Victor Ponta and Traian Basescu were allies in the election

Romanian President Traian Basescu, who is on the centre-right, and his Social Democrat Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, appear to loathe each other and probably do so, but they do deals from time to time. I don’t know whether they met to discuss their strategy in the presidential elections but they were de facto allies against the main centre-right candidate, Klaus Iohannis, who on Sunday unexpectedly won a comfortable victory.

The reason for this unholy alliance was that, although in Romanian presidential elections only two candidates go forward into the second and final round of voting, held a fortnight after the first round, it is very important which candidate comes third. Traian Basescu as President is not permitted to have any party affiliation but he was represented in the election by his great protégée and favourite Elena Udrea. Mr. Basescu’s idea was that Mrs. Udrea would come third and take most of the voters who like Mr. Basescu with her. They come to over 15% of the electorate. In the 2016 elections the PSD would control the presidency, the parliament and the government and Mr. Basescu, as he imagined it, could be the opposition. But this idea was ruined when, to his great annoyance, Monica Macovei stood as an independent candidate. She is the former Minister of Justice who deserves the credit for making Romania’s previously infamously corrupt courts relatively clean. 

She has been a great admirer of President Basescu and would have made a very effective leader for Mr. Basescu’s constituency but Mr. Basescu is devoted to, even besotted with, Mrs. Udrea. In this way the Basescu vote was split. 

Elena Udrea

Everyone agreed, by the way, that neither woman stood a chance of being president because Romanians will not be ready for a woman president for a long time to come.

Meanwhile the PSD had done a deal with the former National Liberal Prime Minister Catalin Tariceanu, who now leads a splinter party. He is the man who sacked Mrs. Macovei as soon as Romania had safely entered the EU in 2007. He was drafted in by the PSD to stand for president in order to take votes from Klaus Iohannis.

It was important for the PSD that Mr. Tariceanu came third so that President Ponta could appoint him Prime Minister as a gesture of inclusivity intended to garner support from people who voted for the main centre right parties that backed Klaus Iohannis. Mrs. MacoveI threatened to wreck this plan too.

On the morning of the first round exit polls – these are published throughout election day here - showed her gathering an unexpectedly high 8% of the vote, not nearly enough to get into the second round but easily enough to take the prestigious third place. This for an independent candidate with no party organization or powerful backers would have been a very great achievement and made her a big force to be reckoned with for the next few years.

In the afternoon and evening something remarkable happened. The exit polls showed her support dropping off and falling to somewhat over 4%. 

This is remarkable because it is a given that left-wing voters vote early (the left is the rural party and in the countryside people wake early). Right-wing voters tend to lie in bed and vote later. Why did this not happen this time? Nobody knows, but the suspicion cannot be suppressed that the vote was tampered with to ensure Mr. Tariceanu took third place, as he did.

So far all went more or less to plan for the PSD though they had expected to win more votes in the first round. All was set for Victor Ponta to be President and to have a nominally liberal and centre right Prime Minister Catalin Tariceanu. This was the plan that was hatched a year ago but, as we know, it was not to be…

Most of Mr. Tariceanu’s voters ignored his advice to vote for Mr. Ponta and voted for Mr. Iohannis, who took the presidency by a comfortable margin of 10% of the votes. Mrs. Udrea told people to vote against Mr. Ponta but on Saturday it was reported that she was neutral. On Sunday she appeared unexpectedly in Paris of all places standing in the queue to vote at the embassy. The Hungarians voted for the German and so did a lot of previously undecided voters. Almost every one of the 400,000 members of the diaspora queuing outside consulates and embassies had several people in Romania they were close to and whom they may have urged to vote –  for Klaus Iohannis. Some Romanians abroad told their parents that they would not send any more money home unless they voted for him.

Mr. Ponta lost badly, but not he only. His party lost badly, of course, even though it is still the government. A lot of people who fear investigation by the anti-corruption prosecutors (DNA) know that they may lose very badly indeed. Mrs. Udrea lost fairly badly and will soon have to manage without presidential protection. She has already been interviewed by the DNA. Mr. Basescu, I suggest, lost and so did Mr. Melescanu who gave up running the secret service to be Foreign Minister and resigned five days later because of his failure to arrange enough stamps to allow the diaspora to vote. 

He said it was a resignation of honour but before Sunday's election he had said the law did not permit him to enable people to vote quickly. He will come back. He always does. He also stood for the presidency as a stalking horse to draw away centre-right votes but later the PSD decided Mr Tariceanu was a more useful feint.

Mrs. Macovei backed Klaus Iohannis and it will be interesting to see what the future has in store for her. She didn't lose, even if some of her votes were lost, and, of course, nor did the parties representing the 7% Hungarian minority, who voted for Mr. Iohannis. Whoever wins or loses, the Hungarians always win. A German president is the nearest thing to a Hungarian president that they can hope for, so they may feel that they won big.

Almost everyone I talk to thinks that Romania has won, including some who are connected to the PSD by ties of consanguinity or interest. Romanians, who have a collective father complex, tend to look for a providential figure to rescue them and the President-elect looks providential. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, people are hoping. Let's see.

War in Aleppo takes toll on the legendary Hotel Baron

Here is a short, sad article on Aleppo's wonderful Baron Hotel, my favourite hotel in the world, in one of my favourite cities in the world. Sad though the war is, I am glad that no worse has so far befallen the grand old lady than a roof perforated by gunfire and no guests for four years.

Mr. Mazloumian, the owner, is an exceptionally nice man, feline and gentlemanly. Arabs are wonderfully hospitable and warm and when you are a paying guest they are even more so. In the article he is quoted as saying of the fighting in Aleppo,

"You think all this will stop? It will take years."

Unfortunately, he is of course right. 

I stayed in the presidential suite, the rooms where President Assad senior had stayed in 1972 for $70, but would have preferred to pay less and stay where Agatha Christie or Laurence of Arabia had stayed. I wrote about my journey here and a brief note about the Hotel Baron here.

I like to google to find the oldest hotel in a town I visit and hope it is run to seed at least a bit. Wikipedia provides a useful list of such hotels here. Among my favourites are the Hotel Imperial in Jerusalem, the Hotel Londonskaya in Odessa and the Hotel George in Lviv. There is also the Grand Cafe des Londres in Constantinople. The Pera Palace was once delightfully late nineteenth century, like a London club in Constantinople, though not shabby  - it was my favourite place in the whole city and the only place that felt old-fashioned - but it was ruined by renovation. Now it's a five star place with air conditioning designed for Americans.

When I went I wanted to go from Bucharest to Aleppo by train but the Taurus Express had been suspended for four weeks. Now it has been suspended indefinitely, of course. I have since remembered the first lines of 'Murder on the Orient Express' which makes me regret even more not taking that famous train.

It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. It consisted of a kitchen and dining-car, a sleeping-car and two local coaches.

Here is a conversation I had with a friend I made in Damascus who now lives in Bucharest. His insight into the war is worth reading.

What will Victor Ponta do next?

What will happen in Romania next, after the surprise election of Klaus Iohannis (his name is really Johannis) as President?

First we have to see if the Supreme Court rules in a case in which Mr. Iohannis is accused by the National Integrity Commission of having not declared a conflict of interest in a slightly arcane matter in his capacity as Mayor of Sibiu. The court could rule against Mr. Iohannis and rule that he is unfit to be president. I can’t see it happening. It is more likely that they will adjourn the case until he becomes president, when he will have immunity from prosecution. This is what they did with a case in which the current President Traian Basescu is accused of corruption in connection with selling off the Romanian navy.

What will happen to Victor Ponta, who lost the presidency to almost everyone’s surprise?

Nothing, for the time being. He will continue being Prime Minister, despite the change of president. It is the Government not the president that rules Romania. Like his mentor Adrian Nastase, who was the PSD candidate for the presidency ten years ago (and who is now out on parole), Victor Ponta never wanted to be president and wanted to continue as prime minister. So everything is peachy. Except it’s not.

Victor Ponta though a clever man is not leader of the Social Democrat party (PSD) or Prime Minister because of his own strength of personality or sheer stature. He is not what in British politics is called a big beast of the jungle. Only two Romanian politicians really qualify for that description: Ion Iliescu, who overthrew Ceausescu and had him shot, and Traian Basescu. Victor Ponta, by contrast, was chosen as a young (too young to have been a communist) and telegenic front man for the PSD.

For those who do not follow Romanian politics, I should explain that the PSD is not a political party in the sense understood in Western Europe. It is the continuation of the old Communist Party by other means and without the left-wing ideology. It is not monolithic or genuinely national but is a federation of parties organised in each Romanian county. Each country organisation is in effect a business, a conspiracy or, if we are to call spades spades, a criminal network. Mr. Ponta is leader as long as he can balance the competing interests of the leaders of the party in the countries (the so called ‘barons’) and offer them a chance of winning the 2016 parliamentary election.

Mr. Ponta said that any PSD candidate for the presidency would get 40% of the votes. It was up to him to get another 10%. The fact that Mr. Ponta won only 45% of the votes and therefore lost the presidency does not mean he cannot lead his party to victory in 2016. The way he lost Sunday’s election probably does. 

Victor Ponta fought a very old-fashioned campaign that seemed to be tailored to the unsophisticated, nationalistic Romanian electorate of the early 1990s, offering pension increases and public works. Playing the racial and religious cards against his German Protestant opponent is what everyone would expect him to do, though it seems to have been ineffective. No one was surprised by his shameless campaign to bribe electors with public money.  Electoral fraud which may have stolen up to 900,000 votes has not made a big impact here, through it certainly should have done. But the sight of very long queues of Romanians outside embassies and consulates, queueing all day in the cold, in many cases never to be allowed to vote, were crucial for winning the election for Mr. Iohannis and will permanently tarnish Mr. Ponta’s image. And these things happened not only on Sunday but in the first round of the election two weeks before. They happened because the diaspora is overwhelmingly opposed to the PSD. Those people were not queueing all day to vote for Victor Ponta. Mr. Ponta defended the way in which voting took place abroad on television in his debates with Mr. Iohannis. The contempt for the viewing public was unmistakable.

Remember that Mr. Ponta was discovered to have plagiarised his doctoral thesis. Then there are lurid, melodramatic allegations on the net about his connection with a young prosecutor who committed suicide back in 2002, while investigating Adrian Nastase. If I held stocks in Mr. Ponta I should sell them. That is what the barons are thinking too.

Tony Blair was motivated by envy

My companion at lunch told me Lord Carrington told him that Tony Blair was motivated mainly by envy, of things he didn't have. This is why he loved destroying traditions. Lord Carrington is a wise old bird and might be right.

Psychopaths are motivated mainly by envy too, but I do not believe Mr. Blair is one.

Deutschland über alles - why Victor Ponta lost

"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.

Lookalikes

Since he first came on the scene I have been struck by a remarkable resemblance between Victor Ponta, favourite to win the Romanian presidency on Sunday, and Alfred E. Neuman, Mad magazine's eternal write-in candidate for president.

An October day in the Maramures

Romania publishes as many books as all the Arab countries put together

An interesting piece of information from this site:

....the Arab world, with its population of over 362 million people in 2012 (according to the World Bank data), produces between 15,000 and 18,000 new titles per year, with print runs varying between 1,000 and 3,000 copies each ... Which is the number of books produced in countries like Romania (with a population of 21.3millions in 2012), and Ukraine (population 45.6millions in 2012), and which is roughly the number of titles published yearly by Penguin Random House.

Interestingly, Iran, with 78 million inhabitants, publishes more than the Arab world. 

The Arabs have produced six Nobel prize winners, of whom three were given the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring peace to the Middle East and one for campaigning for human rights in Yemen. Romanians have won four. However, of the four Romanian winners two were ethnic Romanians and the other two, Herta Muller and Elie Wiesel, a German from the Banat and a Transylvanian Jew respectively, made their lives abroad and did not write in Romanian. By comparison 32 Nobel Prizes were awarded to graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge. I wish my headmaster had not dissuaded me from going there.

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. 

Discussing fascism in Bucharest with the imagologists

Today is the horrible commercial festival of Hallowe'en and an opportunity for fun and parties and to scare ourselves with bogeymen. Or bogey persons. But we do this all the year round and the chief bogeyman is fascism.

Fascism is no danger in Europe for the next twenty years - but fear of fascism is a danger and is to blame for very many bad things. I discovered that it is incredibly prevalent among academics. I was with thirty of them at a conference in Bucharest on Imagological Stereotypes at the weekend. A wonderful occasion, by the way, to meet clever academics and throw around ideas, but they all seem to be sniffy about 'stereotypes', whatever they are exactly, and to disapprove strongly of national stereotypes.

One distinguished professor of Imagology, who had delivered a good talk on 'nationalist discourse', Joep, was saying he has been thinking for years about this and slowly realised that we think dictatorships begin with a putsch but they can come slowly and unnoticed. I warmly agreed and mentioned loss of freedom of speech. He looked at me sharply and asked for examples. 

I gave two from the UK, though I could have given very many: the putative new law to make sexual harassment online an offence punishable with two years in gaol and the story of the man who went to prison for two months for saying on Twitter that he hoped a footballer who was in a coma would die. Joep was in favour of these laws. 

He brought up the subject of Geert Wilders who, Joep said, asked a crowd if they wanted fewer Moroccans in Holland and was prosecuted for racism. When I said that  in a democratic society any political programme should be allowed, 'We have judges who decide these things' Joep said with great severity. He is very pleased about the prosecution. I felt very much that I would not like to be a defendant coming up before Joep as a judge.

What becomes clearer as I think about this is that it is Joep who, from the best of intentions, is becoming a fascist.

Unfortunately, he speaks for most academics in humanities who see nationalism as a purely negative thing. What is sad is that these people really do believe in a grave threat from the anti immigration right (why?) and are generals fighting the last war. They don't realise that evil morphs and the lessons they learn from Nazism are the wrong ones anyway. For example the lesson we have drawn from the Nazis is that ethnically mixed societies are ipso facto good things rather than ipso facto volatile things.

When I was growing up in the cold war fascism was hated for many reasons but principally as an enemy of freedom and democracy, together with communism, but nowadays it is the racial aspects of Nazism which are what drives anti-fascism. This is fine - but concerns about freedom and democracy take a somewhat distant second place and this is worrying. In fact freedom is deeply unfashionable these days, despite or because of anti-fascism. Freedom's mortal foe, equality, was never more in fashion.

I noticed for the first time that Joep's hair was slightly longer than is normal and brushed over his ears. in the 1970s it had been much longer and he is old enough to remember the revolutionary year of 1968. I used to think that the 1968-ers had lost when communism collapsed and free market economics became generally accepted. In fact, these two things were a liberation for the left which is more powerful than ever before in history. As Geert Wilders is discovering.

Thoughts for the day

I have only the idea I have made of myself to sustain me on oceans of nothingness.

Henry de Montherlant

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Oscar Wilde

The hole in Bucharest that’s become a nature reserve

This article by Michael Bird was published recently by the New Statesman and he has given me permission to post it here. 

A failure in Romania’s brutalist architectural planning of the 1980s has transformed a massive hole in Bucharest into an anarchic expanse of natural and urban coexistence.

The communists wanted a reservoir. The capitalists wanted a casino. The city got something else entirely.

“No one made any intervention,” says eco-activist Dan Barbulescu, as he leads me through the paths of the abandoned reservoir. “We did not plant anything. Only the wind and birds have bought seeds to this place.”

Poplars and willows are scattered through this verdant terrain where lakes over four metres deep are packed with thick bullrushes flickering in the wind. A concrete escarpment shields the wildlife from twenty-story tower blocks that rim Vacaresti Lake: a lush enclave in the urban congestion of Bucharest.

Barbulescu is executive director of the Save the Danube & Delta Association. But he also promotes this wetland reserve, where over 86 species of birds thrive, alongside newts, foxes, water snakes and stray dogs. Natural springs emerge from beneath a strip of concrete, where families of otters have arrived, travelling through the sewer tunnels. Nature has ravaged this empty space over 20 years of neglect; Barbulescu calls it “a school of life in the open air.”

This is the richest and wildest park in Bucharest – but this wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Under communism, the plan was for Vacaresti to be filled with water; in the idiotic capitalist years of the mid-2000s, it was meant to be a concert venue. Both projects collapsed – and the zone became a metaphor for the failures of Romania’s development under both communist and free market principles.

Yet its teeming wildlife, lawless beauty and inhabitants of drifters, scraping a living by harvesting the wild, lay the foundations for how this troubled country could prosper.

With over two million inhabitants, Bucharest is one of the largest cities in eastern Europe. And, more than any other ex-Communist city, the Romanian capital suffered from the grand redevelopment projects of a mad dictator, who sought to build a workers’ paradise based on a clueless interpretation of modernist principles.

From the 1970s, Niculae Ceausescu demolished the Vacaresti district’s winding 19th and early 20th century streets of low-level housing and kitchen gardens. (A few traces remain: a cobbled path from an old house nudging through the vegetation, say.) His plan was to create towering residential projects inspired by his visits to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. To supply water for this high-density housing, and to act as flood protection, he constructed two giant reservoirs at either end of the capital. One was completed; Vacaresti lay empty.

In the early 2000s, the space was again earmarked for development: this time it was to include a hippodrome, casinos, hotel and a golf course. But in 2008, Bucharest was hit by a double whammy. Its post-EU accession real estate bubble burst at the same time as the global financial crisis pulverised the city’s private development. Investors pulled out of the Vascaresti project.

Meanwhile the muddy hole attracted peculiar vegetation, then fish and amphibians and, once the trees and bushes had grown, migrating birds.

Similar wetlands exist elsewhere: in Nantes, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, Shanghai. But Dan Barbulescu calls Vacaresti lake, with 190 hectares, “the largest urban humid natural reserve in Europe”.

Four dedicated organisations look after the lake and offer a viewing platform at a nearby tower block. Their ambition is to build wooden walkways through the zone, and an observation centre.

But neither City Hall, the Ministry of the Environment or private donors or charities has any cash for the place. European Union funds are the only option – but before that can happen, the space needs the local government to grant the zone protected area status.

And, although the Romanian leadership seems open to the idea, it has been locked in bureaucracy for over a year. Former owners of houses seized and bulldozed by the Communists are still soliciting the government for rights to their properties. According to Cristian Nan, a representative of some ex-owners, they want to take back their land and lease it to the state.

The Ministry of the Environment claims it is still putting together all the paperwork, before it can create a Natural Park with protected status – but activists are exasperated by the delay.

While the status of the wasteland remains in limbo, Vacaresti Lake thrives as an unofficial zone for leisure, business and housing. Several families have made their home in the reserve. Among them is 48-year old Gica, lying on a mattress outside his home-made shack, playing with his naked daughter. I ask him what his second name is. He offers two options. “You can either call me Gica ‘Pescarul’ (The Fisherman) or Gica ‘Lacului’ (of the Lake).”

Scarred across his body by a house-fire, he now squats with nine children next to a duck pond. “I won’t move,” he says. “Why? I love it here. Fresh air. A large garden – a place for children to run free.”

Gice has lived here for 16 years, and calls himself a “warden” of the lake, which he treats as an extended garden. He shows me a picture on his phone with a cormorant on his shoulder. He loves the birds, but has a problem with the rats.

Meanwhile three pigs are wandering free around the reeds and the grass. “Only one will be killed for Christmas,” he says.

He claims he only eats the fish. He doesn’t touch the birds and wild ducks. “How about the otters?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I don’t eat the otters.”

Outdoor pursuits here also include sex. Playboy Romania has already filmed a nude photo-shoot on the land. Now it seems the zone is a place for cruising, too. Gica says he sees about 15 people per day having assignations in woods.

As I walk through the streets, I see one guy in his early thirties, naked except for a baseball cap, sunglasses, shorts and a pair of trainers. His tanned skin is waxed clean and he smiles and says “Good day” as he walks past. It’s clear he’s not a fisherman or a jogger, so I assume he’s there for another reason, but I don’t dare ask him if he’s there for sex.

I ask Gica whether the place has ever been a dumping ground for corpses. He claims that only once, a decade ago, was there a “burnt body in the woods”.

On the escarpment, a man with no front teeth is binding up willow branches. Thin and twisted, they can be stripped and used as ornamental decoration. I ask whether he will sell them. He mutters that he is not sure. How much can he get for them: three Euro a bunch? “It depends,” he replies, turning his head to the ground.

Along the edge of the dam pass a horse and cart, its rickety trailer full of wild mint stripped from the zone. On the far side of the escarpment, a mother grapples her five-year old daughter as they negotiate the steep concrete. They carry a plastic bag of food for the stray dogs.

People still crack open the concrete to mine for scrap metal to sell: one of the main sources of cash for the city’s massive underclass. But if the lake offers some drifters a sustainable business, others’ behaviour is more destructive. Some nearby residents cut down the trees for lumber and firewood, and parts of the zone are a dumping ground for fly-tipping. Meanwhile fisherman sit back and drink cheap vodka and plastic bottles of beer, before chucking the empties into the ponds while they fish.

Nevertheless Vacaresti Lake has moved on from being just another urban wetland reserve. In Bucharest, state intervention has plagued the livelihoods of citizens for decades. The lake shows that, when the government pulls back, the people can still  create order, business and pleasure out of anarchy.

Corina Creţu ten years ago

Corina Creţu was confirmed this afternoon as the European Commissioner (the Romanian word 'comisar' has a strangely Communist flavour) for Regional Development and therefore the statutory Romanian member of the European Commission.

People in England have been asking me about her which led me to dig out this article I wrote about her part in the exit of Ion Iliescu from the leadership of the post-communist Social Democratic Party (PSD), in April 2005.

We have passed a lot of water under the bridge since those days, to quote Sam Goldwyn, and much has happened to all the figures mentioned in the article. Corina Creţu, before being nominated to the commission, was best known for having exchanged "very personal emails" with the very married Colin Powell. These had begun in 2005. Guccifer the Romanian hacker who hacked into her email account and made the contents public has  just been sentenced to seven years, poor fellow. It seems very harsh.

Mircea Geoană came within a whisker of beating Traian Basescu in the presidential election in 2009, just as Adrian Nastase had done in 2004. Mr. Geoană has since been expelled from the party and then readmitted, but is effectively sidelined, while Adrian Nastase is serving his second prison sentence for corruption. Mr. Meleșcanu runs the external secret service and is standing for president, but doesn't have much of a chance. Mr. Iliescu is still honorary president of his party.

Ole Ole Ole Iliescu nu mai e!


History said a now discredited German philosopher repeats
itself first as tragedy then as farce. Marx's comment on the French
revolution of 1848 sprang to mind as Ion Iliescu was
removed in an unexpected internal coup from the leadership of the
Social Democratic Party (PSD) the party he founded and for fifteen
years dominated even when as 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 the tabloid Libertate
and the headline appeared in other papers, 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 Gorbachov Communists took over the Oedipal popular uprising against Ceausescu which many now say was staged by an alliance between the KGB and Western intelligence agencies. For most of those fifteen years Ion Iliescu, now 75 and educated at Moscow University in Stalin’s time, where he is said to have been recruited by Russian intelligence, had presided over Romania as she made the slowest progress of any former Soviet satellite in Eastern Europe towards functioning capitalism. In those fifteen years former Communists ran a kleptocracy comparable with Yeltsin’s Russia or Lukashenko’s Belarus while the Government slowly adopted chapter by chapter the requirements of entry to the European Union.

Now the younger generation of Social Democrats whom Iliescu had nurtured 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 April 21.This time 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 for fifteen years.
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 Geoana his former disciple
describing him as a dunce (prostenac) for making an alliance with the
Hungarians in round two 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. Undetected
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 there 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. Only immediately
before the start of the Congress did the three went to Iliescu and
offered 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.

At that point the Congress opened and Iliescu was voted to chair the
Congress. 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 Stanculescu play a
double game until the end. Talleyrand in the  French Revolution of
1830 went to the window looked out at the streetfighting and said `I
see our side is winning.' Someone asked him `Which side is that?" and
Talleyrand very shocked replied `I shall tell you tomorrow.'

The conspiracy would not have succeeded so well and might not have
succeeded at all had not Iliescu very angry and badly frightened made
a terrible mistake. Calling Nastase to the podium he said `I now
invite to speak Comrade Nastase'. The walls of the hall blushed. The
word tovarasi (comrade) has been unspeakable except in black jokes
since December 1989. Immediately Iliescu added that the `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 knows 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 very 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 Gorbachov a year later. Ceausescu at the famous
speech from the balcony of the Central Committee building sensing the
hatred of the crowd had promised 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 Mrs. Cretu's melancholy duty to
keep her mentor informed of how the conspiracy against him was
prospering. The whole second tier of the leadership had forgotten
their rivalries and grudges and momentarily united against him.

These past three 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 goes on and on and becomes more alarming by
the day) but for drama the 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 vote was announced: Geoana  964;
Iliescu 530.

Geoana was 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. Mrs 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.

Iliescu's reaction when he knew defeat was unavoidable 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 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 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 indeed 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 or 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 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 towards 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.


P.S Corina Cretu did not resign as a Party Vice-President and she is now one of the leading supporters of Mircea Geoana.

Things I learnt over the weekend

Early Muslims including the so-called 'righteous Caliphs' who are recorded, in chronicles written centuries after the event, as having succeeded Mohamed, were presumably what we would now call Islamists, but Charlemagne, Charles Martel and other Christian kings also used the sword to convert pagans to Christianity. There was not much difference in their methods.

Mohamed's wives were older women whom he married for political reasons, with the exception of Ayesha, who was nine or ten, according to the (unreliable) Muslim sources, when she married him. But this if true did not make him unusual. Other men of the age married pubescent girls. A thousand years later men were still marrying very young girls. King James II, the last Catholic King of England, Scotland and Ireland, married his second wife, Mary of Modena, when he was 39 and she just 15. She was 'tall and admirably shaped', he scarred by smallpox and afflicted with a stutter. For some time she burst into tears whenever she met him.

Jean Marie Le Pen did not borrow the name for the Front National from the British National Front, as I have read many times, but from the organisation that supported a pre-war dictator of Brazil. I am not sure if this is better or worse than the story I knew but it is different.

I heard my first Hayden opera when I attended the one night only production at the Hackney Empire of Life On the Moon, an opera based on a farce by Goldoni and produced by Cal McCrystal, who is or was Physical Comedy Director of the National Theatre's One Man, Two Guvnors , an adaptation of another Goldoni play. The evening was utterly charming, the music ditto, but one expected the music which is very Mozartian to soar and it never did. 

Rupert Christiansen is not miles out when he says

If all you want from opera is sugar-coated alcohol-free entertainment that makes no demands of your intelligence or sensibility, then I can sincerely recommend this well-cooked show. The rest of us would be better off sweeping up autumn leaves.

Still it was a very charming silly fairy story and I love fairy stories. The Guardian man liked it a lot. Do go if it comes to your town.

Raymond Chandler in Bucharest

I just gave the girls in the office a copy each, in Romanian translation, of Farewell, My Lovely. I spotted copies on sale at the tobacco kiosk in the street below. I envy anyone reading Raymond Chandler for the first time. He is not just a good detective story writer but a great writer, a major prose stylist. 

Why is Chandler one of the immortals? Sir Tom Stoppard explains here.

It was not the admittedly enjoyable asides.

     ''You can't tell anything about an outfit like that,''

Marlowe reflects as he smokes his cigarette.

    ''They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back      room, with his chair tilted against the safe.' '

It was more this, which is what happens next.

''Half an hour and three or four cigarettes later a door opened behind Miss Fromsett's desk and two men came out backwards, laughing. A third man held the door for them and helped them laugh. They all shook hands heartily and the two men went across the offi ce and out. The third man dropped the grin off his face and looked as if he had never grinned in his life.''

Look at it. This is writing at 24 frames per second. The paragraph mimics the action. You get the wait, then the door; you g et their backs before the laughing. The repeat ''laugh'' placed at the end of the sentence pulls the laughter through the intervening time. The ''out'' at the end of the next sentence is the monosyllable made by the door closing.

Chandler, improbably, went to Dulwich, the same English minor public school  as P.G. Wodehouse and C.S. Forester (and Nigel Farage). It's odd that Wodehouse is also a popular writer who will outlive his highbrow contemporaries - whether C.S. Forester does I am less sure. Chandler wrote only six novels - slowly - and the major character in all of them is not Philip Marlowe, their hero, but Los Angeles, a city which Raymond Chandler hated. 

How I should like to make Bucharest the main character in a novel.

Here are some more quotations:

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

To say goodbye is to die a little. 

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren't as good as others.

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.



When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

There's more Chandler here. 

The Romanian labour force finally equals the number of retired people

A remarkable turning-point in the Romanian economy has just been reached. The number of retired people and employed people in Romania are now roughly equal, latest figures show.  This is an almost incredible thing. In comparison, in 2000 there were two pensioners for every one employed person.

Figures issued yesterday by the Minister of Labour show that 5.7 million Romanians are now employed, of whom 5.2 million have permanent full-time jobs while 5.2 million receive state pensions - out of a population that has fallen to a fraction under 20 million. So a little over a quarter of the population are now in permanent full-time jobs.

Unfortunately I presume the causes of this change are a high mortality rate, not a high birth rate.

On average in developed countries 65 % of people of working age are employed and here it is 64%. More figures here.