SINTEZA 11/DECEMBBRIE 2014

25 years. What hasn’t changed?A quarter of a century means facing changes, at least when it comes to addressing the

speed level of development in the society nowadays. This issue of Sinteza is dedicated to the celebration of 25 years of freedom in Romania and aims to give a bigger picture of the changes that have occurred since then. But what hasn’t changed? There is a list without any comments or explanations, similar to someone drawing some rocks, one after the other, rocks that are still and unable to generate a movement in the wave of change…

Twenty five years later, we still don’t know whether it was a revolution or a coup d’état, we still don’t know who aimed at us on the 21st and on the 22nd, or later, when most of the people died. Nobody was held responsible for the crimes committed during the Revolution, and the ones bearing the files ended up having great careers while practicing the law. We have tens of thousands of revolutionists by profession, who receive allowances, land and are exempt from taxes, while the descendants of the deceased have been long forgotten, with no one left to fight for them, the widows and the orphans can no longer fight the squires.

The only thing left is fear and a terrified politics, especially when it comes to electoral years, years of change. There is a constant fear of governing, of making courageous decisions, even if there have been consistent majorities at times, politicians would still govern in a minimalist way and today are still governed by the fear of losing power, and it is for this very reason that they have been losing power every single time. When politicians are afraid to take charge of political values or to adopt a clear identity, the end result is a form of surrogate politics: the ongoing political war among leaders becomes the very reason of being in the competition, and sometimes it dresses up in the form of a surrogate program. The fear of political isolation crosses the entire spectrum, from left to right. For 25 years, politicians have been passers-by, but the fear remained, like a fog, like a memento of emptiness and incertitude, of chaos, signalling the death of the system.

We have not escaped the need of a daddy yet, respectively an acute sense of presidentiality allotted to power. People don’t trust rules, the Constitution or institutions, they always want a president who can deliver wages, retirement pensions, and can bring peace and quiet. It seems that we now have a president, in a way, predestined for Romanians, Santa Klaus. And the new President, even if maybe not happy about it, will be stormed with reverential regards, letters, kisses and different other means of massaging the/his presidential Ego, for this has been the practice for centuries on the banks of the Dâmboviţa river.

People are still happy about „getting their country back”, and will emerge in activities such as the slaughtering of the pig for Christmas and other winter celebrations and parties, warming the dream that the country is going in the right direction without them, for all they have to do is look at the pay stub and the pension coupon and see how the amount of money is growing. Even if a quarter of a century passed by, Laszlo Tokes still intends to instigate Hungarians to revolt, and Vadim Tudor is still writing pamphlets aimed at the people that could maybe give him something in return for his silence.

The discourse of anger still dwells in the public space, although nowadays is more visible in the virtual public space. The elderly asking for pensions are being attacked, the people living in the countryside who are not progressive are attacked as well, together with the assisted people of all kinds and the representatives of the rural communities who need gas,

roads and sewerage systems. The new diaspora is not demonized for not eating salami with soy, but for voting without contributing to the GDP, that is for not working here with us, side-by-side. The diversions with the water poisoning and the rows of armour-clad machines are part of the Facebook revolution, as well as the tanks coming from Russia that need to be stopped with the chests of likes.

The anticommunism that brought people out in the streets is back, 25 years later, although, at present, we deal with a form of anticommunism that has no real object. George Soros’ maxim is still available: It is always easier to mobilize people against something than for it. The autonomy of the Hungarians and of the Szecklers is a project situated at a more advanced stage today, but still awaiting better times meant to allow for the marking of a small boundary around the ancestral estate, The Székely Land.

We still have schools, although the numbers dropped from 30.000 to 7.2000, and the numbers are still dropping, and, in the meantime, this past quarter of a century of freedom resulted in building five churches to one school. Our GDP is still very low and we are among the last countries in Europe, although the GDP is five times higher than it was in the year 1989. We still have publishing houses, although book sales have dropped 85%. Our public scholars write pathetic appeals and call people out in the streets, after 25 years of democracy, in order to erase governments from the face of the earth.

Romanian entrepreneurs are treated as thieves, bandits, corrupted and ragged, and the proportion is greater than it was during the first year of freedom: back then 80% of the population were of this belief, 25 years later 93% of the population shares this opinion. Foreign investors are seen as saviours and get aid from the state, while Romanian investors are arrested for corruption when documents come to discussion or when are asked by central or local administration to backhand money in order for any documentation to be issued.

Generally speaking, the political bribery still works instead of some strategies of economic development: the myth of the foreign investor who comes only to bring jobs to the autochthonic space, the economy of the market which alone brings wealth, the flat rate are seen as the only ways towards wealth and economic growth. The IMF and the World Bank give us health certificates and put together the budget project for the upcoming year, and the myth of wellbeing is left to refer to a period further away than the one we used to see with the mind and the soul in 1989.

The Romanian state remained the only source of power, the only choice left for legitimizing authority. The local administration is invaded by the centralized state, an objective we’ve worked on for two centuries, therefore what we have is a local or regional authority simulacrum, for these are mere extensions of the central organisms into the territory. The force of the centre makes local barons look like copies of the barons of the centre. Such forms of politics do not represent the community, or the people in the community, but reproduce an abstract scheme created at the centre, and it is of political nature: social democrats vs. liberals, pro-Europeans vs. conservatives, corrupted vs. innocent etc. Therefore, 25 years later, the central power rejects any projects that could be truly relevant to real people and real communities.

Today, as it was at the beginning of the century, we have a political left obsessed with maintaining the power of dominance and a political right that pathetically cries over open letters and public calls while believing that by passing state property onto the hand of recent capitalists the real revolution will take place (but they haven’t read Marx, who shared the same beliefs but wanted it for the working class). And now the leaders of the right are still

hired by the state, although a small Romanian capitalism is in the making. The civil society is absent from the public space, but, from time to time, a few of its representatives awaken, former ministers or members of the party, and start invoking it and speak on behalf of it. Thousands of organisations fight for social assistance politics, for the solidarity of the community or for other purposes, instances in which the state forgets about the people. Such organisations are run by young people, and are usually unnoticed, but we are still stuck with the lists of support for the intellectuals and with the open letters to a leader that runs for a function.

We idolize for a while the young people that came out to vote or fought on Facebook for a new world, as back when they came out to die in front of the tanks, but soon everybody forgets about them, about their jobs, their studying conditions and about how we must help their careers, with the raising of their children in order to benefit of big, fat pensions out of their work.

We still don’t have a project for the society, we don’t have a map of the future andwe don’t have a proposal for a trajectory. The governments are communicational and emphatic. A quarter of a century later we don’t have a plan, we lead the country with bookkeeping instruments and with our eyes shut. Our natural resources are taken away every day, and we get involved in the personal wars of the leaders. We lost more population than during the most devastating war, last year only 180.000 children were born and the birth rate is continuously falling. Nobody panics, nobody is terrified of what this unplanned future might bring, and it is not something good. This is the shocking naiveté of a nation that was proud of resisting for over 2000 years at the confluence of the empires. These empires died, but we, Romanians, are still here awaiting the new empires to step on us. It is the basic inconsistency of a nation that has been waiting for almost a century for the Nobel Prize in literature and is frustrated with not receiving it.

After 25 years of freedom, „history still takes vengeance on us, by repeating itself”, as stated by Nicolae Iorga a century ago.