Results of Romania's May 19 Referendum Reveal Huge Distance Between Populace and Political Elite

by Ari Weinstein

On May 19, the 18.2 million Romanian citizens of voting age – including both those who still reside in their home country, as well as those who live and work elsewhere in the world – were called to participate in a referendum concerning whether or not Traian Basescu should be allowed to resume his duties as President of the country.

One month prior to the holding of the referendum, a large majority of the country's parliamentarians had decided to suspend Basescu from his function, invoking claims that he had violated the Constitution by exceeding his legally-defined authorities as President. A few weeks prior to Basescu's suspension, the government had been "remanned," with all the ministries that had been headed by members of his party (The Democratic Party – PD,) being distributed to members of a then-new ad-hoc governing coalition formed from the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Democratic Union of the Hungarians in Romania (UDMR.) This new government, whose most recognizable figure was Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu, was sustained (unofficially through critically) by the votes of the parliamentarians belonging to the Social Democratic Party (PSD.)

The results of the referendum were as follows: some 74.4% of those who voted voted against the suspension of Basescu, while 24,8% of those who went to the polls voted in favor of his suspension from office. Thus, o­n May 20, just o­ne day after the holding of the referendum, he was reinstalled as President.

The just-mentioned vote proportions seem to show that Basescu enjoys massive support from the Romanian people; indeed, just about all the articles in the "mainstream," English-language press that concerned the country's current political crisis have claimed Basescu is "far and away Romania's most popular politician," due to his supposedly determined efforts to tackle corruption. However, just a little bit of probing into the details of the results of the referendum reveal that none of the country's prominent political figures – not the bourgeois politicians aligned against Basescu and not him, either – enjoy anything close to the support of the majority of the population.

Proof for this assertion comes, in part, from the turnout figures that have been released ever since the polls closed at 8 PM o­n the night of the 19th. It turns out that o­nly 44.4% of the eligible voting-age population actually went to the polls during the time that they were open. So, doing a bit of math, o­ne can see that no more than 1/3 of the country's adult citizens actually opted to grant some form of positive support to Basescu yesterday (by voting against his suspension from office.) Likewise, the lack of any substantial base of support in the population for the parties that called for Basescu to be definitively removed from office is revealed both by the very low overall turnout as well as by their failure to garner more than a quarter of the total votes cast. Behind the low turnout figures, a critical truth emerges, o­ne all the more politically and socially explosive for the fact that no o­ne in the country's mass media dares to utter it publicly: a solid majority of Romania's population regards the country's political leadership with a scarcely concealed disgust, seeing the latter as being largely responsible for the poverty and miserable living conditions that plague so many people in this Southeastern European nation.

So what was the alignment of political forces that developed around the question of Basescu's suspension, and what (ideologically speaking) separated the two different camps?

Those who followed the diverse political maneuvers leading to the expulsion of the PD from the government, Basescu's suspension from the office of the Presidency and the holding of the subsequent country-wide ballot o­n whether or not he would return to that position would be justified in stating that, beyond personality conflicts and the efficacy of different strategies for fighting governmental corruption, there weren't any meaningful political or ideological differences between the two factions that organized around May 19's referendum vote.

For example, the continued participation of hundreds of Romanian troops in the Bush administration's criminal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well the plans of the US military to establish a large permanent presence at a base near the southeastern Romanian city of Constanta in preparation for assaults o­n nations such as Iran were passed over in silence during the month-long referendum campaign by all the politicians in both the "pro-" and "anti" Basescu camps.  Similarly, with just fleeting, essentially insignificant exceptions these same politicians continued to ignore the fact that wages, pensions and rural incomes are, for millions of people in this country, so low in relation to the cost of living that many see emigration to the west (be it officially legal or illegal) as the o­nly way that they can manage to get by in any sort of acceptable fashion.   

 

By avoiding these vitally important matters like the plague, the leaders of both the factions in the referendum campaign were attempting to obscure the fundamental truth of contemporary Romanian political life: whatever quarrels might break out between them, all of Romania's politicians are loyal servants of o­ne or another clique of multi-millionaires and billionaires, be they from this country or from the more prosperous western o­nes, and this critical  reality "obligates" them to take positions which are completely antithetical to the interests of the ordinary working class and peasant majority of this country.      

 

As proof for the assertion that, o­n the most vital issues of domestic and foreign policy, these parties agree with o­ne another far more than they disagree, it should be recalled here that it was the PSD (routinely referred to in the country's press as being "center-left") that openly supported Washington's assaults o­n Afghanistan and Iraq and which was responsible for the initial decision to send contingents of troops to participate in the occupations of those two nations.

Ion Iliescu, the man who is today ridiculously labeled a "communist" or "neocommunist" by the most openly right-wing politicians and members of the press and who was President of the country for 10 of the first 14 years following the overthrowal and execution of Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu at the end of 1989, took a particularly nauseating stand o­n the key question of war and peace shortly before the 2003 attack o­n Iraq, penning an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he claimed that the military operation in question was "justified" because it was based o­n removing the dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Similarly, Nicolae Vacariou, a member of PSD and the President of the country for the month during which Basescu was suspended, did everything in his power during that just-ended month to prevent proposals concerning the withdrawal of Romania's troops from Iraq by the end of this year from being seriously discussed at the highest levels of the government.

PSD, which from 1990-1996 and then again from 2000-2004 constituted the chief party in control of the government, was responsible for the decontrolling of prices, the resulting hyper-inflation and massive decline in the real value of pensions, the minimum wage and sundry social programs and, not least, for the implementation of one job-destroying privatization after another. Its right-wing character was confirmed and consolidated o­nce again when, during the summer of 2006, it chose Anthony Giddens – a close adviser to the warmongering, social-program destroying British Prime Minister Tony – as its chief ideological strategist.

One of PSD's main electoral allies in the campaign for Basescu's definitive removal from the office of the Presidency was PNL, the main ally of Basescu's PD during the 2004 parliamentary and presidential elections. PNL is a right-wing formation that bases its program o­n two "principles:" o­n the o­ne hand, a crude anti-communism that equates Ceausescu's Stalinist police-state with Marxism (then again, all of Romania's parliamentary parties are guilty of this,) and, o­n the other, a depiction of the unregulated capitalist "free market" as the solution to all of society's ill. At the beginning of 2005, before starting to quarrel with the PD and Basescu, PNL and Prime Minister Tariceanu collaborated with them in order to pass a flat-tax measure which massively reduced the taxes that the country's richest people had to pay. Recently, showing their contempt for the very principle of democracy, Tariceanu and the PNL-supporting multi-millionaire oil magnate Dinu Patriciu suggested that the transformation of the country's government into a monarchy might well be a good idea.

 

This reactionary alliance was also based o­n the participation of three other parties – The Greater Romania Party (PRM) of the right-wing ultra-nationalist Corneliu Vadim Tudor, UDMR and the Conservative Party (PC) of the deep-pocketed TV and newspaper media mogul Dan Voiculescu. Tudor combines anti-Hungarian and anti-Roma (gypsy) vitriol with demagogic claims that he will jail the country's corrupt businessmen and politicians and improve living standards for the poor via the introduction of a "popular capitalism." The fact that this bigot found himself in a temporary marriage of convenience with his sworn enemies in the bourgeois-nationalist Hungarian UDMR just goes to show that the anti-Basescu alliance of parliamentary parties was completely unprincipled.

Given its internal divisions, its inability to voice the concerns of the ordinary people for better living standards in any way, shape or form and the fact that, in terms of its policy preferences, it differed little if at all from Basescu, the anti-Basescu alliance of parliamentary parties made an easy target for the suspended President (himself a fairly skilled demagogue.) The intense pressure applied to Basescu from the time of his election at the end of 2004 by the European Union (EU) to open up the Romanian economy even more to Western European capital by weakening the influence that certain domestic capitalists had over the country's judiciary system obviously tended to strain their relations with him. Thus, Basescu – a died-in-the-wool reactionary whose entire career as a national political figure has been marked by his involvement in privatizations of an at-best dubious legality, blatant nepotism, attacks o­n the rights of working people to strike and receive explanations for why they have been fired by their bosses, not to mention consistent toadying towards the war criminal Bush, -- had some success in posturing in a populist manner as an enemy of the country's "oligarchs."

It is unclear how the country's current political crisis will now play out. It seems likely that intense power struggles will now break out within both PSD and PNL, and conceivably within UDMR, PC and PRM as well. The results of the referendum have made it painfully clear how little support these five bourgeois groupings have within the populace as a whole; their fracturing into smaller parties, complete disappearance from the political scene or attempt to reach a deal with Basescu are all possible.

As for Basescu, he remains – at least as of this moment – a President without anything close to a parliamentary majority. Whatever happens in the near-term in regards to his relations with the parliamentary parties that suspended him from office, it is clear that his moment in the sun cannot last forever. In the short-term, the existence of a grave drought in the country's south which is destroying crops and has already triggered large price increases for various fruits and vegetables has the potential to do a substantial amount of damage to the country's important agricultural sector and, more generally, to its economy as a whole. Moreover, because whatever popularity that Basescu happens to currently enjoy is at least partially a product of an economic expansion in Romania that is based in large measure o­n speculative capital inflows, the overvaluation of the currency and the accumulation of enormous and constantly growing trade (and now, increasingly, budget) deficits, he is likely to incur the wrath of a larger and larger parts of the population when the current boom comes to its inevitable and disastrous end.

Thus, whatever "breathing room" or "honeymoon" the results of the referendum afford to Basescu at the moment, his political future – as well as the o­ne of Romania as a whole – is likely to be extremely turbulent. Both what is currently going o­n in Romanian politics – as well as this country's entire social, political and economic history over the last 100 years – cry out for the emergence of a genuinely progressive alternative that can guarantee a much better life for the long-suffering workers, peasants, pensioners and youth from here. This progressive and genuinely democratic and socialist alternative to the poverty, official mendacity and warmongering that is inherent to modern capitalist society is singularly embodied by the program of the World Socialist Web Site and The Socialist Equality Party.