The PNL heads into opposition, the PSD into government, while the RMDSZ stays sneaky as ever

For the first time in a long while, it looks as though the PNL is seriously considering being in opposition, and furthermore, pursuing an independent party policy of its own. After all, for close to two decades now, perhaps more, the Liberals have been the PSD's sidecar — we still remember the USL (Social-Liberal Union), the PSD–PNL coalition that ruled Romania under total dominance from 2012 to 2014, when the PNL left the coalition.

Back then too they tried enthusiastically to move toward opposition, but beyond attacking the PSD they had nothing to show for it — it was no accident that the USR managed to grow up alongside them, or rather, it was no accident that so many well-meaning young people, who had spent years protesting in the streets, thought back then that their movement should organize itself into a party. (This had its downsides too, and party politics ultimately devoured many good people, so that at the major turning points the USR behaved just like the other parties — for instance, the internal takedown of its own presidential candidate, or to put it plainly, her betrayal in favor of Nicușor Dan, is exactly such a case. It's no accident that Elena Lasconi recently asked Dominic Fritz, cynically, whether it was better, after all, that Dan became president. Her question is more than justified, but as I said, that would take us too far afield.) Back to the PNL. The Liberals then formed a government again, with the USR and the RMDSZ, and the first thing they did was resort to tricks borrowed from the PSD to blow up the USR, which refused to go along with it and left the government — only for us to end up with the then-president, one Klaus Iohannis, a moderately idiotic but severely arrogant figure, bringing the PSD–PNL coalition back together in the form of the Ciolacu–Ciucă tandem. Without delving further into the PNL's party history of recent years, it can be said that somehow the math never worked out for the Liberals — they wanted so badly to gain and hold on to power that they allied with everyone who crossed their path on the highway, so that in the end their value began to converge strongly toward zero.

With Bolojan, their chance has now opened up, and it seems they're beginning to understand that a few years in opposition can bear very fine fruit, especially if they also have legitimate moral grounds for it — and simply not being in bed with the PSD counts as morality in this country. Moreover, for the first time the PNL is in a position where it can not only crow from the sidelines but actually point to something it has achieved — many criticize Bolojan's governance, but it is an undeniable fact that thanks to him the budget didn't spiral out of control, and thanks to him we were at least able to look somewhat presentable in the eyes of Western markets and the EU. His grand state reform didn't succeed, but the image remained that he was the one pushed aside precisely because dismantling sinecures would have disturbed the system. These two factors, morality and governing achievements, are just enough ammunition for the two years until the next parliamentary elections, and Bolojan can reasonably trust that the PSD won't change, so sooner or later it will turn the country against itself again — and then the people will turn toward the opposition. Those who wanted to find their way to AUR have already found it, but there is a very large segment that, while dissatisfied, doesn't want to vote for AUR either, and for them a pole led by Bolojan could offer a serious alternative.

The Liberals have already given the starting push, declaring yesterday that from now on the PSD is responsible for everything — and that's true. The Social Democrats are in government with no coalition partner to blame — which, for a party that scored 22 percent in the last elections, is no small feat. The PSD's real power, however, is far greater than that: it is still perhaps the most deeply entrenched party in Romania, with a huge number of mayors, county council presidents and local majorities, and now the government is theirs too, so they have every chance to govern well, if they wanted to. Except the PSD usually squanders such chances, simply because it treats power the way Iliescu's disciples always have: doing with it whatever they want, not what needs to be done. But if Romania changes, the PSD changes too — though far from enough for us to actually believe them, yet still: this is no longer quite the party where the likes of Dragnea, Tudose, Iliescu and Năstase openly plundered the country, even if we still don't see Grindeanu turning into a statesman. Except it's not even certain that we should be keeping our watchful eyes on Grindeanu: the party's real strongman has turned out to be Neacșu, who, as interior minister and deputy prime minister, effectively has oversight of the government's entire operation and can influence it in full. And what we know about Neacșu is bad enough that we shouldn't trust him: he employed his own daughter in his own parliamentary office, for which he was convicted of conflict of interest — with a final, binding ruling. Yes, and now he is the deputy prime minister in the new government, as well as the interior minister. That alone is enough to reasonably assume about the PSD that it will fail to keep pace with the changes in Romanian society, that it will use government to strengthen its own party positions, that it will once again rack up a record deficit, and that only God knows what will happen once it eventually leaves power.

But this is what Nicușor Dan managed to cobble together — the head of state we elected in the expectation that he would strengthen democratic processes, even though, through the aforementioned sidelining of Lasconi, we could already have had some idea that this man, however brilliant a mathematician he may be, would become part of the system without scruple — or, to put it another way, he simply faded into the grey.

In a Romanian political system thoroughly interwoven with the secret services, however, everything worked out well for Nicușor — he may be the only one who can be satisfied: with the PSD's help, he removed from government the very Bolojan who could have been his challenger in the next presidential election, and with the PSD a MAGA-compatible government has been formed, which is surely convenient for a head of state who lobbies through paid articles in the American press. From now on, the PSD won't support any initiative to suspend the president — AUR has one such move up its sleeve, though it has not yet managed to gather the required number of signatures — so Dan remains the only one who can sleep soundly.

Of course, Hungarian readers are usually curious
about what the future may hold for the RMDSZ

Well, in their case there's no question of any matter of principle; morality and such things have long been off the table. Hunor and his circle have fully embraced the profit-oriented approach they call Transylvanian pragmatism, and they neither want to nor can get out of it — but then why would they want to? After all, the Hungarians will vote for them regardless, and the missing one or two percent can be swept up from Teleorman and so on, because under a deal struck at a spa named after the god Neptune, they have a reserved seat in Romanian domestic politics and at its highest levels.

For now, at least — because Romania is changing, and changing a great deal, with all its extremist phenomena, with the whole Georgescu–AUR–Șoșoacă saga included, Romania is still changing. It would once have been unimaginable for this political class to go five months without managing to squeeze a government out of itself — yet they pulled off this political crisis with ease, losing 770 million euros through a delayed wage law, with several billion more having floated down the Dâmbovița. Crises like this only rear their head in this "mioritic" country when change is brewing.

There is the EU, which is taking fiscal tightening of subsidies ever more seriously, and without which Romania would collapse within moments; there is the Russian threat and MAGA-style idiocy, which affects Romania, as a strategic partner of the United States, far more strongly than one might think at first glance; and there is the fragmented country itself, which, though it has shown spectacular development over the past twenty years, has failed to eliminate social inequalities, and these are now becoming harder and harder to push back into the bottle. Bolojan was able to start putting the public finances in order without major social resistance not because people welcomed it — the tax hikes and cuts to various benefits hit ordinary citizens hard — but because the public gave this so-called pro-Western political class one last chance, trusting that a second round would follow, bringing reform of state companies, reform of the outdated territorial-administrative system, an overhaul of the courts, and the various reforms promised for decades that would finally touch the fat cats feeding off state money — and by toppling Bolojan, that is precisely what failed to arrive. After all, it's rare even in European political history for people to take to the streets in support of a prime minister introducing austerity measures and taking money from the population — yet that too happened in Romania this past May.

So, Romania is changing, and this change will only accelerate if the PSD fails to deliver the kind of governance people expect — and we can be almost certain it will fail to deliver — but meanwhile new parties will emerge; out of the merger and cooperation of the PNL and the USR a new pole will take shape, and the artificiality of keeping the RMDSZ around, a rule that sealed the Neptun deal and has since hardened into a self-perpetuating custom, could soon become a burden for many. The RMDSZ is not entering government now, even though the PSD actually invited it, and relations with Grindeanu are good enough that Cseke had earlier hinted at a great governmental romance — yet by now, for some reason, all of that has stalled, and the RMDSZ has settled instead for a thin agreement, whose details are unknown to the Hungarian community and which has not been made public to us, committing to support the Niculescu government for half a year.

Hunor spoke of a majority born of necessity, but altogether, during this five-month crisis, the RMDSZ failed to create, or seize, a single moment in which it took a stand on principle and held to it. We don't know right now why they didn't join the government, but it's strongly suspected that it may have something to do with the fact that the Alliance belongs to the European People's Party, and the EPP looked very unfavorably on the constitutional amendment tailor-made for Fritz, which was ultimately pushed through and made valid with the help of RMDSZ-affiliated constitutional court judge Csaba Asztalos. In all likelihood, Hunor and his circle also received a clear message that if they entered government with the PSD, they would lose their EPP membership, plus everything that goes with it on the international stage — in other words, practically everything. Either way, precisely because of this lack of morality, the RMDSZ's once-confident vision of the future no longer seems so clear. And now comes the moment when the intellectual laziness of recent years, and the suppression of various critical voices within the Transylvanian Hungarian community, come back to bite them — the Alliance has no answer to territorial-administrative reform, nor does it know what to do with the idea of reintroducing a two-round electoral system; even though this would be more democratic than the current system, the RMDSZ opposes it reflexively, just as it earlier opposed lowering the parliamentary threshold, and more or less every other step that pro-Western forces seeking to modernize Romania consider important.

This is only now going to really crush us, even though our minds have already been gutted by a media landscape from which the journalists and analysts who understood the world, followed its events, and could place processes in a broader context have vanished, leaving behind a large, misled community prone to blind, fanatical faith in anti-vax conspiracies, pro-Russian sympathies and Viktor Orbán — not every Transylvanian Hungarian is like this, but there are more than enough of those who are to make up a critical majority. And starting from a deficit like this, in this complex world, there is an ever-growing need for everyone to speak up without having to fear the consequences of their words. It is precisely this field that the RMDSZ plowed up and then salted, so that what remains in its wake is the wild, overgrown wasteland we are now shouting to you about. So I would like to encourage our readers once again: if anyone has a picture, a theory of what may lie ahead for Transylvanian Hungarians in the next ten years, and what should be done about it, don't keep it to yourself — write to ugar@gesta.ro.

In the meantime, let's rejoice, Vincent, because we have a government, and the RMDSZ isn't part of it.

Anna Karczag