Restarting Protests in Romania
This week marks one year since the start of last year’s protests, which brought down the Boc Government and eventually removed PDL from power several months before the elections. Unfortunately, the relatively few individuals who were actually thinking things through and seeing that USL, or even PP-DD, were nothing more than slightly different kinds of evil and therefore not worth supporting in the least were drowned out by the masses swayed by USL’s massive campaign, so the result was a very solid USL Government, backed by two thirds of the Parliament as of last month’s elections. In short, we as a nation jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Fortunately, at least some people didn’t forget that and now they plan to restart the protests, reminding the new government that not everyone can be fooled so easily and that repeating their predecessors’ mistakes will result in them sharing their fate. Just two of those I have seen announced so far do this, one in Bucharest and one in Cluj, while another one will unfortunately continue to be only against the president and openly in support of USL, but those two still count for something. Perhaps there will be more after them, or perhaps even at the same time, in other cities, but we have to start somewhere, right?
Now there are the usual problems about the very low turnout, the rather unclear demands, the conflicts between the various potential leaders and the various groups, but it’s a very good thing that something is at least supposed to happen. What the result will actually end up being, when you also include the likely interference of the police and, in case of this one from Bucharest, the fact that it’s right across the road from the one that supports USL and there have been plenty of conflicts between the two sides last year, we’ll see later.
