My country is experiencing another massive wave of protests. This is time it is the diaspora that came home to express their frustration with the current occupiers of our Parliament. It is the same diaspora that helped put our current president into office back in 2014, with high hopes. Yet the “thieves” (hoții in Romanian, the slogan of the protests) in the Parliament have been working diligently for the past year to create a plethora of contorted laws that will make it next to impossible to make them pay for the suffering they have caused. Yesterday’s (and today’s, and the past year’s..) protests are the crying out loud of a generation. An entire generation that was let down by its country and forced to live in exile, often on the brink of Europe’s luckier countries. Millennials, my generation.

I was born in Romania in 1988, just as our communist dictator (Ceaușescu or Conducătorul – the leader/”driver” as we used to call him back then) was about to fall. Likewise, I am a proper kid of the nineties, a lawless, but mostly cloudless transition period, where suddenly an entire country was up for grabs and everyone was hustling the way they could. Even though you would call me “middle-class” today, back then when I was born, we didn’t have classes. Everyone was equally poor, or rich, it depends on how do you look at it. Everyone had nothing/everything. In the small mountain town of Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda (oh yeah, did I tell, you? I’m also one of the 1.3 million special snowflakes, who make up the Hungarian ethnic minority of the country – often not really an advantage in Conducătorul’s Romania), we all wore the same patched clothes to school and played with the same old toys that our fathers fabricated in corrugated iron garages or water-filled basements of the ‘hood.

On the Christmas of 1989, our newlywed parents took to the streets of Timișoara/Temesvár, after great dis-contempt and decade-long famine, ready to topple the dictator: much like my generation did yesterday and countless times in the past year. We learned about that in school as Revoluția din Decembrie / the December revolution. While there are loads of streets in many cities across country bearing the name of this “glorious” event (including the one I grew up on), almost 30 years on, we are aching to see that their struggle (and for some, their blood, or even life..) was in vain, the revolution has failed, and Conducătorul’s spirit (ghost?!) very much lingers on. In order to understand what I am about to tell you, we need to go back in time a bit and delve into the (recent) political history of my country. Now, bear in mind that I am no political scientist, or sociologist, these are just the reflections of the past in my relatively simple but 7-year emigrant, blogger mind.

Throughout much of the 90s, me and my friends, we didn’t really worry too much about politics and were happy that our holidays kept getting longer due to the teachers’ almost ritually recurring strike action. To put things in perspective, a Romanian high-school teacher’s base salary in 2002 was $35 US dollars – so things did not really change much economically up until the turn of the millennium. Just as I was slowly starting to act smart and pretend to understand how people think and how things work (and try to use that to improve my rather limited success with the ladies..), I remember accompanying my dad into the voting booth, where he allowed me to feel important and put the stamp onto the ballot, next to a certain Ion Iliescu, the country’s long-standing president (except a short, but later much reminisced, stint by Emil Constantinescu). This gentleman was the first elected president of the newly democratized country, and no matter how hard he tried to hide it, he was still very much from the entourage of the dictator.

While it is important to mention that it is difficult to bin the Romanian political scene into traditional left or right parties (and representatives and senators often switch sides regardless of party ideology), the 2000 presidential vote was a lesser of two evils one, in order to avoid far-right xenophobic populist Corneliu Vadim Tudor gaining power. In the same year, an astute sailor and as-later-to-be-found-out, extremely resilient politician, Traian Băsescu took the mayor’s seat in the country’s capital, Bucharest. With a pledge to go head-on-head with corruption and really finish the revolution, he managed to graduate from the mayor’s seat to presidency just 4 years later, winning in the run-off with only 1.5% against Iliescu disciple and incumbent prime-minister, Adrian Năstase. It was around this time when four things started to crystallize:

The semi-presidential republic‘s subsequent presidents entered into a perennial war with the prime-minister, spending vast amounts of time and effort on useless blocking of each other;

Two major parties started to emerge: PSD, the social democrats’ party (the communist inheritance crew) and Everyone Else (various liberal and democratic parties, under dozens of names, but always being the different, “non-PSD” voice – on paper, at least..);

My generation slowly turned 18, so we suddenly got the right to vote! .. and after that started getting degrees and slowly flocked away from the country;

Albeit for fundamentally different reasons, the situation was pretty similar for the folks with no (desire to get) degrees.

Once in Cotroceni, Băsescu, possibly mimicking Putin’s model, tried to confer as much power to the president as possible. Then prime-ministers, of course did everything to prevent it – they impeached him twice, once before and once after his 2009 re-election. However, the general atmosphere in the country, as we were finishing high-school and partying through college, was a perceived good one. The rampant inflation of the 90s was stabilized, and after a decade of stagnation and even decrease, incomes started to rise and we finally entered the EU in 2007. Then hit the global financial crisis in 2008. These two events changed everything..

With the EU, came freedom of movement. First it was the rroma, but then also others started to look for better lives in Western European countries. Most of these countries (including UK, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, France) tried to protect themselves as long as they could from the Romanian and Bulgarian migration, by invoking the special clause of the accession treaty to delay their right to work until 2014, but Italy and Spain – the major linguistic relatives and thus prime destination countries – were more lenient (Spain – 2009, Italy – 2012). As a result, the country’s population shrank by more than 10%, from a Ceaușescu-era peak of 23 million to sub 20 million in 2011 – and even these official figures did not count for a lot of citizens effectively living abroad, with no signs of the trend slowing down. And of course, it was mostly the young leaving, preparing the scene for perhaps one of the worst demographic disasters of 21st century Europe. The rise of cheap air travel in the late 2000s only amplified everything. The 2008 global financial crisis arrived a bit late to my country, but this did not help the statistic. Job vacancies doubled, but employment did not change much. International capital was very much preferring neighboring Hungary and the reasons became increasingly clear with time: corruption.

Remember when we said that after 2005 the country’s president and prime minister didn’t really get along? Well, that’s because everyone had their shady deals going on: from the president through the prime-minister, to the country’s wealthiest man. During Băsescu’s “reign”, the anti-corruption efforts did intensify, though. DNA, the national anti-corruption agency was created and vested with some pretty exclusive rights – and was the flag-bearer in the fight against corruption until.. well, until the current government, after an arduous fight, managed to remove its leader, Laura Codruța Kövesi – let’s not jump ahead too much, but perhaps this gives you a clue about some of the reasons for yesterday’s outrage and the level of rottenness in the ruling party..

But be no fool, Băsescu was no angel. After communism collapsed in 1989, he became transport minister in the new centrist government, spearheading the privatization of Romania’s vast but rusting commercial fleet – and making a good buck in the process. Already during his first term in office, Băsescu started the process of opening of Securitate (sort of the Romanian CIA from communist times) records when he ordered the secret services to transfer their files to the National Council for Studying Securitate Archives. Researchers of the country’s communist-era secret police cleared the president in of accusations that he collaborated with the Securitate. With time though, it became increasingly open that the president was restoring the feared outfit’s role in order to keep him in office as long as possible, as the rift with the parliament was widening. Briefly, he appointed the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SIE – one of the Securitate’s inherited institutions), Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu as prime-minister in 2012.

However, it was during this time when a young and ruthless businessman from Teleorman, Liviu Dragnea started aspiring to enter the big-league politics – and sent the country into the downward spiral that it is in ever since. He entered the political scene as one of the many forcing Năstase to resign as PSD party head, only to be elbowed away from the party leadership by career politician, ambassador to the US and presidential-aspiree Mircea Geoană between 2005 and 2010, then again by prime-minister Victor Ponta between 2010 and 2015, but eventually he got the seat for himself in 2015 (after an all-out political war with the latter).

Young politician Ponta – dubbed Mickey Mouse by the Romanian public, however, did not fall too far from Conducătorul either. An upcoming Bucharest lawyer and PSD protégé under the wings of Iliescu and Năstase, he became one of the central figures of the second decade of the 21st century in Romanian politics, constantly wrestling president Băsescu and being involved in countless corruption scandals, including one for plagiarizing his doctorate, and after refusing to resign many times, eventually he did so in 2015.

Even though he did not complete his 4-year term, he was the last prime minister to stay in office consistently (3 years). It was around this time when the people of the country started connecting the dots around all of the PSD elite, and the since-regular protests started in Piața Victoriei, sparked by a deadly nighclub fire at Colectiv, claiming 64 lives. Eventually this lead to Ponta’s resignation in 2015. The problem is, we’ve already went through 6 prime-ministers since, just in the past 3 years..

In 2014, Ponta wanted to become president. Leading an ethno-populist campaign, he was in the lead until the last minute, but eventually the current president Klaus Iohannis came out on top, mostly due to the diaspora vote. I had published an ample analysis of the election itself on this very blog the day after the election.

The victory of ethnic german Iohannis was met with high expectations, with the working class being upset over the countless corruption scandals of Mr. Ponta and the wider PSD crew. However, after a brief technocrat government led by Dacian Cioloș and characterized by a strong DNA, opening many cases against key PSD figures, the parliament was eventually subdued to PSD control at the end of 2016, this time with Dragnea at the wheel. What we are witnessing ever since is perhaps an unheard of violation in Europe of a state’s Constitution and a complete making fun of its citizenry. Already the parliamentary election itself was clouded in controversy, with Dragnea convicted for electoral fraud in the 2012 impeachment campaign against Băsescu. Because of his two-year suspended sentence, Dragnea couldn’t be nominated as prime-minister (technically he can?!, but president Iohannis said he wouldn’t do so) – therefore the country has been in an endless loop of Dragnea-strawmen (and straw-women) taking the prime-minister’s seat ever since, with the boss himself staying in office as the president of PSD and the de-facto leader of the country no matter what comes at him. Just a sample form his laws since:

President Iohannis does try from time to time to publicly condemn the Dragnea regime, but he is also powerless himself. Meanwhile, the resounding atmosphere in the country is that it started going down a slope from where there is no return. There is practically no opposition anymore and people feel being left desolate. So they started protesting. First simply for the rule of law. Then against widespread corruption. And finally, left hopeless, against the government. This latter episode has been going on for almost two years and people are pretty much left in total desperation, where they have lost complete faith in all of the political establishment. Bringing back old and cold memories and feeling as if fighting windmills, Conducătorul’s seemingly immortal ghost still haunts after three decades..

We are the country’s lost generation. Some of the smartest on the planet, scattered all across leading companies and universities of the world, leaving our country behind and being left behind by our country, in favor of old, credulous voters brought for PSD by the Orthodox Church and a stick and carrot rise in pensions – only to raise taxes a month later to fund the gap – and effectively ending up lowering them, but keeping it low profile and murky so people won’t find out. Once (2017) the fastest growing economy in Europe:

By now, my generation has had enough. It does not matter whether we live abroad or at home. Oh and believe me, many of us would and will return, if there is stability and a perspective for the future. But currently, ANYONE involved in the past thirty years in ANY government will not do – and fairly so. There are just too many bad memories. Therefore we need to help grow an entirely new political class, lead by reason and excellence, and get rid of the red plague (“ciuma roșie”). With the current system, this seams like an unsurmountable ordeal, fighting the windmill fight of many countries against populist governments, but Romania’s case is so very special: as the aging population back at home starts to not have any funds to pay the pensions from, while all of the youth is looking for their luck elsewhere. When all of the state budget is embezzled, then what? What happens to our parents and grandparents?.. But fear not, talking with my friends scattered across the world, as well as back home, I know that change is coming. People will return. I remember, there was a good trend. 4 years ago, when Iohannis was elected, people really started to believe that this is it, we have broken free from the shackles of communism. Disappointed with their substandard, friendless Western European lives , they have already started returning nicely. Jobs were on the rise, regional centers such as Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár, Timișoara/Temesvár or Iași were booming. Until 2017, when this government came to power.. But now we must hold on (#rezist) as I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Keep signing the petitions, keep sharing the videos, keep going to Victoriei to stand united peacefully and stream it live. Dragnea and folks are getting more and more scared by the day: at yesterday’s protests they have instructed the riot police to use force against the peaceful protesters. I can’t help but to think about a similar situation in 2006’s Hungary, when the local PSD counterpart, MSZP did exactly the same. People have had so enough of them, that 12 years down the line, they have unapologetically lost the last 3 elections and have no realistic chance of doing otherwise in the next decade. And the population of Hungary is quite happy about that, re-electing their oft-criticized government year on year. Just last week, there was a much-publicized decision by BMW to build a billion-euro factory in Debrecen, just across the border from Romania, and our minister of transport said he was “frustrated” by the news. No shit..

My country in arguably the most beautiful place on earth with the kindest, calmest and most loving people. Communism will eventually fall and the diaspora will return home.

One day. One fine day : )

Finally, to close with some food for thought, I’ve created a montage of a few snapshots of the social media atmosphere of yesterday’s protests, side by side with the list of politicians involved in corruption scandals: there are almost no exceptions, all members of the Parliament, all county leaders, all mayors have some case or another opened against them. Therefore it is so important to understand that these protests are not just protests. And they aren’t the seeds of a new revolution either. They are a continued demand for a promised, clean, democratic state that never came.

The 1989 revolution is not over yet. It is just starting..

Try Something New. Everyday.





















Investigations resulting in convictions, appeal under way

Investigations resulting in final sentences

In Romanian – Dosare închise cu sentințe definitive