Dumitru Dobrev: It is a Herculean effort for Romanian elites to get along with each other. We are looking for the man who can restore trust in politics

Vladimir Mitev

Dumitru Dobrev has over 24 years of experience in private law litigation, administrative litigation, domestic and international arbitration. He specialized in the field of industrial property, becoming an industrial property counsel in 2006 and being a member of the Governing Board of the National Chamber of Industrial Property Attorneys of Romania, as former head of the legislative committee (2013-2015 and 2017-2019).

Dumitru Dobrev is one of the key lawyers who worked for NGOs opposing the Roșia Montană sodium cyanide mining project, which after more than 20 years of legal battles ended in 2024 with arbitration, which ruled in favor of the Romanian state. Dobrev is also one of the founders of the party Union Save Romania, which is the party of the new political and civic elites that coalesced during and after the 2013 protests against the Rosia Montana project. However, Dobrev left the party a few years after it was founded because he disagreed with the way a USR minister chose his collaborators from among people who had collaborated with the former Securitate before 1989. More recently, Dobrev has supported the civic sector in Romania, as well as the mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan, who also started his political career as an NGO candidate.

He commented in this interview the decisions of the Constitutional Court, the political crisis in Romania that was unleashed during the annulled presidential elections, made important historic parallels and offered his perspective on what might be the way out of this criss. 

The interview took place on 9 December 2024. 

Mr. Dobrev, how do you assess what is going on in Romania, given the extraordinary two weeks? We have had decisions, including on a legal basis, by the Constitutional Court and in one direction and in the opposite direction (by validating and then annulling the first round of the presidential elections). We had a big surprise in the first round. So a lot happened and, at one point, everything went back to the beginning with the decision of the Constitutional Court to annul the presidential elections. What actually happened in Romania?

As you know, we had several petitions to the Constitutional Court which were rejected, but one was admitted and the Constitutional Court gave a decision to recount the votes.

The lawyers discussed whether there was sufficient evidence to make such a decision, and most of the people who are recognized as professionals in this field, professors of constitutional law, specialists in electoral law, said that there was not a critical mass of evidence that could have led the Court to the decision to recount. There were only “very thin” clues, so to speak.

And yet the Constitutional Court ordered a recount of the votes and you saw that they were recounted and there were some undeniable differences between what was on the ballot paper and what came out as a result of the recount. That is the first aspect.

In the second aspect, there was the second referral by Terheș (currently an MEP, a political defector), and this Terheș is, I suspect, the henchman of those who want to refer cases to the Constitutional Court. The SNSPA (National School of Political and Administrative Studies) has also lodged a referral and this is a very big surprise indeed.

At the beginning there was the first controversial decision of the CCR, the one with Diana Șoșoaca, where the majority of those who know – university professors, lawyers specialized in constitutional/electoral law, etc. – said that there were no grounds to invalidate the candidacy. You know that Georgescu has also had some extremist-nationalist public positions, making apologia of the extreme right, of the inter-war legionaries. The way the law is made, it is very hard to find an argument that Diana Șoșoacă should be invalidated. Because the law, as I understand it, is interpreted by most specialists and as I also said, would have required a criminal conviction to invalidate someone’s candidacy. Georgescu spoke about the Holocaust, he spoke about Zelea Codreanu in apologetic terms. And indeed, the CCR could have invalidated his candidacy if there had been a conviction, otherwise the presumption of innocence operates. Instead, Diana Șoșoacă was invalidated for the presidential election. From there the snowball started rolling.

If it had been just the latter (the third controversial decision in which they canceled the election and decided to start it all over from scratch), without the other two (Diana Shoshaka and the recount), it might have been what it would have been. But there are three strange decisions, to put it that way. That last one, which canceled the elections, from what I’ve read and from what I’ve seen from others who do more constitutional law than I do, I say the reasoning is thin.

That on the one hand. So, it does not meet the requirements of reasoning that a decision of a constitutional court in a European state should have. On the other hand, sitting crooked and judging straight, we have to recognize that we don’t even have a law adapted for situations like this where, how shall I say, a state actor is using social media, psychologists/sociologists and political technologists, for years and influencing the minds of less critical thinking people (since the pandemic) we have to say it straight.

I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I use social media here. I don’t use TikTok. But I use Instagram, I use Facebook and Twitter (currently X) quite often.

In the last few weeks I was inundated with propaganda about how well we were doing in Romania before 1989, just like 2-3 years ago I was inundated with anti-vaccination propaganda. I used to get dozens of these pages a day to like. I’d block them and I’d would still get avalanches of “how good it was when I ate bread soaked in sugar” posts. So, simply put, it’s been awful this year. And now, in the last few months, block one fake account, and three more pop up. It’s just horror. So it’s been a cyber assault, a cyber bombardment, hundreds of networks of trolls, influencers. It’s a guy from Brasov, an IT guy, who didn’t have much of an income, but who was displaying a standard of living that was out of line with his earnings. They have now found seven million dollars in cryptocurrencies and that man has given a thousand euros each to thousands of influencers in Romania, who were selling cosmetics, exotic trips or all sorts of trinkets on Tik-Tok. And all of a sudden, like May Day celebrations during Ceausescu’s time, they all started with the chorus Călin Georgescu, Călin Georgescu.

So, how shall I put it… basically, people’s minds have been seized by microtargeting and by these algorithms that bombard them with information and that have taken them from the pandemic period, have made them feel like a pandemic and have gradually brought them to this area of conspiracy theories, of ultra-nationalism with an anti-Ukrainian tinge, of an Orthodox religious amalgam combined with New Age, of Euroscepticism – the area of this candidate’s political discourse.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but two speeches were posted in parallel on social media. One speech was by Marshal Antonescu, in September 1940, when King Carol II fled and the national-legionary state was installed. Then Horia Sima and Antonescu came to the rostrum with Antonescu and made a speech when Romania was on its knees (in the summer of 1940 the Soviets had taken Bessarabia, Hungary had taken Northern Transylvania, after the Vienna Dictate, and Bulgaria had to be given Southern Dobruja, because, you know, what about Southern Dobruja, we should not have taken it in 1913, we should not have gotten involved in the Second Balkan War). The Legionnaires and Antonescu came to power with Hitler’s blessing. Whole sentences from their speeches are copied in a recent speech by Călin Georgescu. Georgescu even copied their gestures, those rhetorical pauses between words, he copied the same pathetic speech as in the 40s. Someone sat down and studied very well what happened in the summer of 1940 and targeted a certain type of audience.

I tell you honestly, I believe, hand on heart, that if there was a runoff, Georgescu had a 51% chance and Lasconi 49%. Not the other way around. With all the mobilization of civil society and their apparatuses, I mean, how shall I put it, what the Constitutional Court has done is bad. It’s very bad. But I don’t think there’s any other solution at the moment. When the bear ran into your backyard, well, you set fire to the house and stopped the bear for the moment. But what do we do now? I mean, right now it’s a choice between two evils. I don’t know if he chose the lesser of two evils. I’d be inclined to have Georgescu face him in the second round. But if he came out it would have been a national catastrophe.

So the Constitutional Court’s decision wasn’t that strange.

Politically, I think it was the only possible one. It’s a decision in which the Constitutional Court, how shall I put it, was not based on legal arguments, but more on other – on arguments of expediency, political…

However, to revoke an election in a democratic country, which is part of the European Union, is something flagrant, isn’t it? It’s not something that ordinarily happens…

Absolutely, that doesn’t happen. It’s a first for us, it has to be, and the idea of something like this happening to a jurist is almost unthinkable.

Is this a kind of failure of the state, the political system? Who failed, in fact, to get here?

I am not sure who failed. I have some small clues.

First of all, during all these years, all the security structures, the secret services, the judiciary, have failed to deal with the extremism that persists latent in Romanian society. There is a lot of extremism in the area of military pensioners, pensioners from the secret services, from the Ministry of Interior (the so-called siloviki as we would say if we were in Russia).

There was a school of thought in the last years of Ceaușescu’s rule, the so-called national-communism, which encouraged disaffection with the return to the origins, with the glorification of the ancestors. And we have seen that in several Balkan countries there are things pushing them towards this area. This current didn’t die with Ceausescu. It remained and was perpetuated. It’s true that the scientific community laughed at them.

They are social-media memes, with the nonsense they say. It’s called protochronism. You see it in literature, historiography, in the social sciences.

These people have been working, with old Chinese patience, on an ultra-nationalist-orthodox political construct. I see it as a network. They have strengthened and amplified this network with the help of the Orthodox clergy in Moldova. This clergy is pro-Russian and pro-Russian crypto-Soviet, in favor of the Moscow Patriarchate.

There are divergences within the Romanian Orthodox Church over the position to be adopted on the elevation of the Kiev Metropolitanate to the rank of Patriarchate. As you know, at the last Ecumenical Council, which was in Crete, it was decided to establish the Patriarchate of Ukraine in Kiev. And then, those who are at the head of the BOR agreed with what the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said, but there is also a pro-Russian faction. Its head is Archbishop Theodosius of Dobrogea, Archbishop of Tomis, who is in dispute with Patriarch Daniel. These disputes, you know how they are, how we would sit like this at the table and smile broadly at the one who has just taken a nudge under the table. A large number of rural priests and monks in monasteries agree with Archbishop Theodosius’s line, especially since he was a fierce critic of health policies during the pandemic.

Well, all these people, along with most of the neo-Protestant cults, who are pro-MAGA/Trumpian, are Georgescu voters. There are many neo-Protestants in Romania, especially in Transylvania. Their first public manifestation was when there was the referendum for the family. Then they lost. It was not possible to change the Constitution, but they realized that they could change the country. And that’s when they thought about the possibility of forming a sovereignist and Eurosceptic political movement.

Many in the Coalition for the Family are now leaders in AUR – George Simion’s extremist party. A shock was in 2020 when it entered parliament and made 9%. No one woke up then. No one raised an alarm. They went up, they went up, they went down, they went up. Now have you seen how much they’ve taken this election? 18%.

Well, what’s going on? So they somehow went under the radar. The people who are supposed to be in charge of this area know what they’re doing? They cover themselves with paperwork. They send to the presidency, they send to the prime minister, they send to the president of the senate, to ministers. They send all kinds of information. And, of course, they can point out that they said between the lines, in a footnote somewhere that there is a mini-danger of extremism.

I think that at least one big party – the Social Democratic Party, tried to use it in the sense that they wanted to repeat what happened with the 2000 elections when an extremist – Corneliu Vadim Tudor – entered the second round. Corneliu Vadim Tudor was the father of today’s extremism. He and the România Mare party were the extremists of the 1990-2000s.

And they thought that if they entered the second round with the PSD candidate and George Simion, the second round of 2000 between Ion Iliescu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor would be rerun, when everyone, all the intellectuals went and voted for Iliescu because they hated him. You have to take into account the fact that PSD President Ciolacu is a man who failed the baccalaureate exam, he expresses himself rudimentarily, has a limited understanding of European and international politics, does not speak any foreign language, lacks charisma, is a weak candidate, so to speak, and people, regardless of their level of education, have a bit of a “whiff” of him. The PSD has also strategized that there will be a second round between these two (Ciolacu and Simion) and people who don’t vote PSD will have nothing to do and will have to vote for Ciolacu.

At the same time it seems to me that the old PNL-PSD parties and their campaign strategists “played” with someone who was smarter than them, used to think 3-4 moves ahead, like in chess. And here I’m thinking of that Cyberwarfare GRU unit. And the PNL-PSD political consultants and decision makers thought “we will outsmart the fox”. They just couldn’t outsmart the fox. And that’s where they got the big shock. They didn’t see it coming from Georgescu. This one came in under the radar, and I think the panic happened on the afternoon of the first round. I think they got the information online from their observers and people in the precincts. They saw that Simion was no longer rising, instead this one, Georgescu, was rising like a rocket, and that their whole strategy for the second round was collapsing.

In the parliamentary elections, following the Georgescu surprise, three extremist parties entered Parliament. The party of Diana Șoșoacă entered Parliament and got a lot. Georgescu’s small extremist party (POT) also entered. So there are three extremist parties with 31 or 32% of the vote – which has never happened before.

You realize, if Georgescu becomes president and tries twice to form a government, and the parliament defeats the government twice, the third time the president of Romania has the possibility to dissolve the parliament and early elections are organized. And if Georgescu gets the extremists 51% in parliament, then Romania literally “goes to hell”. In other words, we are talking about a period when Georgescu will be in power with the extremists, as it was in January 1941, when the Legionary Rebellion took place. People will be shot in the streets. That will happen. It happened once before and we know it will happen again.

And even if there won’t be violence like in January 1941, but even if all the investors will leave, because the sovereignists said they want to nationalize the banks, maybe the European Union will freeze all the funds in the PNRR as happened in Hungary. Out of NATO is a possibility to get out because that would please Putin. So in this situation you would fulfill Putin’s main dream, which is to logistically block this whole area – from the Chilia arm of the Danube up to Maramureș, so that no truck, no train to Ukraine would pass. Because, to be serious, everything that logistically enters Ukraine at the moment, fuel, weapons, ammunition, whatever you want, enters through Poland, which has a 500 km border there, and comes to us, through the northern area, Botoșani, Maramureș, Suceava, and through here, through the south, Galați-Chilia towards Odessa.

What happens if Georgescu blocks that? Odessa falls, Herson falls, and the Russians reach Tiraspol. The second after Tiraspol, they’ll reach Chisinau. We’ll cry after Maia Sandu, all pro-EU Bessarabians will be Ukrainians on the wagon to Siberia – no one has any doubt that this is going to happen, except the sovereignists (who suffer – pardon me for saying so – from geostrategic imbecility).

And that is why we have a political Constitutional Court. Because the Constitutional Court judges are appointed three by the President, three by the Senate, three by the chambers of deputies. That’s how it is.

It’s not that what was done was done well, we should have had as in the inter-war period, the Constitutional Court, according to the 1923 Constitution, was the High Court of Cassation. That should have been the case now. But Antonie Iorgovan and Ion Iliescu, that’s how they thought of doing with a French model which turned out to be wrong.

That is the situation. Now, at the moment, it will probably be somewhere between now and March and everyone will be looking for a candidate, as happened in France (when the mainstream parties blocked the National Front – Marine Le Pen from forming a government) to find a candidate who can beat Georgescu. I can’t imagine that the Russians don’t have a plan to secure a sovereignist candidacy in the spring ( like not tying Georgescu to funding from Russian banks) and in that case, I doubt that the CCR will try to invalidate him. I don’t know how hard it is to prove where the money that propelled Georgescu through millions of targeted Tik-Tok posts came from. .

Thus, the money trail must be traced, because if the money trail is not traced and we don’t find out who gave the money, with this thin ruling of the Constitutional Court, it will be a lot of wind in the sails of all the conspiracy theories and we will end up like in 1938 when King Carol II asked for the resignation of the Goga-Cuza government, thus opening the way to the royal dictatorship.

And here’s what else I want to say so that you understand things very clearly: – I don’t put the blame solely on TikTok, algorithm, Kremlin political technologists and micro-targeting. If I do so, I am only taking into account one half of the relationship between cause and effect. Because you have to consider that the engine of the V2 rockets that Hitler launched over London – they used oxidizer and fuel (Z-Stoff and T-Stoff, i.e. liquid oxygen with ethyl alcohol).

So, people are very angry with the system, that is, with the fact that there is this PSD-PNL cohabitation, with corruption, justice, bureaucracy, inflation, excessive taxation, special pensions, everything that destroys the social contract between the rulers and the ruled. Those who are working abroad are frustrated because they have all sorts of problems when they come back with bureaucracy, low pensions, a thousand and one problems. And these people are looking for a reason to take revenge on politicians.

And there came in fact this cabal of nationalists, with legionaries, with dacoits, with secret services, with the military, with this Chinese TikTok, which offers a lot of possibilities to sneak around the rigors of electoral law, and all of this together has made an explosive cocktail. So, basically, we have a Molotov cocktail by hand. That is what it is.

But it is also the mistake of 35 years of politicians up to now, because if we had better schools, better paid teachers, they would have made subjects in which critical thinking and not mechanical memorization of subjects, citizenship education, contemporary history, so that citizens would know what mistakes were made in the past, not only that Romanians are a people of heroes who fought against the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and that Romania is the Garden of the Virgin Mary. It would have been a bit better and maybe Georgescu wouldn’t have made it to the second round. But the situation is that they have basically put gas on the fire.I mean, how can I tell you, if you have a shell, what I said about Tik-Tok, with the Russian and Chinese secret services, is just the detonated cap. The boosters and the explosives existed long ago.

If the majority of the content of the crisis is of Romanian origin, this does not mean that the Romanian political or state system will now somehow resolve the internal crisis. Can it be solved?

In principle, it can. But I think that it will not be solved. Even if they somehow manage to defuse this shell. Let’s say they gain another 4 years of peace until 2028. Let’s say, a broad coalition of pro-European parties. But if during these 4 years nothing positive happens, in 2028 the legionaries with Georgescu, with all of them, win with 60%, and they will have the majority to initiate the modification of the Constitution by referendum. And it’ll be a disaster.

I mean, if you look at Romania’s recent history, there have been two such situations. On April 3, 1866, after the coup d’état against Prince Cuza, he went abroad and a Domineal Lieutenancy was established. At that moment, the Guarantor Powers decide that the Moldavians, in case they no longer want the union of the principalities, should elect a prince of their own, to separate from Wallachia and at that moment Russia, which was defeated in the Crimean War with Russian money and Baron Offenberg, the Russian consul in Iași initiates a coup d’état with the help of the metropolitan of Moldavia Calinic Miclescu, putting Nicolae Rosetti-Roznovanu, prince of Moldavia. This was done with the support of the big landowners from families who had already given rulers of Moldavia (who didn’t want a foreign prince because he compromised their chances of reaching the throne), which suited the Tsarist Empire perfectly.

Things didn’t happen, however, because the political class of the time came up with something in return. He came with the foreign prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Then came the war of 1877-1878 which you know as the Russo-Turkish war, we call it the War of Independence, railways were built, sea port, modernization, parliament, the Constitution of 1866, political life, political parties. A renewal followed.

Another moment. In December, 1917, what happened? On the front here in Moldavia, the Tsarist troops were fleeing the front, going with Russia, and Lenin sent an agitator, a Bolshevik from St. Petersburg, a former commander of the Kronstadt fortress, to assassinate King Ferdinand and General Scherbacev, who was the commander of the Russian front and who was not obeying the orders coming from the new power in Moldavia after the Bolshevik coup d’état.

And then the political elite and King Ferdinand agreed with the peasantry to distribute land and the great agrarian reform after the First World War was carried out. The peasant soldiers were not Bolshevized and they sent the Romanian army which drove the Bolshevik troops out of Bessarabia in January-March 1918, so somehow they found a solution because it was still a mess as it is now. It was introduced in the Constitution of 2021, universal suffrage, somehow Great Romania was made, somehow the common man was satisfied, because he was very permeable to this Bolshevik propaganda – “These are the ones who are enriched by the war”, “I send you to die for these people who have armament factories”… “Proletarians of all countries – unite!” That was the talk then, and a way out of the impasse was found.

Now, I don’t know if the current political class has a solution… something to get them out of this pro-Georgescu hypnosis. Because you have a much weaker political class than we had in 1866 and 1917. These are extremely limited politicians, the result of 35 years of counter-selection in these political parties.

If you allow me a comparison between the time then, I hope for the benefit of the current situation. In 2022 Romania had 111 billion euros of foreign direct investment. Romania now belongs to NATO, the European Union. Romanian elites, partially or completely, are integrated into the Western elites. This means that those who control part of the Romanian economy are taking care of what is here “for better or worse“.

How can I call you new? There are several categories – these elites you are talking about, they are not unitary. There are little churches, there are interest groups.

There are those who would have a lot to lose if, let’s say, the extremists come and Georgescu comes. There are some who are like Georgescu, they were on the wave in the 90s and would like to be in power again and they support them for that. They are vindictive and they are, how shall I say, they feel left out. And then they say “God, if a leader like that comes, we can help him, because he doesn’t have technocrats, he doesn’t know what he’s doing and we’ll come and take up positions in ministries and agencies. He’ll be a bit more awkward, he’ll be a bit like Orban in Hungary or Robert Fico in Slovakia, but we don’t think he’ll be that bad. He’s not going to take the machine-gun to the streets. It’s just that these things don’t happen, in fact, if Georgescu comes with extremist parties, the country will collapse.

We all know from all the analysis and all the history that has been written that extremist regimes are very corrupt. And in Germany, I have read some analyses about how, during the war, how much was wasted because of the fights between various factions in the Nazi party and how much favoritism there was for the orders of the military industry and how French industry, Polish industry, Czech industry, industry in the Netherlands, all the countries conquered by the Third Reich were totally inefficient because of corruption, looting and sabotage and also because of the incompetence of those in the Nazi party who were put in decision-making positions where they were not good at.

Understand? So, compared to the way things worked in the United States or Great Britain with the war industry, in the Third Reich it was bureaucratic chaos. Not to mention Mussolini’s Italy where it was the same.

So these regimes are hyper corrupt and they are creating chaos in bureaucracy and administration. Because they come with ideologized and unprepared people and change Romania. During communism, in the early years, when the communists came to power in Romania, they put people with little education at the top. In the villages the communists came and put the poorest and laziest man in the village as mayor. And nothing worked.

The first years of communism in Romania were years of famine, deprivation and terrible hardship. So the country was dysfunctional for years. This is what I think will happen if the sovereignists come to power and expropriate the banks and multinationals.

But those who support them now, they don’t think about that. They’re thinking, you know what’s the big deal if we’re with the Russians a little bit? The Russians give us cheap gas.

They’re horribly wrong. They don’t realize what this country’s coming to. They’re saying it’s going to be a bit like America with Trump, because Trump has his exhibitionism. Only that America with Trump, still has two oceans to the East and West, we have nothing, we have the Invasion Gate (Focșani-Nămoloasa-Galați Line).

People, when they want to achieve a goal, they find all sorts of these bullshit justifications. I mean Georgescu will gather an army of mercenaries.

Now, we have another problem.

When Romania joined NATO, there was also talk that Romania should not be welcomed because it betrays alliances. In the First World War, we were with the Entente, but afterwards, when the Russian front fell, the Buftea-Bucharest peace was made with the Central Powers. We made peace with the Central Powers, which we shouldn’t have done. After that, when the front broke at Thessaloniki and the French advanced and the Germans fled, and we were with the French, the French naturally didn’t want to let us enter Transylvania and go as far as Budapest. But the gift came with the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and Béla Kun. And then they said, let’s forget that you betrayed. And then, even though we didn’t deserve it, we got all these gifts, with Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, and all of it. But, you see, in the Second World War, initially, in 1939-1940, we were with France and England. We let all those trains from Poland, the Polish treasure come this way. After that, when France fell in 1940, Carol II put in a pro-German government.

Antonescu, after that, in 1941, when the Marița operation took place, allowed Yugoslavia to be attacked from Romanian territory. Yugoslavia was allied with Great Britain. We had the daughter of Queen Maria, Queen Maria, who was the queen mother of Yugoslavia, the mother of King Peter of Yugoslavia, the widow of Alexander II Karageorgevic, who died in Marseilles when he was assassinated together with the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou.

So we were the last state in the world to allow the Germans to attack Yugoslavia. We declared war on the United States. You don’t forget these things.

They’re in a drawer, there, well put. And if we, Romania, do something like this again, and declare ourselves, like Hungary, that we are neutral, that we are neutral, that we will no longer allow a single cartridge to pass through to Ukraine (Georgescu dixit), this will be counted as one of the things that will be counted when we were on our asses for two months in the 20th century.

And I don’t think it will be good for Romania if Georgescu changes and creates a kind of Budapest II here, based on the idea that we are exceptional, that we have a special position, that we don’t agree with the EU’s foreign policy… That is, we will be considered an unstable country that you cannot rely on. This is going to happen.

And that will have repercussions.

Don’t you think what we have seen in the last couple of weeks shows that a large part of Romanian society will not accept this, which is the transformation of Romania into a new Hungary, into Hungary number two. A large part of Romanian society is protesting, there’s a big wave in the media and so on.

What is happening? Romania is split in two. If you remember, let’s take 1907.

In 1907, there was a peasant uprising in Romania – an anti-feudal phenomenon characteristic of the Middle Ages. Especially in Moldavia, against the landlords, the big landowners, and the Jews, we have to say that there was an uprising with anti-Semitic overtones. Although we do not like to say so, in Botoșani there were clear actions against Jewish merchants, just like the pogroms in the Tsarist Empire. On the other hand, at the University of Bucharest, Marcel Proust was critically criticized. The professors at the University of Bucharest had heard of the theory of relativity by a young man from Switzerland, Albert Einstein.

Big cosmopolitan cities, people studying in France, Germany and Vienna. And the world was in a state of terrible poverty, because Romania was not like Bulgaria.

In Bulgaria, when you created the Bulgarian national state, you didn’t have a class of landlords with tens of thousands of hectares. You had small landowners and politicians who were somehow more connected to the common people. We didn’t have that. We had the National Liberal Party which was with the oil industry and the merchants and the banks. And the Conservative Party with the landowners with tens of thousands of hectares.

The people in the villages, especially in the lowlands, were in a state of abject poverty, at least until the great expropriation of 1921. These things have not yet been cured in our country, the discrepancy between rural and urban has not disappeared.

There are two Romanias and now we see this Romania which is very poor, uneducated, with little education, full of hatred. Because as they are poorly educated and very poor, they perceive inequality, kleptocracy and the failed state. Especially those who go to work abroad. They work on building sites, they work picking strawberries in Spain. And it’s true that I somehow belong to, let’s say, another category.

But, how shall I put it, if we wanted to draw a parallel, let’s put it this way:

We put in place a Central American state – a banana republic, where there is a clique of rich white planters (criollos) and the majority of the population who are poor, work on the plantations, those cholos. And a few cholos go to Moscow, to Patrice Lumumba University, the KGB instructs them and sends that we are the followers of Che Guevara and we are making a communist revolution. Like these were, Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist revolution.

We’re in a banana republic here in Romania. One side is supported by the CIA, as it was in the Cold War, and the other side by the Soviet Union. And a spiral of violence begins.

This happened in 1930, when the extreme right-wing parties, the legionaries, wanted to seize power, initially by democratic means. They took part in the elections and managed to scare Charles II, who initially tried to set up surrogate parties, also extreme right-wing. But he didn’t succeed, because the Legionnaires were the real ones, as they would say.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, just like today’s George Simion, began to approach the peasants, to play grass-roots politics. And when the king and the inter-war political elite saw that the classic means (surrogate parties) were not working, they started with pressure, secret police, tapping telephones, denunciations, arrests. After that, the legionaries started assassinating politicians – I. Gh. Duca, Armand Călinescu. Repression followed. Carol II, after a meeting with Hitler (where he was asked to bring the legionaries to power) ordered the assassination of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and a number of legionary leaders.

After King Charles II fled to neutral Portugal, the Legionary nation state followed. The Legionaries shot, I don’t know how many, about 60 ministers and generals. It was a spiral of violence. These things have happened before in Romania and we wouldn’t want to see anything similar.

What I’m afraid of is that the current political class doesn’t have the resources and doesn’t have the necessary political intelligence, that we are now a wheel in a ditch. We don’t have the jack jack to get the car out of the ditch… We’ve bought some time probably until March. The solution is not required to be ideal. Now Putin is laughing at us that he has achieved at least one goal even if he didn’t put Georgescu as president but at least he can say that Romania is a failed state. And for Masha Zaharova to come out and laugh at us, that is what is about to happen. So from that point of view… yes, Romania is divided and almost a dysfunctional state.

It’s a question of growing the center if I can put it that way – social energy not going to either extreme, if I understand correctly.

Yes, but for that you have to find the man like Diogenes did when he walked with a lantern in broad daylight and said he had to look for a man. He has to be charismatic and also a politically correct man in Romania. It’s quite difficult to find a politician who has not dipped his hands into public money, who has not rigged tenders and who would assume that all the parties want to put him as a candidate to beat Georgescu. They must stop raiding the public purse, at least for a while because we have a kleptocratic political class and Romanian politicians do administration 10% of the time and 90% of the time they do various business at the expense of public money.

They need to wake up and put a moratorium so that we don’t start stealing for four years to do something because otherwise we lose, we lose everything and the whole country goes to its head.

Don’t you think that this search has already started? We have calls to Nicușor Dan. I heard in informal coffee chats that some university rectors could be candidates. There is talk of a renewal of the political class

Probably other people’s minds have also been shaped so this kind of action could be a solution. Let’s hope they have enough sense to accept it. The political parties need to be convinced, they need to put aside the bickering, with discussions about who, which ministries will take which ministries in the new government.

After all, isn’t it the Romanians who choose? Not Putin, not Soros. Not the West or the East. Romanians elect Romanians. Romanians decide in their own country.

This is only true if you look at the countries that have had such problems – for example Ukraine. Before the invasion there was the “Brother next to brother” campaign. The Ukrainians were flooded with bots and what can I say, to prepare especially the Russian speakers in Novorossia so that the Russian army could go in and conquer the country in three days. There were other countries. In Moldova, Alexander Stoianoglo almost won. There the secret services and the authorities who organized the elections followed Moscow’s money trail and somehow prevented negative developments. They found ways to show the population that “Money was given by the oligarch Ilan Shor who fled to Moscow”. In our country they have been sleeping in their slippers all this time. Yes, Romanians choose, but the point is that for years they have been bombarded with propaganda that has put all this nationalist nonsense into their heads. How do you manage to open people’s eyes in a few months? It’s very hard to do that. I’m not a communications specialist, I’m a lawyer, but I guess it’s a difficult thing.

Don’t you think that Romanian elites of different political shades – such as the more socialist, the more transitional – can somehow understand each other, can negotiate more among themselves now, seeing already that the state or society was on the way to breaking up?

I think so. But it’s not a simple thing. It will be a Herculean effort.

Photo: Dumitru Dobrev (source: YouTube)

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