Aurelian Giugăl
These elections actually confirm what was expected. I quote what I wrote in 2020 after the parliamentary vote four and a half years ago. It is an article written in Libertatea, which analyzed the AUR vote:
“This is why, against this economic and social backdrop, external migration will continue, and the political future could hold anything in store for us. Including a party such as AUR, now on everyone’s lips, with a host of analysts trying to decipher its rise, which may grow (and) in future electoral cycles. As is well known, times of economic crisis bring to the fore such parties, which challenge the status quo of the old political class. That is why we must closely monitor the measures and methods that the current government will use to resolve the current economic crisis, which promises to be a deep one. If things continue as they have been, with those at the bottom being asked to foot the bill for the crisis, we believe that the future will be increasingly bleak.
Let’s look at history. In the 1950s and 1960s, communist parties were very powerful in Western Europe. They were also financed by the Soviet Union. But when the Cold War ended, they were almost non-existent. Why?
Because the economic and political measures taken at the time were social measures, which led to the welfare state. Or, as the French called it, the état providence. So the divide at the time was between the communist parties and the liberal and social democratic parties, etc., and this gradually faded away.
The communists diminished, becoming insignificant at the time of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. And the social-liberal parties became mainstream parties. Christian Democrats, liberals, social liberals, socialists, labor, etc.
What happened after 40-50 years of neoliberalism from the 1970s-1980s to the present?
Well, a major change happened. After decades of neoliberalism, populism-sovereignism has made its way into the city. The main divide has gradually become that between sovereignists vs. populists, anti-globalists vs. free market and capital advocates who turn everything into a commodity, including public goods and services. In a volume edited by Cambridge University Press, Commodifying Politics: European Governance and Labour Politics from Financial Crisis to the COVID Emergency, co-author Sabina Stan highlights precisely these issues. This is a clear transformation of capitalism, which requires privatization, including of public goods, turning everything into a commodity.
So why are we surprised that things are going in the direction that some people were predicting just a few decades ago? Why is austerity the only thing people talk about in Romania?
Mark Blyth wrote Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Why are austerity measures, which have been a failure in Romania, still in vogue here? Here are two examples.
The Democratic Convention of 1996-2000—a period of shock therapy, privatization, and unemployment—has disappeared. The National Peasant Christian Democratic Party no longer exists. It died then, after the 2000 elections.
It never returned to power. It never returned to Parliament.
Two. The Liberal Democratic Party, the party of former President Băsescu. The 2009-2012 government. After the 2009 presidential elections, in 2010 an austerity program was implemented, with cuts in the public sector. The Liberal Democratic Party no longer exists. It has disappeared. It died. It died. It was swallowed up by the current PNL. Boc and several prominent leaders from that time are now in the PNL.
But the PDL no longer exists. After the 2012 parliamentary elections, I repeat, two years after the austerity program imposed by Băsescu-Boc, the PDL did not even run in the elections under its own name.
It was renamed the Right Romania Alliance and changed its name, but its poor electoral performance hastened its demise. So the austerity measures never worked.
Why are all the candidates, center-left, center-right, populist-sovereignists, so stubborn in saying that they will continue to apply austerity measures?
Bolojan from the PNL, who asked for votes on behalf of Antonescu, said that Romania is preparing for tough austerity measures. So should we be surprised by today’s vote? Why should we be surprised?
People refuse. They say ”we don’t want it”. Period. Can you make people stupid so they won’t want it?
How is my vote in Bucharest more equal than a vote in the countryside?
Everyone votes in the interests of their class. Right? So citizens in Dolj, Gorj, Dobruja or Moldova are not full citizens? They are not citizens in their own right? Or are they only half citizens?
Well then, I say we need to look at the causes and then at the electoral effect. Effects are the consequence of causes, not the other way around. Effects do not cause causes, but rather causes cause effects.
You have to take responsibility. You can’t pour gasoline on a fire and expect it not to catch.
Why isn’t there a more visible and influential left in Romania given the current collapse of mainstream parties and anti-establishment sentiment?
The left, in my view, the theoretical left, is purely theoretical and nothing more, and in any case it is numerically limited, no one knows of its existence outside Facebook bubbles and urban intellectual circles, because the theoretical left in Romania consists of a few intellectuals, many of them academics, others somehow involved in the independent cultural sector, and that’s about it. No worker knows of the existence of this left. If, absurdly, this left were to disappear tomorrow, no one would notice its absence, absolutely no one, because it is insignificant, politically, socially, in whatever way you want.
Therefore, these people also depend on survival networks. They are bound by invisible threads to their careers, academic or non-academic, or to the funding they receive from public cultural institutions, and so on. Therefore, they are dependent people, not completely independent people. I don’t see them as capable of meaning anything. You can’t do politics as a hobby. Politics is not a hobby. We know this from Max Weber. Politics is an activity, like any other activity.
You don’t work until four and then go to the political club to discuss politics. What about measures? It’s simple. The system doesn’t want any other kind of politics.
How does the political-economic system react to the challenge posed by voters?
The discourse that has been repeated for decades, that people are solely responsible for their failure or success, follows this neoliberal logic. “You have failed economically and socially, you are the only one to blame. No one else is responsible for your failure.” The depoliticization of political office and state functions and the shift to a logic of market efficiency.
Are you good or are you not good? That’s the only thing that matters. It doesn’t matter that you come from areas with economic problems, poor educational institutions, that you come from small, depopulated towns. It doesn’t matter. No one forced you to stay there.
Why don’t you leave, as Băsescu said? Why don’t you go out into the world? Who is keeping you here in Romania? Seriously, who is keeping them here in Romania? Leave, said Băsescu. Leave! If you don’t like it. That is the logic behind how things work in this area.
We are the most unequal country in the EU. The most unequal. Romania does not have to reinvent the wheel.
Romania doesn’t have to be Sweden or Germany. Romania has to apply tax collection policies similar to those in Central Europe. Former communist countries.
It doesn’t have to become the most efficient country in the world. It just has to imitate the European Union, which it claims to follow.
If it wants to, it should change something about the current state of affairs. If not, that’s it. As Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, says, Europe, and with it Romania, will end up “sleepwalking towards disaster.”
And that will probably happen soon. Because these things will antagonize society.
So I have no doubt about that. I mean, it’s obvious, and tons have been written about it. We can’t keep telling people they’re stupid.
Will anything change for the better if power goes to AUR and Simion?
Definitely not. I don’t think so. I think things will get even worse.
On the contrary. I don’t see that as a solution. It’s like a vote of desperation. Obviously, it’s not a solution, and I don’t see parties that are close to the far right or are actually far right being able to implement economic policies that will balance out inequalities. I don’t think so.
They are all elitist, ultra-liberal parties that already support austerity measures.
Photo: Aurelian Giugăl (source: Aurelian Giugăl)
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