected. If you add on the votes of the other two centre-right candidates Mr. Iohannis’s vote almost equals Mr. Ponta's but Mr. Ponta says he will name former Liberal Prime Minister Mr. Tariceanu as Prime Minister and this may bring over most of Mr. Tariceanu’s supporters. But the election result may be decided by the ethnic Hungarians who make up about 7% of the population and usually vote as a disciplined phalanx as their leaders instruct them.

Wise people who know about how things work in Romania always confidently but mysteriously say that the politicians are marionettes behind whom stand occult interests, shadowy business leaders and the former Communist secret police (and the very boyish Mr. Ponta does rather look like a marionette or even a ventriloquist's dummy). The well-informed people say that the PSD election strategy is a long term one by which Mr. Ponta was persuaded against his will to stand for president and Mr. Tariceanu was persuaded to stand to draw away votes from the Liberal Party and split the anti-PSD vote in return for the premiership. It is also said that the local Liberal barons, powerful political figures in the provinces who are believed to wax fat on sweet deals and immoral activities connected to the public service, have not tried hard to get the vote out for their party leader, preferring the other side to win for financial reasons. 



Be that as it may Romania has divided in the most interesting way over this contest.

The electoral map of the results of the first round is very telling. Hunedoara and Caras-Severin are the only Transylvanian counties to vote for the PSD, as did the Bucovina. Otherwise the border between Austria Hungary, or Catholic Europe and the Ottoman Empire or the  Balkans is reflected in the voting. The areas which voted for Iohannis were not necessarily more prosperous than those which voted for the PSD but they are culturally very different. This division derives from the nine hundred years that Hungary ruled much of what is now Romania but before that to the dichotomy between Eastern and Western Christianity and the division of the Roman Empire into two halves.

Romania is an example of incomplete nation building, though it coheres, which is much more than Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia did. Ethnic Romanians do not share a common history or the same Orthodox religion  (some adhere to the Greek Catholic church and Rome) but they share a common literary language, accepted in all parts of the country, and a common fear - the spectre of Hungary one day talking back the lands she lost in 1918. Like all spectres this danger is insubstantial and doesn't in fact exist, but is nevertheless scary. Since the revolution the the party that now calls itself the PSD have played on this fear with great effect, as did the Communist party throughout its period in power.

You might expect the Hungarians to prefer a Transylvanian German but there are signs that there might be an unholy alliance between the ethnic Hungarian party, the UDMR, and the PSD. We should know which candidate the UDMR endorse on Thursday but if they think Mr. Ponta will win they will want to give him their support and he is expected to win and.

Ethnic Romanians made up a fraction over half the population of Transylvania before it was taken from Austria Hungary and given to Romania after the First World War. The rest of the population were made up mostly of Hungarians and Germans. The numbers of Germans diminished when very many were ethnically cleansed after the Second World War. Under Communism many more left for West Germany in return for payments by Bonn. In December 1989 when the Romanian revolution took place there were about only 200,000 Germans in Romania, a year later half that. Klaus Iohannis would have left in 1990 had he not fallen in love with an ethnic Romanian girl to whom he is now married.

Sibiu, or Hermannstadt to give its German name, is a city designed by Germans and Hungarians for Germans and Hungarians and is a masterpiece of Habsburg architecture that it is now inhabited mostly by the descendants of the peasants in the hinterland. The same story can be told for old cities scattered across Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia and Ukraine. After the revolution the numbers of Germans fell so low that the ethnic German party only filled one seat on the city council. Mr Iohannis, an able youngish schoolmaster, was expected to win that one seat in 2000 but to his and everyone else's astonishment he won the job of mayor. He was chosen not for his own merits (he was an unknown)  but, like Mr. Obama, purely because of his ethnicity, all Romanians thinking that ethnic Germans are more honest and more efficient than Romanians. This was the reason why he later became leader of Sibiu County Council and then was summoned to Bucharest, the Great Wen, where the PSD candidate in 2009 promised to appoint him Prime Minister if he won the presidency.  

When he announced he was standing for president I thought Mr. iohannis's ethnicity would swing it for him. Almost all the Romanians that I know trust foreigners more than other Romanians ('so long as they're white' was the caveat a leading businesswoman added when she told me this). But I spend most of my time with intelligent, educated Romanians who went to university. The peasants and factory workers think differently.

There is an interesting book to be written about the intertwined relationship between Germans and Romanians. It would have to include the the German occupation of Bucharest in the First World War. The German commander, Field Marshal August von Mackensen, complained when he left that

"I came to Bucharest two years ago with a legion of conquering heroes. I leave with a troupe of gigolos and racketeers.”

The same trajectory has been followed by a number of German businessmen who came to Romania. Let us hope that Mr. Iohannis preserved his principles despite the temptations presented by political life in Bucharest. His opponents point however to allegations of misconduct. 

Be that as it may - and Mr. Iohannis is the owner of six properties - it is thought that the astonishing arrests of large numbers of leading businessmen and politicians for corruption which have made the last few years in Romania so hopeful are more likely to continue under President Iohannis than they are under a PSD president. President Traian Băsescu has used the presidency to protect the independence of the prosecutors from being unfairly influenced by politicians, in the PSD and other parties he dislikes, and the so-called 'structure of power', the Romanian shadowy equivalent of the Turkish 'deep state'. This is one principal reason why the fight over the presidency is so important.

Ethnic Hungarians are regarded with suspicion by ethnic Romanians but ethnic Germans enjoy good relations with both groups and are much respected. Romania's first king, King Carol I, was German and is regarded as one of Romania's very few good rulers. But is Romania ready for a German president? Perhaps more to the point is she ready for a Lutheran president? (Like almost all ethnic Germans, Mr. Iohannis is a Lutheran in a deeply religious country where being Romanian means being Orthodox.) Mr. Ponta thinks not and is naturally playing the ethnic and religious cards as much as he can. In the countryside these things matter and not just in the countryside. 

People tell me things are complex but I think two issues dominate the election - whether people want the PSD and the post-Communist old guard in power and whether they think a German president would be better.