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| ROMANIA’S PRESIDENT BEFORE IMPEACHMENT OR RESIGNATION? (18.04.2007) |
| (2007-04-18) |
| Last updated: 2007-04-18 16:16 EET |
“I will step down within five minutes!” Romanian President Traian Basescu said calmly but firmly, only 48 hours before a parliament vote which might lead to his impeachment. Basescu only made clearer a decision he had announced earlier. There will be five minutes for another five-year presidential mandate. Legally, Basescu’s impeachment had to be followed by a referendum through which the voters would validate or refute the MPs’ vote.
However, as pundits and sociologists say, his resignation would automatically lead to early election, whose result cannot be but a new five-year tenure. As analyst Andrei Cornea has pointed out, (quote) ‘this will not immediately and directly lead to anything fundamental. Basescu will indulge in his victory for a week, only to subsequently face the same government, Prime Minister and Parliament. Same problems, same rows.” (unquote)
Moreover the president has been given a shot in the arm, after the Constitutional Court gave a negative opinion on the impeachment process initiated by the Social Democratic Party, whose alleged experts had minutely leveled more than 20 counts against the president, in a bid to prove he had severely violated the Constitution. Although packed with justices owning their jobs to the former ruling party, including former social-democrat justice ministers - the Court’s decision didn’t give satisfaction to the former political rulers. “Constitutional prerogatives and the legitimacy granted by the electorate’s vote allow the president to play an active role and his presence on Romania’s political scene cannot be reduced to a symbolic, ceremonial exercise”, the Court ruled.
The decision enables the president to resume the actions which have constantly annoyed the political class, namely to turn up with obstinacy whenever the government meets, to ask for the resignation of the Prime Minister or of the heads of the intelligence services, to call on the Prosecutor’s Office to reopen some legal cases or to openly voice his opinion on various domestic or foreign policy issues. The justices have thus refused to give a legal endorsement to a purely political move, dealing an additional blow to the anti-presidential majority in Parliament.
Having common roots with the ex-communist left, the Social Democratic Party, the Greater Romania Party and the Conservative Party are the only political groups whose leaders have declared themselves convinced of the discipline and unanimity of their parliamentary groups towards the impeachment procedure. The pro-presidential Democratic Party and the Liberal Democratic Party are expected to either vote against the impeachment or leave the hall during the voting. Consequently, the dispute will be umpired by the two components of the minority government, the Liberal Party and the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, which gave their members the freedom to vote according to their own conscience.
(Bogdan Matei)
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