Cav's Place

I’ll start from a summary I found on Realitatea of an article from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Actually, you can find both this summary in an article about international press reactions to the results and another article with some direct quotes from the original piece, so I’ll try to put the two together while still removing the parts that I believe are nothing more than overreacting at the moment:
The people have spoken, Romania has a new Parliament. But it is much worse than before. All the facts were known, yet four out of five Romanians decided to vote without hesitation for corrupt or criminal politicians and are therefore part of the problem. Six out of ten Romanians did not participate in the vote and therefore guaranteed this result. Sunday’s vote result is a catastrophe – for the country and for the EU. Over a third of those elected do not belong in a structure called “Rechtsstaat“. Like all sad votes in the history of Europe, the result in Romania can be explained, but not excused. The victory of USL, which is dominated by pro-Russian, anti-European and anti-Occidental groups, represents a significant risk in a region exposed to the growing influence of Moscow. The Romanian people have chosen on Sunday and they will have to live with the consequences of their choice.

As I said, I removed some other references to the international consequences of the result, because that sounded a little like propaganda and I doubt those from USL are stupid enough to get on the wrong side of the EU and USA twice. They did it once, earlier this year, when they tried to impeach the president and Crin Antonescu repeatedly showed open hostility aimed at the USA, the EU as a whole and Germany in particular, but Victor Ponta did make significant efforts to smooth things over and he seems to have learned a few things since then, including the fact that he needs to hold back his ally more. The fact that PSD is clearly pro-Russian does need to be noted, however, and that truly is a huge cause for concern. Hostility towards the EU and USA can be justified, but anything but an even greater hostility towards Russia, and also China, certainly can’t be.
Still on the topic of that summary, I’d like to make a little correction: Four fifths of those who voted gave their votes for corrupt and criminal politicians, but that only means about a third of the total, considering the turnout. Three fifths, as that article does correctly point out, just guaranteed the result by not voting. But I’ll also say that, while I assume that the four fifths included the votes for USL and ARD, and may or may not include those for UDMR as well, something must also be said about PP-DD. Perhaps they’re not so clearly corrupt and criminal, though they have some issues as well, starting from their leader, but what’s clear is that PP-DD is an extremely stupid choice and likely even more dangerous than either USL or ARD.

The truth is that there were basically no options worth supporting this time. The only ones to field candidates in all the electoral colleges were USL, ARD and UDMR, with PP-DD close but missing a few. PRM, who are also definitely not a valid choice, being right-wing extremists, had candidates in some 63% of the colleges, PER, who are largely ecologists in name only, in only some 39%, and other smaller parties, which I also fail to see as a real option even in theory, in only a handful. That’s because the hatred against PDL (ARD) is so great that USL was able to gather nearly everybody around them in an alliance with the sole purpose of “winning the war against their regime”. Projects, future plans, what’s that? Nobody knows and apparently nobody cares, so other parties, including the Green Party and the Greens’ Movement, accepted to join the alliance and have as little as a single candidate on USL’s lists in exchange for not fielding any on their own.
Personally, I voted for PER, being lucky enough to live somewhere where they had candidates for both chambers, but it was just to say that I did, because even a recent interview with their president proved once again that they have nothing to do with the Green doctrine. They’re very socially conservative, are set against the European Greens, support nuclear as the only option to move away from fossil fuels because “renewables are too expensive”, and are clearly right-wing economically, being mainly interested in economic growth, just done with some care for the environment, stating that they’re not “extremists” to think the other way around. Either way, they got all of 0.78% overall, so it doesn’t matter, even if this means that their candidates averaged around 2%, which would have clearly been the best score Greens or Ecologists would have ever obtained in Romania if they’d have managed to have people in all the colleges.

With the final results just announced, it appears that USL do have more than two thirds of the total seats, as well as more than two thirds of the seats in the Senate. In the Chamber of Deputies they are just shy of two thirds, but the minorities’ group is always allying with whoever governs, so they have well over two thirds there too, without any need for other alliances or negotiations, and therefore there’s nothing stopping them from changing the Constitution as they see fit, switching us to a parliamentary republic led by an unelected prime-minister and with a purely figurehead president. Some of them would want said president to be elected by the Parliament and others would actually prefer a return to monarchy, since they’re just talking figureheads anyway, but they were willing to “compromise” by allowing the people to continue electing the president, as long as the office will be stripped of any real powers, which will be handed over to a prime-minister appointed directly by the party that obtains the most seats.
They plan on some other changes as well, many of which equally worrying, including that of the electoral system. Granted that the current hybrid system is a very bad choice, and it also caused the number of seats to increase from 470 to a staggering 588 at the moment, which creates the somewhat amusing problem of not having enough seats for a joint session, literally, as the large chamber has 501 seats, but it’s still definitely less troubling than the first-past-the-post one they seem keen to implement. Not that they can be blamed for trying at the moment, since under such a system USL would have won 88% of the seats in the Chamber and some 93% in the Senate, but people sure are morons to encourage them towards it by voting for them in such numbers!

To conclude, while PP-DD was, as I said, probably the most dangerous and, to put it bluntly, idiotic choice, PDL (ARD) had created a lot of problems and would have continued to do so, therefore putting them back in control wasn’t an option, the most realistic estimate being that life would have continued to be difficult under their leadership, with little to no real hope of improvement, though the risk of having the situation spiral out of control would have at least been very low. USL, on the other hand, may manage to alleviate some issues in the near future and create a false sense of security for a year or two, but the price will most probably be the fact that things will take a dramatic turn for the worse afterwards, plus that the changes they want to make to fundamental laws and their pro-Russian attitude should be more than enough to completely disqualify them in the mind of anyone capable of thinking things through for at least a few seconds.
Yet options existed, certainly starting from not allowing USL to score such a clear victory, taking away their chance to make all those fundamental changes and making sure that a sufficiently powerful opposition will exist to keep them somewhat in check. In addition, the other parties certainly shouldn’t have joined them, instead choosing to remain independent and take their chances with their own doctrine, therefore giving people a reasonable number of options to choose from. But people are fucking morons and now, as stated in that article that I started from, we all have to pay the price.

Bottom line, as one of the 1.27% of eligible voters, 3.04% of participating voters and 3.15% of voters who cast valid votes who chose something else, voting for parties, or independents, that didn’t make it into the Parliament and therefore aren’t represented in any way, I don’t see why I should be forced to live with the consequences of others’ idiocy, thank you very much. And, while I normally frown at those who don’t vote, this time around I can certainly understand those who lived in areas where the only options were USL, ARD, UDMR, PP-DD and perhaps PRM and could honestly say that they had no options whatsoever, so I’d include them among those who shouldn’t suffer because of others’ choices as well.