This is what cowardice and baseness look like in politics

Put cowardice for president Iohannis, and baseness for the others. The latest cowardice: the appointment of Ecaterina Andronescu, Romania’s education grave-digger, and champion at stepping on dead bodies to become a minister again. This physics professor, the president of „educated Romania”, this big project anyone has yet to see since winning his mandate, has quietly signed the appointment decree, the same way he caved-in to all the other despicable acts committed by the PSD. Without making a sound.

I’m not sure you understand the gravity of this moment. Education is the grand presidential project. Not showing the slightest sign of opposition to the education falling in the hands of a politician who’s shown already three times how much harm she can cause, is an act of pure cowardice, of ignorance or of fear. Nothing could justify it. For education, the harm caused now will spread for generations. With her timid-granny figure, Andronescu has killed, with every mandate, the future of the Romanian school and today she returns to throw the last shovels of ground on its grave.

President Klaus Iohannis himself appeared to show he had a weight on his conscience three days ago when he left the impression that he’s going to reject the proposal. „If I remember correctly, Mrs. Andronescu will be proposed for education. Well, I’m telling you, this is gonna take a little while or even quite a little longer”, the president declared, bad luck, on November 13. Today we found out that „quite a little longer” means just three days, this is also because, before he began talking, the president didn’t care to find out that an interim cannot last for 45 days without the possibility for extension.

Nothing could have prevented the head of state from rejecting Andronescu one, two, or three days ago when PSD announced the proposal, and ask for another nomination. Some will argue that he would have risked getting back an even worse proposal. It is hard to imagine, though, something worse than Antonescu for education. I don’t think a more able catastrophy has yet been invented. So the question remains: Why? If not out of cowardice, then we are left with only two other possible explanations: out of convenience or fear, in horror of Dragnea. Have they paralyzed him with the series of attacks and threats of criminal charges?

But enough with cowardliness. The spectacle of baseness though is really quite unique. Andronescu, this pretended mimosa, with an appearance of political innocence, was wiping the floor, on August 14th, with the government and with Dragnea. On November 13, after only three months that is, she accepts to join the government about which she had said that „It does not represent her” at the proposal of Liviu Dragnea himself. The one of whom she was demanding, in that now-famous open letter to the PSD members, „to take a step back, to step down as head of the party.” Can you imagine something more despicable, a greater baseness, a politically-invertebrate more disgusting than Antonescu?

The tableau of decadence though contains details that are worth psychoanalyzing. The announcement that Dragnea was going to name Andronescu at education was made by Firea, who has supported her in her previous bid to take the same cabinet position, but was denied the position by the same cynical PSD leader. Now that Firea has entered a conflict with the supreme leader, Antonescu has suddenly become a very good choice for education, and the mayor finds that betrayal goes even further. Dragnea would like to put Andronescu in her place, at the head of PSD Bucharest.

And do not be surprised if one day Ecaterina Andronescu will again turn her weapons against Liviu Dragnea, if she gets all the assurances that she will one day become prime minister. It’s only that she just crossed the ocean to make herself available, to lobby a bit at the State Department, and to convey to the Americans that if they ever find themselves in need of a serious prime minister, of character, she will make the sacrifice.

PS: As many of the readers have noticed, Klaus Iohannis just gave himself a very nice November 16th gift, the day he won the second round of the presidential election four years ago against Victor Ponta.

Traducerea: Ovidiu Harfas