The Romanian Liberal wing reinvented itself after its historic defeat in December 2016, as pro-migration, globalist and fully in support of the LGBT agenda.
Yet, it seems unlikely that the improbable Saxon conducător of Grand liberal alliance, Klaus Johannis will be able to cause much more than a small procedural delay. Indeed, he was forced on July 9, under pain of suspension, to promulgate the decree of dismissal of his dear Attorney General Laura Codruţa Kovesi, who had, under the guise of “fight against corruption”, so effectively transformed Romanian justice into an instrument of political blackmail in the service of his clique. By signing this decree, Johannis already looked like a chess player having first lost most of his pieces, then his queen, and thinking how to get his opponent to concede to a draw.
Such is the impasse into which the “Johannis camp” seemed, a month ago, to be sinking, apparently with no hope of return. And then suddenly, a flash of genius: a colorful crowd of activists from the Open Society, Hungarian-Transylvanian separatists, and some debris of extreme right-wing groups, the #rezist movement, appeared. For nearly two years, this group has been a major organizer of “anti-corruption” demonstrations, in which Klaus Johannis readily takes the lead. Now, they believe they have finally found the fatal weapon against Liviu Dragnea’s “dictatorship” (a dictatorship based, let it be said, on the largest parliamentary majority in Romania’s democratic history). To respond, after exactly two months, to the White March of the PSD , they called for yet another “mass” event, the mother of all protests, for August 10, putting much hope in the temporary (not unusual in this summer period) presence on Romanian soil of millions of Romanians (around 25% of the active population) working abroad (mainly in the Western EU), and most of whom are absolute fans of the Romanian “Right”.
Above all, while still lacking a political program, and even a clearly identifiable leader (other than the already worn-out Johannis or the former “technocratic” – i.e.: totally unelected – prime minister Dacian Cioloş, dismissed in 2017 at the end of a disastrous mandate), the #rezistants have found themselves a slogan.
Regarded as the official slogan of the great gathering of intra-European migrants convened on August 10 to “save democracy” against the choices of the majority, it has gone viral on social networks. The two words also appear on countless T-shirts, placards, flags and other roadside signs stuck on land belonging to sympathizers of the movement: MUIE PSD: Manipulare-Uzurpare-Indignare-Exasperare. The slogan was endorsed even by the semi-official “philosopher” of the #rezist movement, the very academically respected Gabriel Liiceanu. Under the title “The insult that unites us”, he undertook, on a Romanian neo-conservative blog, to provide this new political philosophy with a beginning of doctrinal basis.
The slogan, first seen on the signs of the proto-rezist movements that had extorted the resignation of Victor Ponta in favour of Cioloş, this foul-mouthed slogan MUIE (mouth in Gypsy jargon) PSD (also seemed to contain indecent allusions to the rumours of homosexuality surrounding Victor Ponta) did not seem destined to become an epochal syntagma of the political life of any EU member state. Yet, against all odds, this is what it has become.
The intra-European Romanian migrant workers (renamed “diaspora”), by virtue of their salaries paid in euros and of their prolonged stays in countries that have legalized gay marriage, are declared culturally superior to their brothers at home, and their sacred right to “save” said country from the darkness of “corruption”. They will not tolerate hindrance to constitutional rules or to universal suffrage any more than the US-based United Fruit Company did in Latin America at the height of the golden age of military coups.
Some, of course, soon started to find this noisy slang a bit exotic. They were called to order. The writer Mircea Cărtărescu, for example, an icon of the #rezist movement and author – among others – of a bestseller entitled Why We Love Women, seems, at first, to have feared that the new slogan might bring a too brutal response to this (probably rhetorical) question, protesting on his blog against this primitive jargon, much too insensitive to the enjoyable consensuality of modern and progressive sex. Subjected, as soon as he published that post, to the avalanche of insults and threats that is now the normal speech of anti-PSD terrorism, he quickly showed all the extent of his civic courage, erasing the incriminated text from his blog – a quite realistic prefiguration of what freedom of speech could become in Romania in the case of an (electorally improbable) victory of this new oral culture.
On Friday 10th, this rhetoric of radicalization “paid off”. As expected, the protest (between a quarter and half a million people in Bucharest), although massive, did not even gather the entire pool of the anti-PSD movement, despite the summer period: among the tertiary employees in gentrified city centres that make up the bulk of indigenous troops of #rezistants, many have probably had trouble identifying with a protest whose slogan sounded more like a title of some underground hit by the turbo-folk singer Romeo Fantastik. On the other hand, those who decided to take to the streets anyway showed a level of violence that, in the highly peaceful country that is Romania, was unprecedented since the Mineriads of the 1990s: insulting the police and throwing various projectiles (including bags of feces) at them, even stealing weapons from them (a method reminiscent of that of the Kiev Maidan), they finally managed to trigger a reaction from the gendarmerie, which tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas canisters. In the fray, an isolated female gendarme was brutally beaten by a small group of “protesters”; currently hospitalized, she suffers spine injuries and might remain paralyzed.
Whether this tragic episode was premeditated or not by more or less professional provocateurs, it is obvious that the organizers of the protest, by assuming a rhetoric of extremism, had from the outset accepted – maybe even wished for – the occurrence of such tragedies, probably deemed to be “good for the cause”. And lo and behold, the pro-Johannis press immediately described the event as … a police blunder! Yet, faced with the evidence of very clear images, and of a no less unequivocal body count, one wonders how many Romanians will be willing to believe this version – not enough to change the game through electoral channels. But in that case, what are the real intentions of the #rezist brain-trust (if there still are any)? Whether the plan turns out to be another putsch attempt, which we see every six months, or more simply to maintain pressure on the rather timid PSD-ALDE government supported by a huge parliamentary majority, the question is the same: do the “services” (i.e., the political police inherited from the Băsescu era) still have the means for such ambitions, or do they only seek to sell their skin dearly?
In favor of the second hypothesis, there are signs that the ongoing divorce in the Euro-Atlantic world has already produced some cracks in the Westernist bloc in Romania. While the SRI (the main outlet of Romania’s “intelligence community”), under the leadership of Soros-boy Eduard Hellvig, seems more aligned than ever with Berlin and Brussels, some of the former champions of “Euro-Atlantic values” are now switching sides. For example: after growing up in the same “civil society” incubator as Hellvig, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who has long been connected to various transatlantic networks such as Freedom House, has not only been less timorous than poor Cărtărescu in her rejection of #rezist’s libidinal drift, but also much sharper: describing Romanian migrant workers, who have come to Bucharest to “save” a country they have long since abandoned, as a sordid and manipulated Lumpenproletariat (which, moreover, corresponds quite well to their de facto status in various host societies), she seemed to parody the former Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi, who lost his post when he criticized the anti-Băsescu protesters of 2012 in similar terms. Between the unskilled jobs that most of the Romanian migrant workers can expect in Western Europe and the increase in wages in Romania itself, which have tripled since the end of the Băsescu era, the gap is no longer as huge as in the past. By trumpeting that the “diaspora” sends home $5 billion a year, the Westernist press in Romania and Western Europe admits – for any financially literate reader, who knows that this represents 3% of current Romanian GDP (only 10 times more, for example, than what the Raiffeisen bank extracts from the country in net profits), for a migrant population between 3 and 5 million – that the average Romanian migrant sends to his family and/or spends in Romania each year between $1,000 and $2,000, which is, in any case, less than $200 / month – less, for example, than renting a studio apartment in Cluj. This average obviously covers a wide variety of cases, including real and dazzling individual success stories, but also many cases of unemployed Romanians, sinking into mass poverty in Western Europe and occasionally begging for some money and food from … their family back home.
And while many Romanians left, many also came back, with or without savings, but often with a changed vision of the world: a much less idyllic vision of the once mythicized West, which they have discovered to be economically fragile, socially more and more unfair, morally decadent, threatened by mass immigration, ravaged by criminality and paralyzed by political correctness. Culturally, the window of action for those who hope to “manage” the sovereignist insurgency of emerging Romania by means of South American methods may be closing rapidly. Is this what the leaders of the Bucharest “Maidan” also feel, and which leads them to try and play double or nothing?
The near future may tell us: further protests are being organized at the time of this writing… and those stolen guns remain at large.
