Romania Is Normal

~ Clarissa

Romania is having a normal one:

Yes, you ready showed everybody, Romania. Nobody can outdo you in “wait, what?” news.

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Published by Clarissa

7 thoughts on “Romania Is Normal”

    1. “life is getting pretty weird here”

      What is the deal with Georgescu? Is support for him real or astro-turfed or purchased?

      Why would Romanians want what clearly looks like a russian agent as president?

      (And is president the head of state or prime minister?)

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      1. President’s the head of state, but it’s more of a ceremonial/diplomatic/liaising between different centers of power sort of role in the current constitution – we’re more of a parliamentary republic, post-2012. There are very few things the president can actually do on his own – even as far as the military goes, he’s the head of the armed forces but the actual decisions get taken by the supreme council of defense, which he leads but which the parliament vetos. Prime minister has vastly more executive power, and also legislative through the means of “ordonanta de guvern” – basically a limited and very controversial amount of legislative power left to the government’s side, but they have little to no influence in outside matters (diplomatic or military). Probably the biggest inside matters sources of power the president has is the ability to veto laws (but only once per proposal) and the ability to mobilize public opinion – we’re very tsar-friendly, as a nation, and if the president comes out and says something is rotten in the state of Denmark, it means things.

        Basically if Georgescu gets elected it’s very bad optics for our international partners, but there isn’t really much shit he can do if he’s facing an unfriendly parliament. And personality-wise, he isn’t the sort that deals well with unfriendliness, give him 6 months and he’ll do whatever the prime minister tells him to :))

        Support for him is real, but it’s not for him :))) The demographics of the Romanian electorate, going by vibes so to say, are about 20% westernized upper middle class (votes USR and a bunch of tiny very Western parties, neither shrinks nor increases, used to be very revolution-minded but the steam came out of its sails after the pandemic), about 35% what a very perspicacious Romanian sociollogist characterizes as CRIB – basically an old guard middle class that’s either state bureaucrats or private enterprise that depends on the state, that used to be bolstered by a very significant rural lower class but they’ve lost that in the past years due to a mix of demographic issues and diaspora issues – very anti-neoliberal, votes PSD/PNL, in complete free-fall numbers-wise, and about 45% antiestablishment (these are the guys that are called extreme right by my fellow USR voters, but they really really aren’t) whose star is in the ascendant. These are maybe 10% actual far right (these were the guys voting PRM 15 years ago, plus the hyper-religious crowd whether Orthodox or Neoprotestant – used to be 15% but it’s decreasing as fast as the CRIB powers-that-be, and for the same wrong-side-of-neoliberalism-issue), maybe 5% rural lower class (dying off quickly) and the rest is a mixture of rural “self-made” middle class/urban lower-middle class/diaspora that’s very neoliberal, makes its money working in the EU, reacts to the fundamental uncertainty of neoliberalism by textbook patriotism. Georgescu’s main draw is that he appeals to these trad vibes while having a very inoffensive, intelligentsia-look-alike presentation (previous figures being scandalous folk in the Corneliu Vadim Tudor vibe). His main vulnerability is that he’s personally a crunchy granola sort that nobody except a small section of the USR electorate could take seriously – his handlers are trying to mitigate by keeping him from talking to the press in non-controlled situations, but it’s not quite working. What’s happening right now, however, is that the antiestablishment electorate is super fired up because of the honestly bullshit cancelling of elections, and they’re rallying behind him (rather than behind other antiestablishment figures such as George Simion or Diana Sosoaca) because he’s being Wronged by Authority. Honestly if I were the Deep State and trying to keep the guy from being elected president I’d have just pumped up on TikTok his wife’s healthy vegan recipe for the healthiest Romanian traditional soup (a true bougie abomination upon God, and I say this as someone who likes bougie cooking and dislikes that soup) and his opposing candidate would have won at 85%. However, the opposing candidate was a less-neoliberal-than-usual USR person, and the constitutional court (which cancelled the elections) is mostly CRIB-nominalized judges at the moment, so no way in hell that was happening – they preferred to throw a mulligan hoping that having an united CRIB candidate would work (it’s not working lol)

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        1. “I’m obviously Stille”

          Many, many thanks for that comprehensive rundown. I’ll have to read it a few times for much of it to soak in. But it gives me a handle for news from Romania (a place I’m very fond of). Previous attempts just left me with a dizzy head.

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          1. You’re welcome, and hit me up whenever there’s weird news from Romania and I’ll try to offer context. A dizzy head is pretty much guaranteed if you look at English language news, shit’s completely nonsensical.

            Some vibe points to keep in mind:

            • Romania has been incredibly influenced by migration, with a double-digits part of the population being the EU’s Salvadorans, so to say. This was *far* less negative for us than for the Salvadorans, since it broke the back of a Belarus-like power structure by bringing in seed money for a gajillion small businesses (or, hell, buying houses, and many things that make the average Romanian lead a far less precarious life than its Western counterpart). However, the social effects were very real, and the generation that was first left with random relatives as its parents went to pick strawberries in Spain is now old enough to vote.
            • One memory that colored the discourse for 2024 were the 2000 Iliescu vs Vadim elections, which are still talked about heatedly a quarter of a century later. Basically, after half a century of commies, and while being a presidential republic, we had 8 years of a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing socialist (Iliescu) in which the standard of living (already horrible) took a dive as poorly performing state industry got sold for pennies on the dollar, then 4 years of a democratic president (Constantinescu) that put in the groundwork of getting us to join NATO and the EU, but didn’t quite achieve it. Then Iliescu comes back, and to ensure he gets elected, he pumps up a Trump-like candidate (Corneliu Vadim-Tudor) ensuring that he ends up facing him on the second round. And I have to remind you that back then we were a presidential republic, so the president could do a lot of damage without anybody being able to stop them. Every middle class or with higher education Romanian who was of voting age in 2000 has the memory of voting for the fucking commie and then getting blind drunk to forget what they placed their stamp on. Every one. So the current, very unpopular PSD and PNL leaders both tried the same trick, pumped up a harmless nobody like Georgescu to keep the western USR candidate from getting in the second round (all their projections showed they’d lose to them) and also to keep away antiestablishment candidates with actual parties behind them (Simion, whose success in the first round would lead to greater mobilization for his AUR party in the parliamentary elections, which happened between presidential rounds – and many nobodies in parliament are a bigger problem than 1 person at Cotroceni palace) and, because they’re idiots (hard to poll as low as they poll with a captive audience like they have) didn’t realize that there’s a pool of almost half the voters that is currently in disparate blocks but can find commonalities if given the right uniting figure e.g. a polite dude with trad talking points.

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            1. Considering stuff like that, things like Georgescu-s Prigozhin-bought-on-Temu friends or the Dracula revolutionary cell is just … local color. This is just the intelligence services trying to make themselves useful by rooting out enemies of the state, very ineffectually. Back when when we were hosting a NATO summit, the enemies of the state ended up being some highschool punk kids from my town that I was friends with, the press was just as deluded, but nothing bad ended up happening to my friends so I can’t find it in me to march for the Temu Prigozhin and his Dracula buddies, you know what I mean, lol? It’s just theater.

              The weird part is where we have the Americans, a very earnest, serious nation, taking this shit seriously. Because there’s normally a balance of the ecosystem, so to say, where the public left-wing sector is funding one set of Romanian NGOs and the private, religious, right-wing sector is funding another set of Romanian NGOs and we all go troll each other’s public meetings and try to hook up with the other team’s women (Romania is very antifragile like that) but all of a sudden people here are taking Musk seriously and I can only imagine the internet rotted their brains.

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