The three big laws that are turning Romania into a mafia state. President Iohannis must put a stop to serious derailments in education, justice and national security

Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă and President Klaus Iohannis are trying their best to present Romania abroad as a genuine democracy, irreversibly anchored in European standards and values. Prime Minister Ciucă’s latest attempt is from today, an interview for Bloomberg in which he says that Romania has met all the standards to join Schengen. But what Ciucă and Iohannis want to project is one thing; the reality in Romania is another.

Political and democratic standards have collapsed under the PSD-PNL-UDMR coalition. Anti-reform is so rampant that three substantial packages of laws threaten the very democratic bones of the country and its future. The education, justice, and national security laws are tailored for the use of a few de facto mafia groups in those areas, to whom they offer money, power, and legal protection. President Iohannis owes it to himself to halt this accelerating degradation if he has any respect for democracy and cares about its external projection.

We are at a new political low, where legislation is made with an eye to the interests of various power groups and not to the public interest. The expectations formulated in the 2021 elections by the reformist segment of society, such as it is, have been hijacked by bringing the PSD into the government, contrary to the narrative with which President Iohannis and the PNL ran in the elections.

The reality is that structural reforms are not on the real agenda of the ruling coalition. On the contrary, counter-reform is the foundation of this coalition, which has virtually no opponents: it has subordinated part of the judiciary, the mainstream media, institutions and control agencies. Paradoxically, the very creator of the coalition, President Iohannis, remains the only domestic institutional factor that can stop this mafia steamroller; and public pressure, but that’s another story.

The three packages of laws are deeply damaging to a democratic society. G4Media, Edupedu and Economedia have presented and dissected them at length, along with very few other media outlets. Otherwise, guilty silence and self-censorship at most of the trusts bought with big money by parties and government. Here are some of the provisions that would turn Romania into a hostage captive to mafia groups:

National security laws:

– Turns Romanian citizens into informers, by obliging them to cooperate at the request of the intelligence officer.
– significantly weakens civilian control over the work of the secret services, which is in any case anemic
– eliminates any control over the financial operations of the secret services and strengthens their capacity to interfere in economic markets
– makes it almost impossible to dismiss the heads of services
– grants immunity from prosecution for secret service employees
– turns the services back into criminal investigation bodies by expanding the list of threats to national security

Justice laws:
– First, Minister Cătălin Predoiu is accused by reformist justice organizations of having fooled the European Commission by radically changing drafts after consultation with European partners, an unspeakable gesture
– retains all the anti-reformist provisions of the Dragnea/PSD period
– the Prosecutor-General can overturn, with reasons, all measures and solutions adopted by the prosecutor (including by DNA/DIICOT prosecutors), which opens up the possibility of major abuses
– eliminates the position of deputy president of court/deputy chief prosecutor from being filled by competition, opening the way to patronage-based promotions at the top of the judiciary
– affects the independence of both DNA and DIICOT
– promotion to the Supreme Court is totally controlled by the Supreme Judicial Council, with the National Institute of Magistracy being eliminated

Education laws:
– abolishes the CNATDCU, the council that examines complaints of plagiarism, amid the scandal over the plagiarism accusations against Prime Minister Ciucă
– gives the possibility to renounce doctoral degrees
– introduces parallel admission for national colleges, favoring college teachers who are tutoring for high school entrance
– enshrines the transformation of chancellors into education barons, with as many mandates as they want
– the creation of thousands of new politicized management posts

• In addition to the three draft laws with outrageous provisions, under the PNL-PSD-UDMR coalition, we are drifting further and further away from European rules with an increasing number of directives that have been poorly transposed or not transposed at all. The most recent example is the whistleblower law, recently returned to parliament by President Klaus Iohannis on the grounds that it discourages whistleblowers from reporting law-breaking or corruption. Another example is the delay in meeting the NRRP milestones, with Romania missing the first payment of €2.6 billion of the recovery funds it had hoped to make at the end of July, as the G4Media.ro first revealed. Dan Tăpălagă described in the Romanian Model editorial how Romania is moving away from Western values.

These anti-democratic derailments, contrary to public interest, are useful for a few groups in the three big systems. Most teachers, magistrates or employees of the national security system (army, police, intelligence services) are honest professionals, people who do their jobs with dedication, and who do not need privileges, immunity or protection. The beneficiaries of these monstrous legal provisions are a few quasi-mafia groups that have found the key to the offices of PSD, PNL and UDMR politicians and are thus exercising their power. They must be stopped.

As the public and parliamentary debate is strangled by the PSD-PNL-UDMR, the beneficiaries of the main levers of power in the state and virtually unlimited public funds, it is utopian to believe that the opposition to these slippages will come from within the parties. The only decision-maker who can stop the disaster is Klaus Iohannis. Either as a result of internal or external public pressure or because he still has a shred of respect for democracy. He made this anti-reformist political coalition, he must stop it from destroying the major systems.

Traducere: Ovidiu Harfas