Volume 10 Number 1

Winter 2001

Feature: Romania after the 2000 Elections

Interpreting an Electoral Setback—Romania 2000
     Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Sorin Ionita

There are some striking similarities between Romania’s 2000 general elections and those in Poland in 1993. In both countries, growing dissatisfaction with a fragmented parliament provoked debate, before and during the campaign, about reform of the electoral system. In the end, proportional representation was nevertheless preserved, and the electoral threshold was raised to 5 percent (higher for coalitions). Bickering center-right governing coalitions were not able to work out viable common strategies and, with their defeat, paid the price for the painful reforms initiated the previous years. The postcommunist left won by a landslide, and the anticommunist right not only lost power but did not even make it into parliament, haven fallen below the electoral threshold.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that one’s worst fears, after such electoral disasters, do not necessarily come true. The Polish center-left did not reverse earlier reforms and proved at least as capable as the previous governments of managing the economy and leading the country in a better direction (for example, toward joining the EU and NATO). Moreover, a Solidarity-led alliance restructured itself and was returned to power four years later. Perhaps there is hope for Romania, too.

Unfortunately, there are also differences between Poland in 1993 and Romania in 2000. Despite efforts by the center-right cabinet over the last two years, the magnitude of reforms in Romania still does not match the shock therapy that put the Polish economy on the right track in 1990–91. Romanians, moreover, do not have a president with the stature of Lech Walesa, who, despite his increasing unpopularity at home, was able, at the time, to focus international attention on his country and counterbalance a center-left parliament and cabinet. To these differences we must add that there is little to no interest in Romania to be found in the West and thus little aid and almost no foreign investment. And finally last-minute doubts have emerged regarding the depth of the country’s democratic transformation given the impressive electoral performance of the red–brown (communist–fascist) Greater Romania Party (GRP) and its extremist leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor. Whether Romania—under Ion Iliescu as president—will be able to replicate Poland’s success in the years to come (the two countries are similar in size, structure of the pre-1989 industrial sector, share of population working in agriculture, and so on) is anybody’s guess. A lot will depend on the ability of the political class to bridge its ideological gaps and improve its effectiveness, thus regaining the loyalty of that portion of the electorate that cast a protest or antisystem vote in 2000. The democratic-right is now under considerable pressure to reform as well as rebrand itself. But in order to succeed, it must start with a honest attempt to understand the mistakes of the last four years.

Not all the problems the ruling coalition confronted after 1996 were of its own making. The victory of the anticommunist parties in 1996 came too late and was too incomplete to change the transition blueprint already created by the postcommunist parties. Despite their victory, the anticommunists did not win an absolute majority, so they had to ally with a postcommunist party (the Democratic Party [DP]), which did its best to block the restitution of property. The reformers also lacked government experience and had neither sufficient nor qualified staff to replace the existing bureaucracy, the still-formidable relic of the communist era. By the end of 1999, the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PSDR), the communist-successor party, led by Iliescu, was leading in the polls again, and, in June 2000, it won local elections and was clearly poised to win general ones as well. What was this blueprint, which made all the difference between being a first-wave applicant to the European Union and a laggard country such as Romania? And what kind of society has it created in the end? Here are three of its defining features.

The first and perhaps most important factor to consider is the glaring absence of decommunization. The extensive survival of communist-era formal and informal networks has provided communism with a certain retrospective legitimacy.

After a decade of transition, Romania is still a country where communism was not only never put on trial but has survived as a legitimate doctrine, successfully putting its traditional enemies on the defensive. Romania never passed a law for the screening of civil servants, thereby cleansing the administration of communist-era bureaucrats; nor has it purged society of former Securitate informants. Although a law for the screening and reviewing of Securitate files (which allows citizens access to their own files though it has not banished the former collaborators from public positions) was passed in December 1999, it was too late. Most of the targets of such legislation had already won the battle for economic and political power. The upshot is that the previous communist elites still control most of the formal and the informal economy, including the new private media. The press remains authoritatively dominated by former Securitate agents and their national-communist ideology. (For details, see Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s account of Romanian press coverage of the Kosovo war in the East European Constitutional Review 8, no. 3 [Summer 1999].) Besides the economy and questions of freedom of expression, the absence of decommunization has affected the legal culture and even the moral health of the society in general, as people have come to understand that justice does not work, and that Stalinist torturers, the terrorists of December 1989, and the 1990 vigilante miners remain at large. To complete this picture, in January 1999, miners—led by GRP members—besieged Bucharest and, after beating the police, were stopped, at the last moment, by the government and the army with a mixture of threats and promised rewards. The event, broadcast extensively by BBC, CNN, and every European channel, showed the entire world how frail was the power installed in November 1996. Worth noting is the fact that the miners reportedly defeated the riot police in their first confrontations, in part, because they had better communication equipment, meaning plenty of mobile phones, while the police were still using an outdated radio station. Except for a few of the leaders of the miners’ revolt, who were fined, nobody was ever charged for this assault on the state.

The second crucial feature of the country’s dubious transition blueprint had to do, not surprisingly, with property transfers. The main goal of the Romanian transition was not the creation of a market economy. For the postcommunist political class what mattered most was being in control of the transformation, and, specifically, of the privatization process. Such control allowed the members of this class to achieve two important objectives: the preservation of a massive constituent base in the state sector and the accumulation of private assets in the hands of their political clientele. Even as late as 1998, Iliescu’s main condition for supporting the government’s budget was to slow down privatization and increase the Audit Court’s control of the process. The court, whose president, like every important figure of the judiciary, had been appointed and granted tenure in the Iliescu era, even tried, in 1997, to interfere—in a perfectly communist manner—with the process of determining the correct price of assets to be privatized.

The final defining feature of postcommunist Romania, as a result of both the Constitution and the organic laws, is that the political system suffers from a thoroughgoing lack of accountability. Elections by party lists and the frequent defections of deputies from one party to another, with total disregard of the mandate given by the voters, has made parliament the country’s most unpopular public institution. The legislature elected in 1996 had fought to overturn parliamentary immunity, to no avail. The Constitution grants immunity to parliamentarians regardless of the nature of the offense—political or criminal—and parliament’s own regulations make the lifting of immunity almost impossible. Only twice, in the case of Vadim Tudor and of a PSDR deputy who embezzled and bankrupted a large state bank, have deputies succeeded in stripping a fellow parliamentarian of his immunity. The judiciary, dominated by magistrates held over from the previous regime, has also proved resistant to reform. Experience, measured in years of legal practice, was incorporated into the new laws as the main criterion for being a member of all the important judicial courts. As a result, communist-era magistrates still dominate the judiciary.

This state of affairs partially explains why the campaign against corruption launched by former president Emil Constantinescu in 1997 did not achieve much. It is also true that those elected in 1996 had little understanding of or skill in pursuing the institutional reforms the country needed. The minimal progress they achieved was mostly prompted by the European Commission’s gentle push. They lacked the expertise and the willpower to adjust the institutions to their needs, and they shared the delusion that replacing Iliescu’s people with their own—often relatives and other people they felt they could trust absolutely—was enough to achieve change. By 1999, Constantinescu had the courage to say it plainly: "We won the elections, but did not win power." Until his last day, however, he remained as incapable as the rest of the coalition leaders of understanding that their amateurish approach to institutional reform was as much to blame as fierce resistance to change by the public administration and the corrupted media and business circles.

It would have been difficult for any coalition government—even a more coherent and responsible one, staffed with professional public executives, which was not the case in Romania after 1996—to alter significantly this transition blueprint, so well entrenched was it during the first six years of transition. To their credit, the reformers tried and even achieved some results. Unfortunately, they complicated the situation even further with their own blunders, and the whole unhappy sequence culminated in the disastrous 2000 electoral campaign. There is a long list of ready explanations for the poor electoral performance of the center-right coalition last year, and they range from the deeper, structural ones to short-term actions and decisions made during the campaign. What follows itemizes the more-salient features of that debate.

The failure of institutional reform. The coalition was unable to make reforms visible or otherwise to give a sign that things were changing. The ministers—especially from the Christian Democratic–National Peasant’s Party (CD–NPP)—complained that people did not notice their accomplishments in areas like local government, health care, education, fiscal policy, or housing policy. They had a point. On the other hand, since the reforms were implemented in an erratic manner and policy analysts are still struggling to understand them, it would be foolish to blame the electorate for failing to credit the government. The few areas where changes would have been quickly visible were left untouched: the judicial system, for example, where tens of thousand of trials were pending, or the two houses of the parliament, with almost one thousand bills left languishing on the agenda.

The group most affected by the public’s discontent is CD–NPP, blamed for all the evils of the last four years. It was spectacularly unsuccessful in implementing the laws it managed to pass: the famous 1/2000 law regarding the restitution of forests still exists almost exclusively on paper because of the ineffectiveness and sabotage of various government agencies, some of them, like the Environment Agency, run by fellow party members. The council in charge of reviewing the Securitate files, another CD–NPP idea, wasted much time with administrative arrangements and then rushed to screen the files of candidates in the last weeks of the campaign. The results were disappointing: only about 20 candidates for parliament, most of them far down on the party lists and who probably would not even have made it into parliament, were found guilty of collaborating with the former secret police. Embarrassingly, some of them were CD–NPP members. It is not hard to become cynical about the entire screening project. Most politicians today were once Communist Party members, and, in the late sixties, the authorities decided that party members would no longer be recorded as informants; their files were destroyed. Between 1989 and the passage of the law on the archives last December, many powerful politicians have also had ample opportunity to clear their files of whatever compromising documents remained.

The lack of leadership and professional staff in political parties and government. A strong feeling of drift and lack of coherence has for several years afflicted the center-right side of the political spectrum. Part of this was due to the overly complicated power structure within the ruling coalition. As president, Constantinescu had continuously tried to outmaneuver his main partner, the Democratic Convention (DC), in controlling the government; meanwhile, DC was fighting with DP over ministries, even as the Liberal Party (LP) was trying to gain equal status with CD–NPP inside DC. When it failed, LP left the alliance and ran on its own in the local elections. But there was an obvious lack of leadership within the coalition as well. CD–NPP leaders and agencies fought fiercely with each other in a variety of instances, further undermining the administrative capacity of the government. (For example, the CD–NPP minister of environment blocked the implementation of the forestland restitution law sponsored by his own parliamentary caucus; and the heads of the Ministry of Agriculture and Agency of Regional Development, both from CD–NPP, clashed over the right to administer the EU Sapard program.) Underscoring these intragovernmental conflicts was the fight for control inside DC, with its factions and subgroups at odds with each other and former president Ion Diaconescu unable to keep the peace or maintain a balance. The democratic right, in general, has had weak party leaders who were not able to run for office themselves. They therefore recruited presumably more popular but reluctant outsiders (like Teodor Stolojan and Mugur Isarescu) a few months before the elections to do the job for them. The results were the same in both the local and general elections: the center-right candidates lost because the party campaigns only managed to drag the candidates down, with their final vote tallies yielding results lower than their initial ratings.

It is unlikely that the overall situation will change anytime soon. The Romanian political system does not produce professional cadres and public policies. Even worse, in the last ten years, we have not glimpsed a trend in this direction, as a result, say, of natural evolution. It looks as if we are stuck with an Italian-style party system, which does not train and promote competent public managers and is not able to come up with policy ideas other than very narrow ones (such as tax exemptions), benefiting only a specific clientele. Lip-service is paid to the EU acquis communautaire across the spectrum but with few practical results. PSDR won the last elections simply by staying on the sidelines, watching the center right erode its own political capital, without advancing any alternative strategies whatsoever. In fact, this is a shortcoming that characterizes the entire Romanian intellectual elite: the think tanks (few in number), academia, and the media are not terribly interested in drafting and evaluating public policies with an eye to workable, real-world implementation. Instead, they focus almost exclusively on speculation, storytelling, and amateurish discourse analysis. (The Romanian language does not distinguish between "politics" and "policy," which may explain why politicians and opinion leaders find it so difficult to grasp the notion that policy analysis is something other than gossiping about which minister did what to whom.)

Misreading the voters’ wishes. The basic explanation for the left’s electoral success, which ran with no program except for general promises that it would eradicate poverty, lies in the public’s discontent with the governing coalition’s continuous squabbles and constant deadlocks. In opinion polls, Romanians overwhelmingly declared that they would prefer a government composed of experts, not politicians, and of one party, not a coalition. During the negotiations between LP and the Alliance for Romania (AR)—a reformist splinter of PSDR—the likely presidential candidate of this would-be party, Teodor Stolojan, enjoyed the highest level of sympathy in the opinion polls. Once the merger between these two parties was blocked by AR, it became clear that no party would be strong enough to govern by itself except PSDR. AR collapsed in the polls from around 14 percent to around 4, while its supporters returned to PSDR as the fallback or default choice. The vote for the strongest party became a rational vote for people so disappointed with the ability of parties to govern in a coalition.

Moreover, an assessment of the economic situation, not symbolism, took the upper hand in forming electoral preferences this time. The large majority of those surveyed denied the importance of the left–right dichotomy in their electoral choice. The overwhelming concern was for an improvement in living standards in the near future, and the main reason behind the vote for PSDR was people’s belief that a strong party can run things, unlike an unstable and divided coalition. A majority still believes that nationalized or confiscated property should be returned to the rightful owners, but, since the coalition was unable to keep its promise in this regard, and since most people do not fall into the categories of owner anyway, this general support for property restitution is largely inconsequential. Most of Iliescu’s supporters were drawn from the viewers of state television, just as in the old days. The majority of this constituency, despite denying any ideological affinity, is, nevertheless, strongly collectivist: 68 percent of these people think that Communism was a good idea badly put into practice, and 78 percent think that the state should support loss-making state industry. Communist hard-liners are still grouped around Vadim Tudor, while PSDR and Iliescu draw on the poorest and least-educated countryside and urban population. This stable constituency, however, was recently joined by some disappointed middle-class entrepreneurs. As a result of the overtaxation of small and medium businesses between 1997 and 1999 (a policy enforced by the IMF in order to ensure Romania would be able to pay debts contracted in 1995 and 1996), the current government coalition alienated its main constituency, the feeble middle class, which had begun to emerge in 1990 and thereafter.

Failed electoral alliances and a collapsing center punished by its own electorate. Sometime in the summer of 2000 there was a chance that the entire pool of voters positioned between the two blocs of the old left and newer right would be captured by an LP–AR alliance, which no doubt would have become the second biggest political force in Romania. The alliance was undermined by the violent anticommunist discourse of some LP members (among whom was Senator Dan Amedeu Lazarescu, a longtime collaborator of the former secret police) and by the stubbornness of Teodor Melescanu, AR’s leader, who did not want to give up running for the presidency himself. The alliance would have featured Securitate men on both sides but would have inspired a sense of moderation and made a much better nucleus around which this amorphous electoral segment, both anti-Iliescu and anti-Constantinescu, could have coalesced. This group of voters, centered between the postcommunist and anticommunist blocs, plays a pivotal role in Romanian elections. The cornerstone of our democratization would be to create a party or alliance, though with values more liberal than this constituency currently embraces, that could capture and bring it gently into the mainstream. Fierce and unnecessary animosity has blocked this unappealing but necessary project—to everyone’s detriment. A moderate, antisystem AR would have made a more positive contribution to parliament than the extremist GRP.

As for the other parties, CD–NPP made the mistake of allying itself with minor and unpopular parties and failing to change its leadership after the June local elections. The Liberals did not remove from their list the former Securitate collaborators, especially their president Mircea Ionescu Quintus, a well-known pal of Vadim Tudor. Both parties failed to come forward with a single candidate for the presidency. These blunders alienated their natural voters. Had these historical parties tried to self-destruct on purpose, they could not have obtained superior results. LP won its old match with CD–NPP, proving that it was in no way inferior to them; the electorate was not necessarily any more faithful to the latter. Unfortunately, the final results prove that the electorate did not prefer one or the other but voted, faute de mieux, for the idea of democratic anticommunism and was eventually poorly served by both.

The poor showing of the democratic candidates in the campaign. Not only did the center-right parties put off their voters by failing to present a single presidential candidate, but they were also unable to support the candidates they did nominate during the campaign. The most vivid and charismatic television appearance, by far, was that of the extremist Vadim Tudor. The postelectoral evaluations show that Stolojan and Isarescu undermined each other’s credibility by appearing to be two technocrats on the same track, and thus giving the impression that they were simply office hunters, rather dull and awkward ones to boot. Their poor performance (both ended the electoral campaign with roughly half the numbers they began with) and their obvious lack of preparation for the television debates only reinforced the impression of political amateurism conveyed by the democratic right. The amazing unprofessionalism of the campaigns was not the fault of the public-relations firms that ran them, however, but of the parties and party leaders. Without party think tanks and strategists to help draft political projects, the parties themselves scarcely knew what to ask from their contractors.

One major, outstanding factor will complete this picture, and it is external to the country: insufficient Western support for the Romanian leaders elected in 1996. Romania was not invited in 1997 to join NATO despite intense advocacy efforts by Emil Constantinescu and Jacques Chirac. In addition, the Kosovo war inflicted important losses on the Romanian economy, due mostly to the embargo on Danube traffic. The bombing of Serbia, a traditional ally and neighboring Christian Orthodox country, was highly unpopular in Romania. Romanians identified strongly with Serbs and resented Western involvement in defense of the Albanians, speculating that a similar offensive could one day involve Transylvania, where a Hungarian community of two million still resides. They would, however, have accepted Constantinescu’s strong endorsement of NATO had this policy at least boosted living standards. Instead, in 1999, the government was forced to pay foreign debts, contracted by the PSDR government in 1994–95, in order to avoid bankruptcy. Almost every Romanian citizen contributed to this repayment with nearly a quarter of his or her income in 1999. It was a levy similar to the one Nicolae Ceausescu had required in his last years, even if this time the tool used was to keep the wages in the public sector well below the rate of inflation. By the beginning of 2000, despite Romania’s receiving a formal invitation to join the EU, at the December 1999 Helsinki summit, Constantinescu had become, in the eyes of most Romanians, a loser. He appeared to be a politician who had betrayed traditional alliances and friendships, and this in exchange for being treated by the West pretty much as Iliescu had been treated in his time. The year 2000, despite a boost in exports and a return to growth, recorded the lowest rate of foreign direct investment in the last several years. Romanians thus decided that old-timer Ion Iliescu, not amateur Constantinescu, could make the most of scarce domestic resources.

All of the foregoing amounts to an ill omen for the capacity of the Romanian center right to reform itself and approach the 2004 elections with the institutional means and mentality of winners—whether its members are in parliament, like LP, or out in the cold, like CD–NPP. But the disappointment and bitterness was not much different in Poland in the aftermath of the 1993 elections. It remains to be seen if Romania’s center-right politicians will be able to replicate the spectacular comeback of their Polish counterparts, who returned to power four years after the electoral disaster of November 1993. Our guess is that letting the PSDR government erode its own popularity through new years of economic and social hardship will not be enough, and that a great deal of serious political work, over and beyond talk-shows, and an effort to penetrate deeper into provincial Romania, will be needed.

Alina Mungiu Pippidi is a professor of political communication at the Romanian National School of Government and Administration and director of the Romanian Academic Society, a think tank in Bucharest. Sorin Ionita is executive director of the Romanian Academic Society and a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University.

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