One of the main reasons
why I have decided a while ago to abandon Europe for good and to
return to my adoptive country, Australia, is the proliferation of
so-called “experts” in political analysis and geopolitical
affairs who are quite ready to distort the truth, manipulate public
opinion and sell their meagre talents to the highest bidder. The
following article published by two political analysts - one from
Poland and the other one from Romania - amply illustrates my point
(link
to the article here).
I have followed the
events unfolding in Romania since the recent general election in an
unbiased and non-partisan manner. Both parties in this conflict -
President Iohannis and his backers, on the one hand, and the leaders
of the largest Romanian party, the Social Democrats, on the other –
have made huge errors of judgement and through their actions have
pushed a part of the Romanian population to the brink.
In truth, there are
only two forces fighting it out in Bucharest. The former Securitate
apparatchiks, who after the revolution succeeded in infiltrating in a
tentacular fashion the justice system as well, have severely
undermined Romanian democracy for the past ten years to date. They
have perfected a system of government that is based on mass
surveillance of the population and on a justice system that is
totally subordinated to the secret services and the subservient
media. The centre of power in this system is the Cotroceni
presidential palace and it is operated directly by the president of
the day (first Basescu and now Iohannis).
The other side, made up
of the former politicians of the communist-era regime and young
politicians recruited after the revolution, is by and large favoured
by the Romanian population which has returned them to power time and
again, with ever-increased majorities. This group dominates the
parliament and its members are usually in charge, for better or for
worse, of governing Romania.
In order to undermine
the politicians' popularity and install their own government, the
former and current secret service apparatchiks grouped around the
president have used an anti-corruption campaign and the National
Anti-corruption Agency (DNA) to imprison, fabricate evidence or drag
through the courts almost all relevant leaders of their opposition,
now in control of both chambers of parliament and of the government.
In so doing, they have severely jeopardised the rule of law and the
country's main democratic institutions, not to mention the fact that
they have made a mockery of the idea of justice in Romania.
President Iohannis has
lately resorted to personally participating in the street
demonstrations against the government (!), after the newly-elected
prime minister made the error of rushing through a set of
badly-needed amnesty measures. Using the subservient part of the
Romanian media, the secret services from Bucharest to Brussels
(EurActiv was only too happy to oblige) are hard at work depicting
the elected officials and the government party as thieves and corrupt
individuals who should not be trusted and should be locked up simply
because they're winning elections. In fact, however, President
Iohannis is himself a felon, as more than ten years ago he obtained
two valuable properties in the centre of Sibiu using forged
inheritance documents (the courts in Brasov, my native city, have
rejected the president's appeals and annulled the phony inheritance
papers).
To resume, we are not
witnessing a “social insurrection” in Romania, as the authors of
the article above will have you believe. What we are in fact
witnessing is a set of actions and manipulations undertaken by a
desperate president whose party was soundly defeated during the
recent elections but who still wishes to impose a government of his
own choice against the will of the Romanian electorate or that of the
Romanian parliament.
Now if Brussels
considers that to be a fight for “democracy”, then the entire
European hierarchy is rotten to its core. To be sure, a quarter of a
million protesters spending a few days on the streets after an
intense manipulation campaign are in no way representative of the
millions of Romanian voters who cast their ballots in favour of the
current crop of parliamentarians and the government they have
appointed in the wake of the December 2016 elections.
