Political analysis or political garbage ?

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.