Băsescu and power. The Petrov case

For a purebred political animal like Traian Băsescu, used his entire life to exercising power in various forms, the High Court’s verdict is tantamount to banishing Zeus forever from the Olympus of symbolic power. The final sentence of collaborator of the former Securitate as political police is a humiliation for him that is hard to bear. The fall is too hard while you’ve been in so high a position. Today, not much is left of the once-great politician.

As an MEP, he will be isolated and probably excluded from the European People’s Party. The pressure to resign from the European Parliament will increase. He probably won’t, but he will fall into irrelevance in Brussels. Until yesterday he was treated with the deference due to former presidents.

As a former head of state, he loses the respectability and credibility of two terms as Romania’s president. Who will be listening to Petrov today other than a tiny hard core bunch of bigots? He also loses the advantages offered by law for life to former presidents: the protocol villa, special allowances, secret service protection, paid staff, luxury car at his disposal.

The man for whom power meant everything loses, in short, the attributes of symbolic power. It is difficult for someone like Traian Basescu to accept that he was once Petrov the informant, the man on the sidelines, the insignificant, the petty snitch. Not even in his own party, the PMP, does he matter much anymore.

Traian Băsescu ended up completely neutralised, like other informants who thought they were more powerful than the system that created them and made them great.

Dan Voiculescu, another collaborator of the former Securitate under the conspiratorial name Felix, is today a disciplined soldier in the army of those in power, after years of dreaming of being its general. Sorin Ovidiu Vântu, a collaborator of the former Securitate under the conspiratorial name Nuș, who was making presidents and prime ministers in 2009, has fallen into obscurity. Felix is laughing at Petrov today, after Petrov mocked Felix the cat for years. Only this species of former collaborators is capable of such cynicism and shamelessness.

The former ship’s captain climbed the mast of power to the top after ’89, turned the tables and ruled the system in which he began his career as a mere collaborator.

Only one of their rank and file, schooled in the school of the former Securitate, could dismantle the old rotten webs of corruption in business, politics and justice and replace them with new ones. Traian Băsescu defeated the old system of power, and the new system he installed after Romania’s accession to NATO and the EU defeated him. This was his historic role: to bring Romania out of post-communism. Under him, Romania made a great leap forward. Who could have done it more skilfully than an insider?

In 2004 there was no alternative to the systemic corruption of the Nastase (PSD) government, the last outburst of the Securitate before 1989, nor in 2009 when Romania was under the assault of powerful media moguls (Dinu Patriciu, Dan Voiculesu, Sorin Ovidiu Vântu). Anyone who didn’t support Băsescu then was automatically placed in the camp of everyone else.

The institutional reforms of his first term are undeniable, from justice and the defense system (putting the Black Sea on the NATO map is largely his merit), the symbolic condemnation of communism, limiting the power of the media moguls, the fight against corruption, even if he never really believed in them.

His second term was a disaster. Fallen under the toxic domination of a greedy, ambitious woman, he methodically destroyed his own legacy. Basescu wanted to totally subordinate the new system of power, to protect the businesses of his close associates and his family.

The new system not only politely refused him, but put under investigation pretty much his entire family and his protégé. All politicians who subsequently tried to overthrow the new system of power, see the Dragnea case, who also temporarily got out of hand, have ended up badly. Traian Băsescu was the last strong politician with a high degree of native intelligence, instinct, and autonomy who had the ability to impose decisions in moments of major crisis.

After him, Romania entered the zodiac of political mediocrity, of the mindless executants teleguided by the system. Today, the system seems more powerful than it was even under Traian Băsescu.

History will probably remember his other actions as well. As a former mayor he did more for Bucharest than all the former mayors put together. Time will sift what remains after him, with good and bad. But the present does not leave him much room for manoeuvre. The verdict that he collaborated with the Securitate as political police has cancelled out his stature of politician on the Romanian and European political scene.

The past came up to haunt Traian Băsescu too. Petrov the snitch condemned him to irrelevance during his lifetime.