The Zero Government

Romanian government has set a new world record as it survived a motion of censure in the Parliament after 219 votes were cast in favor of overthrowing it and not one single vote in favor of its continuing activity.

Thus, the Romanian government is the first government in the history of democracy to  continue to administer the country without any support in the Parliament.

Romania is a beautiful country in the Eastern Europe, though it is the poorest member second corrupted member of the European Union, according to a survey released to the press yesterday.

In 2008, the general elections were won by the Democratic Liberal Party by a 34 percent and formed a government led by Prime Minister Emil Boc in a coalition with the Social Democrat Party, the second party in the elections, with 33 percent.

The Boc government had to manage a country that was making preparations for the presidential elections that were held in November 2009.

For that reason, no provision was taken to compensate the effects of the economic crisis that were felt more present in Romania than in other nations in Europe or elsewhere.

By the end of 2009, it was already evident for everyone that the Boc government was extremely incompetent and that it lacked any possible vision to solve the more and more pressing economic problems of the Romanians (the only measure it took was to impose a tax that killed all small companies in the country or forced them to register in neighboring countries).

So, on October 13, 2009 a motion of censure was passed and the Boc government was toppled by the former ally, the Social Democrat Party, which in the meantime had been cast out of government, in coalition with the National Liberal Party and the ethnic minorities represented in the Parliament.

A new majority was formed in the Parliament to the end of proposing a new government and a new Prime Minister, Klaus Johannis, the mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, a ethnic German that had proved excellent skills in managing the city he was mayor of and had a huge popular approval throughout the country.

Even though the German and Austrian press reacted instantaneously to the nomination of Johannis, considering it an excellent choice for Romania, their opinion, which was also the opinion of the majority of the Romanian people, was not shared by president Traian Basescu, who chose to interpret the Constitution in a very personal way (he fancies himself as some sort of “player president,” concept unheard of in the entire civilized world).

Consequently, Basescu nominated as Prime Ministers some no names and the country ran on fumes until after the presidential elections on December 6, when Basescu was voted in for a second term, in a ballot that was accused of having been seriously biased by interferences that are completely strange to all democratic countries (from buying the votes to falsifying the vote report sheets or reporting completely false data).

The entire presidential campaign of Basescu was centered in focusing the hatred of the population on the institution of Parliament, by proposing a referendum on suppressing one House of the Parliament. On that occasion, Basescu overlapped his presidential campaign on the one for the referendum, in the most illegal way, since the law in Romania, like every other country in Europe, stipulates that referenda are to be organized by the government, and are to be very objectively reflected in the promotion they get in the media (Basescu had as a slogan of his campaign the threat “They cannot dodge what’s coming to them,” “them” being at the time a reference to the members of the Parliament, but as it turns out referring also to the Romanian nation as a whole). Many think that it would be consistent with Basescu’s mental patterns to assume he tried by this to avenge the fact that the same Parliament had attempted to democratically impeach him in 2007 for the obvious reasons mentioned above and below.

However, since the opposition challenger couldn’t prove anything substantial in front of a Constitutional Court unwilling to make such a radical decision as to create a president, Basescu remained in office for a second term.

It is fair to say that Basescu lost the elections on the national territory of Romania but the difference was made by the votes of Diaspora, so that right now Romanians have a president voted in Italy, and Spain, where many of them are looking for what the Romanian government should have provided for them by Constitutional obligation.

The first thing Basescu did was to appoint the former Prime Minister Emil Boc again, and, since in the meantime the Parliament majority had changed (by creating a majority with senators and representatives who had fled the parties that had brought them to the Parliament), the government passed and Boc resumed governing the country the same way he had done a year before.

Before May 6, 2010, Romania was the only country which hadn’t taken any provision against the economic crisis. And it carefully preserved this status until May 6.

On May 6, president Basescu, who had been acting, against the Constitutional provisions, as the Prime Minister of the country (probably part of his “player president” ludicrous concept), announced the first measures, convened with the International Monetary Fund, meant to control the governmental expenditures (meanwhile the Basescu regime contracted some loans from the IMF that are thought to keep the country in economic stagnation for generation).

Thus, Basescu announced that the wages will be cut by 25% and the pensions by 15%.

Considering that the Romanian average wage is of about 140 Euros ($190) and the average pension is of about 100 Euros ($125), it comes as no surprise that the presidential unconstitutional decision was met with violent riots of the population.

The Constitutional Court considered the pension cut as unconstitutional and the idea was dropped. The wages were reduced by 25% for all those who work in the state sector of activity.

Ever since May 6, the Boc government didn’t take any other proactive provision that would make the economy work, and it is the opinion of most of the people in Romania that this government doesn’t know how to do the job.

It looks like the Boc government doesn’t know absolutely anything else than to strip the population of the country of the last dime in their pockets.

Many Romanian people are of the opinion that this is a government bent on using the state’s power to impoverish the entire nation by practically stealing their money (for instance in a country with the most primitive and broken roads and almost no highways, this government imposed a new tax on drivers, which piles on other two already existing for the same thing).

In June, the Boc government had to go through another motion of censure, and passed by a seven votes margin.

Since then it continued to do what it knows best, that is impoverish the people of the nation.

On September 15, the House of Representatives passed a law on pensions by a major fraud committed by the House’s chairwoman Roberta Anastase who counted 180 representatives in the House, though there were only 70 present and they were not enough to ensure the quorum needed for the law to pass.

Anastase’s fraud was proved by journalist Radu Tudor and by the leaders of the Social Democrat Party with video shootings taken by the cameras installed in the House to record the sessions, and as a result all the sessions of the house with Anastase presiding were boycotted by the opposition parties. A complaint was also filed in the name of Roberta Anastase.

Anastase is not investigated by any prosecutor though according to Romanian law she should have been imprisoned right away for a felony so evidently proven. The law she passed by fraud was referring to reducing the percentage on which the pensions were calculated, and to increase the retirement age to 65 for both men and women.

After being threatened with impeachment by the opposition in case he signed it into law, president Basescu returned the law to the House, where it was modified by the opposition members to increase the percentage and decrease the age or retirement to 64 for men, and 60 for women.

After many union trade movements in the streets, some of them resulting in clashes with the police, and many cases of governmental corruption documented in the Romanian media, the things had to come to another motion of censure.

On the eve of the vote in the Parliament, the leaders of the coalition in power decided not to cast their vote for the government for fear that some of them could vote against their own government.

Thus, with some 30,000 people protesting outside the Parliament building the motion was infringed with 219 votes in favor of the motion and zero votes in favor of the government. In order to pass it would have needed 17 more in favor.

As a consequence, Romania now has a government with no support in the Parliament and with absolutely no approval rate in the Romanian population, and is ruled by a president with some 9% approval rate and a party with some 15% in the confidence rate. And the trend is speedily descendent along with the depression of the population and the skepticism that is similar to the mood in the Communist era.

With a situation that is volatile and a government that rules, along with the president of Romania, against their own people, the situation has striking resemblances with the situation in December 1989, when a self-absorbed tyrant was considering himself “the genius of the Carpathians,” “the father of the nation,” “the hero,” while he was starving his nation. After 20 years, in the streets of Romania the call for death of the leaders was, unfortunately, heard again.

It is possible that, on the long run, those who stil cling to power now may find out that the fall of the government today would have spared them a lot of trouble.