Cav's Place

In a very surprising and perhaps downright shocking turn of events, three of the parties known to have a green or ecologist doctrine in Romania have organized a press conference yesterday to announce their merger, with the Romanian Ecologist Party (PER) also mentioning in passing that they had merged with the Romanian Ecologist Union (UER), which was the fourth and smallest party with such a doctrine, last week. This was preceded by a brief notice about the merger of the Greens’ Movement (MV) and the Green Party (PV), but not even that notice mentioned anything about PER and nothing was ever made public about any negotiations taking place. Before the announcement regarding press conference, which was only made a couple of hours before the scheduled time, none of the parties had offered any information whatsoever about any of this other than the simple statement regarding the merger between MV and PV, which also lacked any sort of details.
Considering this complete lack of transparency and some of the reactions I’ve seen, I’m led to believe that even many of the members of the three parties were kept in the dark about it and some may still not know any more than I do. Still, after going through all the news posted or linked to by the parties involved and also watching a full recording of the press conference, I assume I’ve gathered as much information as they’re willing to allow people to gather at the moment and I’m going to base my comments and conclusions on it.

Seeing as the merger talks between PV and PER had clearly failed and both of these parties were openly hostile towards MV, whose leaders had also repeatedly stated that they want nothing to do with either of them, it’s actually rather amusing to see how quickly these differences were set aside after MV appeared to have secured a rather lucrative arrangement with the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which appeared to more or less guarantee a few seats in the Parliament after this year’s elections. Both PER and PV had taken the correct stance of blaming all the major parties for the country’s problems during recent years and trying to present themselves as an alternative, but as soon as the president of PSD stated that there will be a few eligible positions made available for their “green allies” and invited them to negotiations, they couldn’t throw all of that behind them fast enough.
What’s more difficult to understand, however, is what made PV and, more notably, MV practically allow themselves to be absorbed into PER. I mean, it may officially be a merger, but the fact that, according to a statement released by PV, PER will hold seven of the 13 seats in the new party’s ruling council quite clearly shows that they in fact took over the other parties, and that’s made even more obvious by the fact that only PER will appear on the ballot at the next elections, if admittedly fielding candidates from all of these parties. I really can’t understand what happened there and what did they hold over the others in order to obtain this result, which is even more shocking when you see that MV, despite holding on to the goods they all coveted, appears to have drawn the shortest stick, having only two members in said council, even if one of them will be the new party’s president.

Still, I’ve been asking for such a merger for quite some time, so in itself it’s certainly good news. The problem is that it happened in probably the worst way possible, so the end result is clearly negative. If MV’s current leader, Remus Cernea, would have been removed in the process and the new party’s stance regarding the major parties would have been the complete rejection advocated in recent years by PV and PER, but otherwise the doctrine would largely follow that of MV, it’d have probably been the best news coming from the Romanian political scene since 1990. As it is, however, Remus Cernea will quite obviously be the new party’s president, MV’s collaboration with PSD will be a clear policy for the new party, but PER, known for being socially conservative and right-wing on the economic scale, so exactly the opposite of how a Green party should be, will most likely determine the doctrine in most other aspects.
What this means is that all options that were so far available to those who desire to put the environment first but also oppose the major parties have been removed and, perhaps unless some independent candidate will run in my area and provide me with a tolerable option, I for one will probably need to take something against nausea before going to vote in December, considering what I’ll be forced to pick. At the same time, I can’t be against this party in the least, because they do appear to put the environment first and that’s certainly my top concern, so it’s a very awkward situation, clearly supporting them ideologically but firmly opposing them politically.

What’s left to do in the next few months is keep a close eye on the developments and continue to support most of their projects that deal with the environment, animal rights and welfare, minority rights, individual rights and freedoms and other such issues even after voting against them, and therefore also against my own interests, in December, while at the same time continuing to oppose their political choices at least as vehemently as I have been opposing those made by MV so far. Afterwards, I can only hope that they’ll manage to avoid the 2008 scenario, when PV and PER ran together in the parliamentary elections and seemed set to merge shortly afterwards but then dropped the whole idea almost without a word and went their separate ways once again, somehow manage to stay together until 2016 and decide at some point between now and then to get back to being the true political alternative they actually should be by opposing all the major parties equally.
If and when that will happen, you can certainly count on me to offer them whatever support I can even on the political side of things, as I have back in 2009 for example. However, the current leaders of these parties have proven once again, through this utterly inexcusable lack of transparency, that they’re not to be trusted in any way, shape or form, so the sooner they’re removed from power, the better. I’d be tempted to say that managing to remove Remus Cernea from power but somehow still keeping him in the party would be the first priority from this point of view, seeing as this complete lack of transparency is becoming the norm for MV and his attitude in many other situations makes it perfectly obvious that he may well have abilities that make him very useful for any such efforts but is highly toxic if allowed to make any decisions, but at the same time I know I’m rather biased here, seeing as I haven’t followed the others to be able to accurately compare and I’m also quite set against him personally ever since he banned me from his Facebook page, so I’ll just say that it’d be a huge improvement if all the current leaders would be replaced and leave it at that.