{"id":4452,"date":"2020-05-12T08:28:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T07:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/?p=4452"},"modified":"2025-06-09T08:32:18","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T07:32:18","slug":"romania-on-the-brink-of-political-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/2020\/05\/12\/romania-on-the-brink-of-political-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Romania on the brink of political violence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Romania \u2013\u00a0<\/strong>Since Klaus Iohannis\u2019s surprisingly fast rise to power in 2014, his detractors have regularly used the \u201cNazi\u201d card against him. In most cases, this has been done in a stupid way: ignoring \u00a0the word\u2019s actual definition, and instead simply making a cruel reference to Iohannis\u2019s ethnic background.<\/p>\n<p>This is likely based on the fact that Iohannis is part of Transylvania\u2019s \u201cSaxons\u201d \u2013 a German speaking minority in the multi-ethnic country of Romania. While Saxons often adopted Hitler\u2019s ideology in the 1930s and during the second world war, however, Iohannis clearly cannot be held responsible for these family ties. While it is true thatsome of his words contain a\u00a0certain aftertaste of antisemitism, that attitude is so widely spread in Romania that it should not lead to any meaningful conclusions about Iohannis\u2019s alleged prejudices \u2013 and even less so, imply that they might arise simply because of his family history.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, it can be observed that there is a growing affinity between Klaus Iohannis\u2019s political discourse and topics popular in the ideology of Nazi Germany. It seems however, that Iohannis himself is not aware of these affinities, considering his lack of historical and philosophical knowledge.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Brief context<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Since the campaign that led to his first election, Klaus Iohannis \u2013 followed by almost the entire Romanian \u201cright\u201d\u2013 has systematically emptied his electoral discourse of anything political.<\/p>\n<p>In Hungary, the FIDESZ party in power presents itself as \u201cright wing\u201d or \u201cconservative\u201d (sometimes adding \u201cilliberal\u201d since 2015, for the connoisseurs). Whether these tags are appropriate or not, they do clearly locate the ruling party\u2019s ideology on the spectrum of ideas. This is an approach mirrored by other parties, with FIDESZ\u2019s main opposition usually called \u2013 and often calling itself \u2013 \u201cleft wing\u201d (or, more and more commonly, \u201cgreens\u201d to some), despite being in reality Macron-type liberal.<\/p>\n<p>In Romania, following the failure of his 2014 campaign accusing the \u201cleft\u201d of harbouring malfeasant political figures, Klaus Iohannis changed his approach.\u00a0 Instead, he decided to make his \u201csocio-democrat\u201d(actually populist) opponents look like the \u201cparty of corruption\u201d, while repositioning his own side (<em>de facto<\/em>\u00a0Macron type liberals) from being considered the Romanian \u201cright\u201d, to being the side of the \u201cjob well done\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>This brutal replacement of politics by morals \u2013 though not unprecedented in Romania\u2019s post-1989 political life \u2013 can today be observed in two phenomena:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Firstly, the media tendency to reference the origin of Iohannis, to the point of unhealthy overuse. By focusing on his territorially Transylvanian, ethnically German identity, this behaviour sets a symbolic, geo-biological hierarchy of Romania\u2019s population: the hard-working \u2013 and therefore rich and well-disciplined-Transylvanians in the North-west, and the thieving, lazy, lying, obscurantist and sometimes murderous Vlachs and Moldavians in the South-east, outside of the Carpathian Arch. This discourse convinced a lot of voters in Transylvania\u2019s Hungarian minority to vote for Iohannis in 2014, and even (to a lesser extent) in 2019. Ironically, Klaus Iohannis turned out to be the most anti-Hungarian president of Romania\u2019s constitutional history \u2013 communist era included \u2013 showing himself to be, first and foremost, a puppet of Romania\u2019s deep state, which is itself in allegiance with the Empire of the West and therefore opposes Orb\u00e1n\u2019s desire for any kind Hungarian independence.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Secondly, it can also be observed that there has been a more and more biopolitical colouration of that moralism. Iohannis\u2019s Romania became the \u201cclean Romania\u201d, while his socio-democrat opponents \u2013 disregarding the fact that their program has not contained anything even remotely Marxist in thirty years \u2013 \u00a0became the \u201cred plague\u201d. In Romania\u2019s right-friendly media, it is said that supporters of the Social Democratic Party can only have voted for them because of a lack of basic intellectual skills. Every time the PSD voting results are too high for the media\u2019s liking, the legitimacy of universal suffrage is called into question, proposing to withdraw the right to vote from either non-graduates (held to be simpletons), or the poor (selective suffrage), or the old, or all of them, since the Romanian right\u2019s political discourse mixes them up anyway.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Eastern European far right \u2013 which can be compared to Ukraine\u2019s \u201cultras\u201d, or in Poland amongst the\u00a0<em>opponents<\/em>\u00a0of the PiS\u2013 maintains a degree of\u201cprogressive\u201d ideology which may surprise the Western observer. While hostile to democracy, anti-egalitarian, building to the idea of the \u201cenemy from within\u201d and so on, it\u00a0<em>at the same time<\/em>\u00a0favours multi-culturalism, the LGBT agenda etc. This is because it does not claim legitimacy in the light of some relatively mythical past, but in a specific, eugenic and technologist vision of the\u00a0<em>future<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>This is a clearly recognisable sign of the American ideology that is ever-present in Romania, and which can be seen both through the usual channels (also active in Western Europe) and, more directly through the cancerous spreading of neo-protestant cults led by the United States.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Outcome (ongoing)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Once we understand these elements, it becomes easier to see why, in Klaus Iohannis\u2019s Romania, the \u201cCovid crisis\u201d can only go wrong \u2013 though so far, everything has happened much the same way as it has everywhere else: the Romanian government\u2013 surprised by a largely unknown threat thanks to its own guilty lack of awareness, exaggerated by the media reports of the Chinese government\u2019s \u201ccrisis communication\u201d \u2013 overreacts. Like almost everywhere else in Europe, it lacks the means to take technical action, thanks to the neo-liberal looting of the last decades. Therefore, it finds itself faced with a technically unconvincing yet spectacular solution \u2013 the same madness suggested to Boris Johnson by the spin-doctor Neil Ferguson and quickly imitated by Macron: lockdown.<\/p>\n<p>While this is familiar action to those viewing from France, Italy, Switzerland or even Hungary, the \u201cCovid ideology\u201d fits so perfectly within the Iohannis regime that it could lead to its downfall.<\/p>\n<p>I have mentioned elsewhere the drama\u2019s first act, namely the quick transformation from a (more formal than real) democracy into a military dictatorship, which took place in March-April 2020 thanks to the weight of the Romanian deep state. I have also mentioned their (European record-setting) hefty fines, given by the truckload for every minor violation of absurd and liberticidal lockdown rules. These fines quickly became one of the primary tax revenues of the exsanguinated Romanian state.<\/p>\n<p>However, on May 6<sup>th<\/sup>, the Romanian Constitutional Court declared these fines illegal as their enacting decree did not sufficiently specify the conditions for recognising a misdemeanour, thus leading to an arbitrary window of opportunity for their execution by the police. French friends, take note\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Without any further delay, on May 7<sup>th<\/sup>, Klaus Iohannis dedicated a television address to commenting on this decision, and on the country\u2019s situation as a whole. Utterly mixing crisis communication and campaign speech, he pointed the finger specifically at two enemies of the \u201cclean Romania\u201d that he believes himself to embody: the PSD, and a judicial system that he accuses of being its secret accomplice (despite the fact that the same judicial system had severely punished the PSD, and its then-leader Liviu Dragnea, who is still in prison today).<\/p>\n<p>Prior to this, Iohannis had already accused the PSD of wanting to \u201csell Transylvania to the Hungarians\u201d on April 29<sup>th<\/sup>, without any grounds whatsoever. Even though the PSD \u2013 led by Iohannis\u2019 sidekick Ludovic Orban \u2013 is in charge of their coalition government, and disregarding the fact that the PSD had granted exceptional powers to the government in parliament at the beginning of the \u201csanitary crisis\u201d. On May 7<sup>th<\/sup>, he placed both the PSD and Covid-19 on the same level, there by giving the biopolitical rhetoric of the ruling liberal far right in Romania its final, perfect and definitive form. The dangerous metaphor of the \u201cred plague\u201d has become a rather more real hallucination.<\/p>\n<p>So let\u2019s examine the impact of these two disasters on Romanian society:<\/p>\n<p>Covid-19\u2019s official numbers show 888 deaths in Romania, which represents 1.26 days of general mortality in two months. This figure is actually similar to post-communist Europe\u2019s low life expectancy, especially amongst men \u2013 which I have analysed elsewhere. Nothing currently indicates that this mortality rate might grow in the future, either in actual lockdown conditions, or out of it (as clearly shown in the Belarussian and Swedish examples).<\/p>\n<p>I have often mentioned in these columns the records of Liviu Dragnea\u2019s PSD government (2016-2019) which, amongst other things, show doubled salaries in the public sector, thus slowing the exodus of Romanian doctors. As light as the pandemic toll might be, we could reasonably think that without this government, it would have been slightly heavier.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, Romania seems to be threatened far more by the authoritative delusions of Klaus Iohannis and the Atlanticist far-right he embodies than by a virus that is killing significantly less Romanian people than an ordinary flu \u2013 \u00a0or indeed than by the \u201cred plague\u201d of the relatively timid PSD. There are countless acts of violence committed by law enforcement against passers-by circulating in complete accordance with the law. Moreover, obviously intimidated doctors refuse to give certificates of attestation to the victims of those violent acts, even though it is statutorily due to them. Under the pretence of the fight against \u201cfake news\u201d, the regime has also closed several sites that were hostile to Klaus Iohannis, including amongst them\u00a0<em>Justi\u021biarul,\u00a0<\/em>against which Iohannis hold an old rancour for having revealed one of the grim aspects of his social rise in the early 1990s: his ties to a Canadian network of child trafficking ( editor\u2019s note: the site is now censored, making it impossible to provide a link). Online, an army of trolls (<em>a priori<\/em>\u00a0belonging to the workforce of Europe\u2019s biggest \u201csecret\u201d services) tracks down every sign of scepticism regarding the lockdown in order to brutally remind \u201cperpetrators\u201d of the suffering of parents in intensive care (except that Romania probably does not have enough beds in intensive care for all these trolls\u2019 parents).<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Conclusion (temporary)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now, the question is to what extent the deep state of Romania is in control of the mockery of democracy ruled over by Klaus Iohannis since the Ceau\u015fescu couple\u2019s murder. If it is still the case that the deep state holds power, then Iohannis is probably close to his political end, with Covid-19 lighting the fuse. His exaggerated attacks against the PSD could in that case have been staged in order to boost the PSD\u2019s popularity (they being as much controlled by the deep state as Iohannis\u2019s PNL) who would rise to power so \u201ceverything changes so that nothing changes\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>However, if Klaus Iohannis turns out to be honest in the paranoid and eugenic delusions that he showed in his last public interventions, we should expect the worst. In that case, it would be unlikely to see him finish his mandate (perhaps even the year) as the head of Romania. He would then risk, before leaving the stage more or less brutally, leaving behind a toll from Covid-19 that is perhaps even heavier (and that\u2019s saying something) than the lockdown\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n<p><em>The points of views expressed within this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The original article has been published in French on May 8, 2020, and has been translated by the Visegr\u00e1d Post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Romania \u2013\u00a0Since Klaus Iohannis\u2019s surprisingly fast rise to power in 2014, his detractors have regularly used the \u201cNazi\u201d card against him. In most cases, this has been done in a stupid way: ignoring \u00a0the word\u2019s actual definition, and instead simply making a cruel reference to Iohannis\u2019s ethnic background. This is likely based on the fact<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"acf":{"subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visegradpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}