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| A REVIEW OF THE 2008 INTERNAL EVENTS IN ROMANIA |
| (2008-12-28) |
| Last updated: 2009-01-12 16:30 EET |
The forecasts issued these days by foreign and local experts, which are not at all in the optimist spirit of the winter holidays, warn that in 2009 the Romanian economy will be affected by the world crisis. The record growth of over 8% in 2008 reported across the whole European Union will go down to 3 or 4% in 2009, in the best case scenario. The first signs of crisis already cropped up this autumn. Consumption, mainly based on loans, has drastically diminished. The companies that exported their output were forced to temporarily lay off their staff or simply sack them due to a drop in demand. And the cases of bankruptcies reported among small and medium sized companies increased. Whole sectors of the economy, from the car industry to tourism, and from constructions to animal breeding, need aid from the state.
Against the backdrop of this depressing economic and social context, Romania has a new center-left government set up by two former opposition parties: the pro-presidential Liberal Democratic Party and the leftist Social Democratic Party. Prime minister designate is the leader of the Liberal Democrats Emil Boc, former mayor of the city of Cluj (in central Romania). Labeled as the most docile disciple of President Traian Basescu, Boc was chosen as the emergency solution after Liberal Democratic Euro-MP Theodor Stolojan gave up the position of PM for yet unknown reasons less than a week after he had received this appointment.
The new Cabinet validated on Monday by Parliament includes very few new names. The rest were members of the previous governments. Here they are: from the Social Democratic Party Dan Nica was designated Vice-Premier, Cristian Diaconescu - Foreign Minister, Marian Sarbu – Labor Minister, Ecaterina Andronescu – Education Minister, Ilie Sarbu – Agriculture Minister and Gabriel Oprea – Minister of the Interior; from the Liberal Democratic Party Gheorghe Pogea was designated Finance Minister, Radu Berceanu –Minister of Transportation, Vasile Blaga – Minister for Regional Development and Adrian Videanu –Minister of the Economy. They are all veterans of high-level politics. Laura Stefan, an expert with the Romanian Academic Society, explains why these politicians were chosen for the respective ministries:
”I believe that the most important ministries, which deal with lots of money, were assigned to those people who have a lot of experience in their parties and in those respective fields. They must have taken into account the fact that 2009 is going to be a difficult year and they counted on the expertise of these people”.
Journalist Tia Serbanescu notes that the ministers were announced separately, and she fears that the new government will be not only a two –color one, red and orange, but also a two-headed government:
“For me it would have been normal for the PM designate to announce the whole list of ministers, because this is the government he will be heading and will be responsible for. The fact that the ministers were announced separately is further proof that we are going to have a two-headed government, even if this was not acknowledged officially. The way positions were assigned shows a clear separation of the parties within a single government.”
The only so-called independent minister of the new government is the former and current Justice Minister, Catalin Predoiu, who remained in the government and left the National Liberal Party after the Liberals and their Ethnic Hungarian partners went in the opposition.
Fighting the economic crisis was the debatable moral alibi invoked to impress the electorate by the Liberal Democrats and the Social Democrats, avowed enemies for almost two decades, when they signed the so-called ‘Partnership for Romania’, the founding document of this new coalition. The arithmetic argument, however, is indisputable: the government would have parliamentary command of over 70%, condemning the former parties in power to a tough position: 20% for the liberal party, and 7% for the Hungarian Union. The liberal democrats and the social democrats had almost equal percentages, with around 35%, at the parliamentary elections on November 30th.
Although they got several tens of thousands of votes more, the left got three seats less. It is only one of the paradoxes of the introduction for the first time of the so-called uninominal vote and the principle ‘one seat- one elected official’ instead of the party list system, in place since 1990. Because of a complicated redistribution system, meant to preserve proportionality, and, at least in principle, offer parties seats in line with the number of votes they got, enough candidates that came in first in their colleges were left without seats, and many that came in second or third are now senators or deputies. The presidency of the two chambers was itself divided between the government parties. The new head of senate, by constitution the second in command in the Romanian state, will social democratic leader Mircea Geoana, while the head of the chamber of deputies will be liberal democrat Roberta Anastase, the first woman to hold such a position after the revolution of 1989.
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