4 - 10 January 2001
Issue No.515
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 4 - 10 January 2001 Issue No.515 |
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Romania hits rock bottom
So Romania will not be "governed with a machine-gun," at least for the time being. Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the right-wing extremist who proposed this idea, has been defeated in the second round of the Romanian presidential elections. However, his score of 33 per cent, coupled with the lowest election turnout ever, indicate that Romania's democracy, like its economy, is in crisis.
Since the fall of Ceausescu in December 1989, Vadim Tudor's Greater Romania Party (PRM) had been a noisy presence in Romanian politics: consistently polling 10 per cent, and holding several important towns, among them the Transylvanian ethnic flashpoint of Cluj. In the mid-nineties, during the last months of Ion Iliescu's last reign, the PRM entered into coalition with the President's party. In the run-up to this year's general elections, Vadim Tudor and the PRM were expected to do well, but polls and commentators never expected (at least in public) the political earthquake of 28 November. In the first round of the presidential election, Vadim Tudor received 28 per cent of the vote, only 10 points behind Iliescu, thus eliminating the centre-right candidates. The PRM polled 21 per cent in the general election, compared with 37 per cent for Iliescu's Party for Social Democracy (PDSR), while the main governing party, the Christian-Democratic Peasants, failed to win seats in parliament.
However, it is not difficult to see why the far right made such an alarming breakthrough. Since 1989, the average Romanian wage has halved in real terms. Nearly half the population lives in poverty. While this year has seen higher-than-expected economic growth, unemployment is at 10 per cent and inflation 40 per cent. In such a desperate situation, there are many Romanians ready to support Vadim Tudor.
As befits a former court poet of Nicolae Ceausescu, the PRM's leader offers more a rhetoric than a concrete programme. His discourse is peppered with jibes at "unRomanian" elements: the substantial Hungarian minority, Jews (all 10,000 of them), and especially Gypsies. At the same time, he is nostalgic for Fascist and Stalinist hard-men of the past: Ceausescu, Marshal Antonescu, and the founder of the quasi-Nazi Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu. Romania would regain a mythic glory through authoritarian government. Another model of leadership is the Emperor Napoleon, and a nebulous "people's capitalism." And yet, perversely, the "Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Carpathians" supports Romania's entry into the European Union. The late surge in support for the PRM can be partly explained by pronouncements by Iliescu and the PDSR. The latter ruled out any repeat of their coalition with the PRM, and strongly suggested that they would govern with the centre parties, whose policies the Romanians were set to sanction at the polls. This loss of votes to the far right will haunt the new government.
Certainly, the election of Ion Iliescu, with 66 per cent of the vote, is a remarkable personal triumph. By the end of his third presidential term, in 2004, Iliescu will have spent half a century in Romania's corridors of power. Born in 1930, Iliescu joined the Romanian Communist Party at the age of 14. He subsequently became leader of the Young Communists before rising to the position of deputy to Nicolae Ceausescu. After a State visit to North Korea in 1971, Iliescu broke with Ceausescu over the latter's plans for "cultural revolution" in Romania. Iliescu was sidelined, but never completely left the party apparatus. "Spontaneously" made head of the National Salvation Council in 1989, no doubt thanks to Gorbachev and the KGB, Iliescu would remain a dominant figure in post-revolutionary politics.
Particularly gratifying for him has been the fact that many of those intellectuals who vilified Iliescu as a neo-Communist, and who cannot forget his role in the miners' rampages of the early nineties, mobilised behind his candidacy to stop Vadim Tudor. With Vadim Tudor defeated, Romania remains, it seems, on track for European integration. However, Iliescu and the PDSR face a sobering political and economic reality. They owe their election to the countless losers in the transition to a market economy. However, parliamentary arithmetic demands that they receive the support of the political centre.
Much more importantly, however, any left-leaning programme is hamstrung by Romania's agreements with the IMF, the real "ruling party." The new prime minister, Adrian Nastase, would like provisionally to increase the budget deficit in order to give immediate relief to pensioners, workers and others in poverty. It is difficult to see how this will be acceptable to Romania's paymasters, let alone to the EU. The Romanian people are desperate and impatient. If there is no rapid improvement, there could be worrying consequences for the nation's future. Young qualified people, many of whom did not bother to vote, could increasingly opt for emigration. At the same time, the third of young voters who supported Vadim Tudor may well be joined by others tired of endless sacrifice, and who care little for the dythrambs he may have written for Ceausescu. The PDSR's "honeymoon" will be a blip in Iliescu's long career.
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