Who governs Romania: Dancila and the PSD or the opposition? Who is responsible for the horrors of the Dragnea era?

Dancila’s government has weathered the motion of no confidence, but it acts as if they were in the opposition. The pension law didn’t get enough votes in the Senate due to the absence of the PSD MP’s, but that didn’t prevent the leaders of the PSD from throwing the blame on the opposition. The PSD-ALDE majority coalition worked perfectly fine during the motion, and also when it came to sheltering Tariceanu from prosecution, but it suddenly fell apart on the most crucial election promise: increasing the pensions.

It’s hard to tell if the PSD-ALDE majority deliberately sabotaged the pension law, scared of the unsustainable rise in the budgetary spending, or whether they are already in vacation mode; with Dragnea out of the picture, and with Dancila’s government alive and well, who cares about law-making? Who cares that the pension law didn’t pass? What matters is that the premier blames the failure on the opposition.

It would not be the only attempt to mystify reality.

The PSD is amping up the rhetoric that the opposition committed election fraud. Interior Minister, Carmen Dan, floated the idea on Sunday, at Antena 3 news channel. On Tuesday, the PSD senator, Serban Nicolae, piled-up on the idea, while on Wednesday, Mihai Fifor, the PSD’s spokesperson, announced that they are ready to put together a parliamentary committee to investigate the alleged fraud. It would make for a hilarious first: the party in power who organized the elections, investigating the opposition for election fraud.

But nobody answered yet for the interminable lines the Romanians had to wait in to vote abroad — neither the Foreign Affairs Minister nor the Minister for the Interior. They both blamed the president, Klaus Iohannis, accusing him of announcing his referendum too late, after all the planning for the required voting stations took place.

The PSD continues, thus, the legacy of Liviu Dragnea, following the same strategy and behavior: the party is well-intentioned, but it is not allowed to govern appropriately. Enemies are lurking in every corner, working overtime to sabotage the government at every opportunity. President Iohannis, George Soros, the EU, and the opposition parties, the PNL, the USR, and PLUS. There’s always someone out there in the dark setting up traps to derail de government.

The PSD’s schizophrenia goes so far as, in the absence of credible adversaries, to accuse itself of sabotage, as in the case of Bucharest Mayor, Gabriela Firea, who accused Dragnea of trying to make her responsible for the violence of August 10, 2018, that her own party and government were trying to stonewall her. This is after she continuously blamed the opposition of not letting her do anything good for the city.

The common denominator in the PSD’s actions: running away from responsibility. Did the PSD and ALDE have just proven, in the vote for the motion of no confidence, that they have a substantial majority in Parliament? Then they and they alone are responsible for not passing the pension law in the Senate! Was Dancila’s Government in charge of organizing the elections? Then they are the first to answer for any possible irregularities, for the „lines of shame” and for the poor organization of the voting sections outside of the country.

Of course that the Liberals, after the elections, were foolish enough as to raise a totally unrealistic expectation: taking over the government. In a shortsighted and dumb image play, they shifted the entire focus on them, instead of ceaselessly demanding that the opposition hold power accountable for the horrors of the Dragnea government, and to expose, every single day, the chaos caused by the PSD-ALDE governing.

Why wouldn’t the opposition demand that inquiry committees be set-up to find out who really lead the government, and by what illegitimate mechanisms, and who was part of the „think-tanks” where crucial decisions were made on the judiciary, and how key institutions became subordinated to a single man?

Who was part of the extensive network of foreign lobby against the justice, against the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) and, ultimately, against Romania’s interests? How did Romania’s foreign policy become a bargaining chip in negotiating Dragnea’s freedom? How did it come to blackmailing Romania’s external partners with the large military procurement contracts?

Who answers politically for each case in particular? Who hired Giuliani, Freeh, and who coordinated with them, which institutions of the Romanian state were involved in actions directed against Romania, where was the money coming from and on whose orders?

All these horrors have happened in the last two years, and they have to be clarified somehow, and we cannot go any further as if none of this had ever happened. Here the opposition has an important role, as does the President Klaus Iohannis. They have a duty to those who voted for them, to those who have entrusted them with their confidence, that the darkest age of the past 30 years will not go unpunished, and that those responsible will be paying an appropriate political price.

All those who served in the Dragnea regime must be exposed, each with his or her own role, with his or her own actions, and with the immense harm they’ve inflicted to Romania. Dragnea ruled from the shadows, from behind the stage. It’s time to find out how he did it, through whom he did it, and what he left behind.

But the PSD knows that attack is the best defense, so it goes on the offensive as if it were in the opposition. The opposition must quickly reverse the roles and move on to the offensive. It has massive public confidence on its side, but to which it also owes a duty to explain that it is the PSD, ALDE and the Government of Dăncilă that is in power, not them.

It is them, Viorica Dancila, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, Carmen Dan, Eugen Teodorovici, Tudorel Toader (let’s not forget about him so quickly) and others that must answer punctually to everything that happened in the last two years in the „Republic of the Crooks” and to pay till the last penny the bill for this eventual economic catastrophe.

Traducerea: Ovidiu Harfas