There will be a government, and it will be a PSD one! Is Romania's government crisis coming to an end?

It seems the long march is over, during which Romania got along quite well without a government, but now we can start worrying, because on the one hand we will have a government, and on the other hand it will be a PSD government — however different it may seem from the outside, though it doesn't even seem different.

Things sped up last night. We left the crisis saga at the point where Nicușor Dan, although he had not personally stated anything in that direction, had it leaked to the press by the presidential office: if Luca Niculescu also failed to form a government, the president would dissolve parliament and call early elections. Sorin Grindeanu, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the architect of the fall of the Bolojan government, sensed the approaching danger: for days he had been saying that his party would only take on a governing role if the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Hungarian minority party (RMDSZ/UDMR) also joined in. It is rather strange for a political party to want to share — at all costs — ministries and everything that comes with governing, such as budget money, with its biggest rival and with a so-called minority-protection party.

Late last night, reports were already coming in that the presidential leak had had an effect: frightened deputies and senators were calling their group leaders one after another to ask whether the information was certain, whether they had seen it, read it, what would happen now. To understand the situation, one must know that in early elections, dozens of deputies and senators could lose their plush seats and well-paid sinecures. It is far from certain that their party would achieve the same result, and even less certain that they themselves would again make it onto the party list; for smaller parties, even getting into parliament would become questionable. After such a panic, it would have been a miracle if Luca Niculescu had remained without a chance of forming a government. But there are no miracles in Romania, so the PSD quickly dropped its coalition siren songs and decided at today's meeting to enter government. Luca Niculescu will be prime minister, the PSD will provide eleven ministers in the cabinet, while the rest will be independents — insofar as anyone can be independent in this country — or experts. One novelty is that artificial intelligence is being elevated to ministerial rank. Interestingly, at the PSD's governing council meeting, everyone voted in favor of joining the government, with eight abstentions — one of the abstainers being none other than the party leader, Grindeanu, who had previously called government participation risky terrain for his party.

Alongside the eleven PSD ministers, six expert ministers will join, so the new government would be made up of seventeen ministries, and its investiture requires 233 votes. Now that the PSD is set to approve Niculescu's government, the only question is what the other parties — so far considered as potential outside supporters — will do. The PNL had already said earlier that it would vote for the government regardless of its composition, and is even considering a six-month support agreement. This six months seems to be some kind of mystical unit of time, since Grindeanu too spoke of his party entering government but evaluating after six months how good a decision it had been. The RMDSZ (UDMR) had already announced earlier that it didn't matter to them whether a PSD, expert or hybrid government was formed — they would vote for it. Hunor Kelemen would likewise sign a support agreement with the future government, which would include putting certain more important matters on the agenda — though none of them concerns the interests of the Hungarian community in Transylvania. With the PSD's 127 parliamentary seats and the combined 111 seats of the PNL and the RMDSZ, the required 233 votes would be reached, and Romania would finally have a government after five months. But as tends to happen around here, and as Romanians say, there could still be a „răsturnare de situație” — that is, everything could still be turned on its head.

I consider this, however, less likely

On the one hand, the threat of early elections raised by Nicușor Dan can be quite convincing. On the other hand, there is the scandal about which we still don't know enough even today, although if the details come out and coincide with the half-information and theories currently circulating, we could find ourselves in the middle of the biggest political scandal in Romania since 1989: a string of anomalies surrounding the American ambassador in Athens and the fall of the government.

I cannot rule out that the success of the current government formation also depends on the fact that the now-infamous ambassador resigned from her post, leaving the circle of MAGA friends who had conspired to bring down Bolojan without a patron. Besides that, Trump's openly anti-European policy may also be playing a role, since Romania is, after all, a member of the European Union. Romanian public life has been debating for months what exactly pro-Western orientation means: pro-MAGA, that is pro-Trump and pro-American, or pro-European. To illustrate how serious this semantic dilemma is: when Nicușor Dan, during one of the prime-ministerial nominations, stated that he wanted a pro-Western government, reform-minded forces spent weeks writing about what exactly this meant — Americanism or Europeanism — while the Romanian president, through an article published in an American outlet close to MAGA, signaled that he leans more toward the orange-haired one. However, Trump's betrayal and Europe's anger may well have already pushed the president in the direction of using the threat of early elections to pressure the parties into finally putting together a government for us.

What this government will be like remains to be seen. The PSD does not have a majority on its own, the expert ministers have no party, so every single law will have to be fought for separately in parliament, and the first and biggest winner of this could be AUR. Sorin Grindeanu partly explained the decision to enter government this way as well: good governance is needed to hold back AUR. This is undoubtedly true, the only question being whether the PSD — which has gone down in history as one of Romania's most corrupt parties — will be able to rise above its own mistakes and live up to the task. Before we start writing them off, however, let us also note that the Social Democrats have every chance of becoming a party that governs well, since their social embeddedness is deep enough to carry through even the more unpleasant political decisions successfully.

So tonight, what we know is that in the past five months we have never been as close to a government being formed as we are now, and this government will be a PSD one, because a government in which 11 out of 17 ministries are led by PSD politicians is indeed a PSD government. How long they will manage to keep it going depends on them too — but as experience in these Mioritic lands shows, not for long.

Anna Karczag