Will Romania Join the European Club of Normal Families? Behind the scenes of a referendum.

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By Modeste Schwartz.

Romania – Since the 1990s, the increasing hegemony of the Soros galaxy on Romanian civil society has resulted in a continuous intensification of LGBT propaganda. After obtaining some rather uncontroversial reforms (such as the decriminalization of homosexuality), the LGBT crusade, however, was soon to drop the mask of civic egalitarianism, and started busily implementing all the rest of the LGBT agenda: an anti-family and anti-religious re-education program for the population, which became all the more difficult to ignore as the effects of its triumph in Western Europe became more and more visible. The hostility of a large majority of the Romanian population against this new type of social engineering explains that, despite the total submission of the Romanian political and media elites of the last 30 years to Western dictates, no Romanian government ever had the courage to adopt the legal reforms (institutionalization of “gay marriage”, etc.) required by this agenda.

In the meantime, the counter-attack was being organized: since 2013, a group of mostly Christian NGOs called the Coalition for the Family has been campaigning against the LGBT agenda; in 2016, it collected three million signatures for a popular initiative referendum on the definition of marriage. President Johannis (whose administration should have acted upon this popular will) swept aside the petition, calling the signatories (among whom, certainly, many of the right-wing voters who had just voted him into office!) a bunch of “religious fanatics”. Nevertheless, in September 2018, this referendum project tossed out the window returned through the door of the parliamentary chambers; they approved its organization, which is now underway: the referendum will take place on 6 and 7 October 2018. Romanian voters will have to answer YES or NO to the question: “Do you want the definition of marriage contained in the Constitution to specify that it intervenes between a man and a woman?”. Should the YES option prevail, in the future it will be, if not impossible, at least very difficult to adopt in Romania laws allowing, for example, “gay marriage” – unless the constitution is again modified, which would require another referendum.

In turn, the organization of the referendum sparked the appearance of a hostile politico-digital nebula, gathered under the hashtag #boicot, whose staff is roughly the same as that of the #rezist movement, which we have already commented upon in previous papers (e.g. here and here). A small minority in Romanian society, the #boicot movement, aware of the impossibility of a NO victory, seeks, by calling for a boycott, to obtain the invalidation of the referendum by lack of quorum (validation requires about six million citizens to vote). The Romanian cultural context obliges the local LGBT lobby to be more frank than its western equivalents, so that we now see a totally leftist politico-cultural fauna frantically embracing the allergy of Bavaria’s Wolfgang Schäuble to any expression of the popular will.

In the face of the tsunami of misinformation launched, from its position of cultural and digital hegemony, by the #boicot movement, and naturally retaken abroad by all the channels of the liberal / mainstream press, it is first necessary to debunk a number of untruths:

• The Coalition for the Family is not a proxy of the Romanian Orthodox Church; on the contrary, the most active elements within it come from the world of rapidly growing neo-Protestant churches (especially in the north of the country, on a territory which – and this is no coincidence – once was the realm of the Uniate Church during the Habsburg era). On the contrary, it seems that the Romanian Orthodox Church, marked by a certain inertia and quite ineffective in the field of public relations, is a latecomer in this movement initiated by North American Protestant think tanks close to Trump and the Republican Party. Presenting this referendum as a strictly orthodox enterprise is therefore an instrument of misinformation, knowingly used by the #boicot camp in order to keep the non-Orthodox from voting: Uniate or Catholic Romanians, Calvinists or Catholic Hungarians, etc. Unfortunately for the #boicot camp, all publicly recognized churches in Romania (with the only exception of the German Lutheran church … to which Klaus Johannis belongs) publicly supported the referendum and encouraged their flock to participate.

• The referendum was also presented as a plebiscite in favor of the ruling Social Democrat Party and its president Liviu Dragnea (now dubbed “Daddy” by his admirers), in the hope of keeping opposition voters (no less opposed than those of the PSD to the LGBT agenda) far from the polling stations. Here again, nothing could be further from the truth: in parliament, all the parties represented supported the organization of the referendum, including Klaus Johannis’ National Liberal Party (suddenly reconciled, it seems, with “religious fanatics” …); the only exception was the USR – a small globalist party recently created to give political consistency to the #rezist movement. Even within the USR, which includes some “recycled” nationalists, this option has led to internal dissension. In reality, within the PSD, some, as opposed as all the rest of the Romanian society to “gay marriage”, would have nothing against a “civil partnership” which would confer on “atypical families” all the non-reproductive rights of traditional couples; extremism in this area, if it exists, is certainly not on the side of the PSD.

• The Hungarian Minority Party (RMDSZ / UDMR) is no exception either, despite intense #boicot propaganda seeking to scare away the Hungarian electorate by presenting the Coalition for the Family (though American-inspired!) as a resurgence of the Romanian National-Communism of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime. This aspect of the #boicot propaganda, based on the fraudulent amalgamation of ethnic minorities and sexual minorities, has had some success in the Hungarian elites of the Transylvanian cities – including “right-wing” voters, which has led to some rather surrealistic situations: some Transylvanian Hungarian, who, with their Hungarian passport, are voters of FIDESZ (who has long since inscribed the heterosexual nature of marriage in the Hungarian constitution), will not use their Romanian voter card in support of a referendum organized by a government allied to Victor Orbán’s Hungary, under the pretext that it would be potentially magyarophobic! This is, to tell the truth, only the most tangible manifestation of a Transylvanian schizophrenia that we have already had the opportunity to comment upon – a legacy of decades of a liberal euro-compliant strategy of the RMDSZ / UDMR, which the party happily abandoned two or three years ago, when it chose to ally to FIDESZ. According to that outdated strategy still clinging by inertia to the political conscience of many Hungarians in Romania, only Euro-globalization could guarantee the respect by the Romanian ethnic majority of the rights of the (historical, territorial) Hungarian minority. Leading to an implicit conclusion which could only please the Europeanist circles: the less the Romanians vote, the healthier the Hungarians are. In the long run, this undemocratic approach to the problem of ethnic coexistence could naturally have no other consequence than that Romania Hungarians being cast as a Trojan horse acting on behalf of foreign powers within the walls of the motherland – thus confirming the magyarophobic discourse of a Gladio-type Romanian far-right in all respects comparable to that which, at this very moment shows what it is capable of in Ukraine. The former boss of the RMDSZ / UDMR, Béla Markó, who gave way to his pupil Hunor Kelemen when the party shifted its alliances, even wanted to let it be known that he by no means regrets this suicidal strategy: breaking his usual reserve, he publicly announced his intention not to participate in the vote, and was bold enough to copy-paste, in support of his statement, the famous anti-fascist poem attributed to Martin Niemöller, an Evangelical German priest jailed by the Third Reich. Ironic enough in the context of his ideological alignment with an increasingly German Eurocracy, and of the rallying of all Hungarian churches behind the referendum, this plunge into deep historical ridicule shows in Béla Markó a capacity for self-criticism equal to that of the Junckers, Timmermans and other sons of May 68, that is to say null. “Fortunately” (if I may say so), Hungarians (a little more than a million) are now less numerous in Romania than Romanian neo-Protestants (around two millions), who will vote YES as one body, and it is therefore unlikely that a possible failure of the referendum could be blamed on the Hungarian minority, which will hopefully not suffer the irresponsibility of some of its retired leaders.

Regardless of its outcome, part of the balance sheet of the referendum can already be drawn. Indeed, the best campaign in favor of participation and voting YES was probably the predictable uprisings of the entire Euro-liberal camp, including the tragicomedy played on Monday, October 1 in the European Parliament, where the entire Eurocratic apparatus seemed to have set themselves the task of guaranteeing, by its arrogance and intellectual dishonesty, an overwhelming victory for Liviu Dragnea not only in the referendum, but even in the European elections of 2019. Many Romanian citizens followed, on television and online, this ritual of public humiliation of the poor and backward Eastern cousins, in which some Dutch and German inquisitors, never elected or poorly elected, strive to teach “democratic” good manners to governments based on parliamentary and electoral majorities such as the West no longer dares to dream of. And the referendum, though it was not on the menu, got smuggled into the debate by the ineffable Judith Sargentini deploring aloud that the Romanians will have, this weekend, two days (Saturday and Sunday) to vote. As for the extremely dignified Frans Timmermans, he has been magnanimous enough to acknowledge that family policy is the responsibility of the member states, but only to add that he saw, weighing on the referendum, the suspicion of trying to “politically exploit hatred against minorities “; as the French Nicolas Bay rightly pointed out, the Eurocracy is always ready to respect the prerogatives of the Member States, but on the implicit condition that they serve only to produce ever more liberal-libertarian legislation.

As a result, despite a few defections on the right (like those of Traian Ungureanu and Laurenţiu Rebega¹, close to Victor Ponta) which, in principle, should be billed at a high price to their authors in 2019, Romanian MEPs of all parties have shown a fighting spirit unprecedented since the accession of Romania, and closed ranks around Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă. The latter, instead of apologizing for her mere existence as the Romanians had always done in Brussels and Strasbourg, defended with dignity, but without weakness, her country’s sovereignty. Like Viktor Orbán a few days earlier, she turned blame into glory: this little shy woman, with questionable rhetorical talents, hitherto somewhat despised even in her own camp, is now nicknamed “the Romanian Iron Lady”. Commenting on the debate from Bucharest, Liviu Dragnea, in the toughest statement ever made by a PSD leader against the EU institutions, said that “Romania would not kneel down”.

Therefore, even if nothing in the institutional history of this referendum allows to describe it as a “partisan” operation of the ruling coalition, we can see quite clearly the political benefits that Liviu Dragnea can derive from it – namely, the very ones that Viktor Orbán has previously drawn from the “Sargentini Report” tragicomedy: to show to the lukewarm people of his camp, tempted by a return to Euro-submission, the true face of politico-cultural Euro-imperialism; and expose his political opponents (like Ungureanu and Rebega), too soft in the face of Western interference, to the suspicion of betrayal of national interest. Finally, by joining Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in the camp of states that are institutionally opposed to the LGBT agenda, Dragnea burns the ships of Romanian Euro-submission, making more and more unlikely any reconciliation with a West that seems, these days, to have adopted the LGBT brand of sexual liberalism as its new de facto religion.

Are Eurocrats aware of the danger of a consolidating populist front of post-communist Europe? Hard to say, they seem to favour it by their seemingly stupid arrogance. On the other hand, the conciliatory attitude adopted by the Western members of the PES (of which the PSD is a part), playing the “good cop” while some Western right-wing populists (like the Austrian Harald Vilimsky) overplayed the slander, seems to suggest that at least some of them have understood that the exploitation of the old right / left reflexes – which potentially oppose Czech and Polish, Hungarian and Romanian, etc. – might provide one of its last chances of survival to the Euro-globalist ship. And indeed, the temptation to swap in 2019 the dream of national emancipation against the small change of a “prominence within the PES” is a recurring motif in the talk of some analysts close to the PSD, exactly like Viktor Orbán and his team keep speaking about (but do they (still) believe in it?) “subverting the EPP” towards illiberalism. In 2019, no doubt, someone will fool, and someone will be fooled. But who’s fooling who?