The news from Romania

I started this blog to write about Romania but other things happened instead. Recently Donald Trump happened.

I even failed to blog about the new Social Democrat (PSD) government that took power, in coalition with a small party, the misnamed Liberal Democrats, at the end of last year.

Now Romania is second item on the BBC World Service news, above Trump’s visa policy.

Readers who follow Romanian politics know what to think. For those who don’t, but are interested, I’ll fill you in.

Romania, like all her post-Communist neighbours, has been a by-word for corruption. But for the last three years Romania has become famous as a country where corruption is being tackled very effectively and in the most remarkable way.

The success of the Romanian anti-corruption drive is not just cleansing the Augean stables here. It is an example to the rest of the region. People in nearby countries look in astonishment at what is happening.

And now it is all about to end.

Late at night on Tuesday, without warning or consultation, the new government issued an Executive Order, to take effect after ten days, removing from the Anti-Corruption Agency (DNA) the remit to investigate abuse of office if the sum involved come to more than €44,000 and ordering the release from prison of a large number of inmates, including politicians and businessmen, on the grounds of prison overcrowding.

Within half an hour of the order being announced people came out onto Piata Victoriei, the square in front of the government headquarters in Bucharest. Soon, thanks to Facebook, thousands were in the snow-covered square



Each night, in freezing weather, vast crowds (150,000 it was estimated on Wednesday, which is 8% of the city's population) have been besieging the government building. They are friendly crowds, except for the suspicious incident when some violent football hooligans turned up in the early hours of Thursday morning and attacked the police. The crowd at that point dispersed and many think the thugs were arranged by the PSD to discredit the protests.

The journalist Michael Bird was precisely accurate when he said, 

'Romania’s Government has declared a war on the war against corruption.' 

All Romanian parties have been corrupt but famously the most corrupt are the Social Democrats, the successors to the Communist party. They represent an important part of the deep state that really runs things here.

Things changed, however, to everyone's surprise, when a remarkable, very driven youngish woman called Laura Kovesi became chief prosecutor of Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) in 2013. 

She is a sort of Joan of Arc and has extraordinary passion. Under her leadership of the DNA, a legal, social, economic and political revolution has taken place in Romania. Countless officials, businessmen and politicians of all parties have been prosecuted and gaoled for corruption.

They include very many very powerful and famous people and some of the richest men in the country. 

The former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase was gaoled twice. The last PSD Prime Minister is awaiting trial.

It reached the point long ago that it was impossible to keep up with who was in prison, who was awaiting trial and who had not been fingered.

The Romanian ex-Communist aristocracy of crooks and nouveaux riches was going on for being decimated. 

The Romanian president is directly elected by the people, as in France. Klaus Iohannis was elected two years ago pledged to clean up the political class, but he didn’t have to. The DNA did it for him.

In fact, it looked at one time almost as if the DNA were going to wipe out the political class altogether.

The culmination of the anti-politician drive was the creation, after huge street protests just over a year ago against the last PSD government, of a new government of non-political technocrats. 

But Romanians got tired of experts and, despite steady economic growth, the PSD have returned to office, much stronger than ever. They won power on a platform that promised spending increases and tax cuts. They are genuinely populists, a much misused word.

And that’s where we are now.

Let’s see whether moral pressure from the streets and from the EU and Council of Europe can have an effect.

Romania was the only country where Communism came to an end after a violent revolution and that revolution has created a very strong tradition here that political protest can change things.  

It seems impossible but Romanian governments are always much weaker than they look. And they do tend to do what the EU and more especially the Americans tell them. Let’s see.

If the government does not back down even worse things are likely to happen. 

It is said that the government intends to merge the DNA with another, much less effective, anti-corruption agency. If they do, you can be very sure that Miss Kovesi will not be the head of the new merged body.

Two last things. 

Please do not be influenced by the occasional article in the press (paid for by rich Romanian felons) saying the anti corruption prosecutors are politically biassed and it's time for a South African style amnesty and general forgiveness. There is a very useful debate to be had about the role of the very powerful secret service, that provides the DNA with the information that leads to prosecutions. There are no valid grounds to allege that the DNA is a political operator. Most importantly, the people who end up convicted receive fair trials and are in almost all cases guilty as charged.

Second, do not make the mistake of imagining the Social Democrats are left-wing in any sense other than being the party that gets the votes of the masses, especially older people living in terrible poverty, in return for higher pensions and a higher minimum wage. 

They are a party run by multi-millionaires and people join it to enrich themselves and their families, not to make the world a juster place. They are about money not ideas, but they are at least as nationalistic, socially conservative and as refreshingly lacking in political correctness (or as racist, sexist and homophobic, depending on your point of view) as most people are in Romania. 

They are as pro-American as any other party nowadays (how times change). They make no fuss about migrants because, unlike Hungary or Bulgaria, Romania is not on the migrants' route.

They are best understood as a federation of networks of influence, geared to making money and trading favours, in each of the 41 counties, plus Bucharest, which they now at last control. 

They are often described as a mafia but, in fact, as one lady who was sleeping with many of the party's leaders back in the Nastase era put it to me, it's not organised crime because they are not organised. 

But that was then and many of those people, including Adrian Nastase, are in or have been in or worry they will be in prison.