The dramatic turn of political discourse in Romania

PSD party leader Liviu Dragnea during a campaign in Romania. Dragnea is known for steering the government from behind the scenes, recently replacing the entire cabinet (and prime minister) with more loyal party members. Souce: Partidul Social Democrat from Romania (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

That moment, which is still fresh in my memory, took place at the end of the 2004 Romanian presidential election. Its main protagonist was the candidate Traian Băsescu. Immediately after the polls closed, Băsescu gave a very emotional speech accusing the Social Democratic Party (PSD) government and its candidate of stealing more than 300,000 votes. He asked for the immediate replacement of all members of the national election commission and insisted that people take to the streets.

Days later, after the final results came in and Băsescu was declared the winner, he completely forgot about the massive fraud he promised to investigate, and no one was dismissed or arrested for it. And still, the apocalyptic and manipulative discourse of that night became the epitome of his ten-year-long presidency.

Unpresidential rhetoric

It would be no exaggeration to say that Băsescu’s presidency was characterised by the weaponisation of political discourse not used to convince by means of reasoned arguments, but to muckrake and destroy political adversaries, and to turn social classes against each other in his endeavour to justify the destruction of the social state in the aftermath of the 2009 economic crash. Although an analysis of the rhetorical means he employed to weaponise his discourse – which was often sexist, racist, classist and xenophobic (on one instance, he called a journalist a “filthy Gypsy”) – would require a study of its own, one thing is clear: by the end of his second term in 2014, the public space was forever changed, and the tone of public discourse, radically altered.  

One of the reasons why this went almost unnoticed is that numerous right-wing intellectuals saw Băsescu as a political hero fighting endemic corruption and were ready to employ sophisticated arguments to justify his violent language. Others argued that Băsescu was a man of the people, a man of action, but not a man of words. What he said and how he said it was of little importance. Even though Băsescu was filmed hitting a child while campaigning in Ploiești, it was disregarded by his supporters who remained silent on the matter. It could be argued that this justificatory discourse was violent in itself, although not explicitly, precisely because it tried to downplay and condone the explicit violence of the (un)presidential rhetoric.

The radicalisation and weaponisation of discourse was not Băsescu’s only legacy. After the 2008 economic crisis, Romania was in very bad shape. Thanks to the almost perfectly implemented austerity measures, poverty and social precarity had risen to extreme levels, triggering an unprecedented flood of mass emigration. According to the 2017 UN International Migration Report, around 3.4 million people left the country by the end of 2015. The high emigration rate between 2007 and 2015 placed Romania in second place globally, after Syria. In Romania there was also a war raging: an economic war against the poor. The weapon of choice was austerity, which crippled Romania and drove its citizens away. The right-wing government’s only answer to this was even more austerity and anti-corruption efforts.

Although it would be hard to make a case against fighting endemic corruption, or against the fact that the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) played an important role, it has to be said that the DNA was sometimes used as a political tool and that significant corruption cases (like Bechtel or Microsoft cases) were either quickly shelved or simply closed without anyone of importance being deferred to justice. It is not difficult to see why the right-wing parties forming the government under Băsescu suffered a major political defeat in the 2016 general election, and that only an unending series of blunders and grave mistakes by Victor Ponta, the PSD’s presidential candidate during the 2014 presidential campaign, allowed Klaus Johannis of the National Liberal Party (PNL) to claim a narrow victory.

Spreading virus

Leaving the election results aside for the moment, what defined the last two national elections, as evidenced by a whole series of studies on the matter, was the increased violence and aggressiveness of political discourse. Characteristic of this electoral discourse was its nationalistic and populist tone, employed by the PSD and PNL (National Liberal Party). Their anti-European tone supplanted the ideological void and lack of political vision of the traditional parties. It would not be far-fetched to say that in the last several years we have witnessed what could be called the PRM-isation of Romanian politics and political discourse.

PRM (Greater Romania Party), led by Vadim Tudor, was a far-right parliamentary party which had taken part in every election from 1992 until its demise in 2004. Since it had a bad reputation in Brussels, the party was systematically isolated by all the others. Its agenda was discredited and the public appearances of its leaders were often ridiculed. The slow dissolution of the party began in 2008 when PRM acquired only 3.15 per cent of votes, its lowest result since its establishment, which also fell below the electoral threshold necessary to obtain seats in the parliament.

What many regarded as a good thing was in fact the opposite. Because the PRM functioned as a magnet for far-right politicians, it was systematically marginalised by all other political parties. Once the PRM started collapsing, it ceased to function as a “containment chamber” for the toxic and violent discourse and the fallout was dramatic. The virus unleashed spread rapidly throughout the political spectrum, transferred by many ex-PRM members who jumped ship and became key figures in mainstream political parties (i.e. Olguța Vasilescu, who left the PRM to join the PSD in December 2007 and was later elected mayor of Craiova and in 2017 took office as labour minister). The virus easily spread thanks to the fact that Romania, and indeed the whole of Europe, was still recovering from a debilitating economic crisis and its aftermath, and the fact that nationalist and anti-European sentiments were on the rise across the continent.

The most visible and damaging effect of the polarising, divisive rhetoric that became the norm in the 2014 and 2016 national electoral campaigns divided the Romanian people in more dramatic ways than ever. While the PSD capitalised on the economic and demographic catastrophe caused by the crisis, the opposition parties scrambled to recover from the fall, warning that the PSD would effectively terminate all anti-corruption efforts and even endanger the country’s membership in the EU. Their apocalyptical warnings could not really make up for the lack of any plan to solve the country’s problems. War between the two factions broke out in February 2017 when hundreds of thousands of Romanians took to the streets to protest against the infamous Government Emergency Ordinance No. 13/2017 that was perceived by many (and not without good reason) as the beginning of the end for anti-corruption efforts in Romania.

One of the main features of the protest was its unprecedented negative rhetoric. “Muie PSD!” (loosely translates as “Suck it, PSD!”) soon became a popular slogan of those who called the PSD and its supporters “the Red Plague”. Gabriel Liiceanu, a former Băsescu supporter, wrote a popular article, “The Swearing that brings us together”, taking great pains to legitimise the use of this slogan. The fact that some were quick to remind him that, a couple of years earlier, he had written an article arguing that violence breeds violence and that insults have no place in the public space did not really trouble him. Of course such expletives are often used by protesters to express their revolt and anger, but this time it was the highlight of the anti-government discourse.

Toxic polarisation

Dialogue between the two sides became impossible. The PSD and its supporters (“the Red Plague”) were anathematised by the protesters and on a couple of occasions fistfights broke out between protesters and PSD supporters. Discursive violence quickly turned to physical violence. The fact that the PSD organised counter-demonstrations made the possibility of a collision between the two groups even greater. Instead of sensing the danger and trying to de-escalate the conflict, many of the populist intellectuals kept writing inflammatory texts, deepening the divide between PSD supporters (most of them older people or those in a precarious economic situation) and anti-PSD protesters (most of them middle-class younger people).

Never in recent times has Romanian society been so polarised, and both traditional parties, the PSD and the PNL, have tried to use this conflict to their own advantage. Although the PSD and its leader, Liviu Dragnea, were trying to show strength, it is beyond any doubt that they were losing political capital. The fact that the PSD forced the resignation of its own prime minister (not once, but twice in the course of a year), only to replace him and the whole cabinet with other party members exclusively on the basis of their loyalty to Dragnea, did not stop the collapse in support for the party. For this reason, internal party conflicts were becoming an ever-greater problem for Dragnea, its autocratic leader who was doing everything in his power to avoid a final decision of the Bucharest Court of Appeal against him, which would certainly mean his imprisonment (Dragnea was convicted in June 2018 for abuse of office and is appealing the verdict – editor’s note).

In trying to distract from his personal and political problems, Dragnea received the support of the entire government coalition to call a referendum for the purpose of exclusively redefining marriage as a union of heterosexual couples in the constitution. It would be an understatement to say the referendum had no real meaning and was nothing more than a dangerous political weapon in the hands of a man desperately trying to build a false consensus to stay in control of his party and out of jail. The constitutional amendment proposed by the PSD (and supported by the PSD coalition partners and even by the PNL) was useless since the Romanian Civil Code already defines marriage as a union between husband (man) and wife (woman). However, its effects on the already deeply polarised society were dramatic. The discursive violence of those in favour of the constitutional amendment rose to a whole new level. Homophobic and sexist remarks were no longer the exception, but the norm.

Supporters of the PSD, along with the Romanian Orthodox Church, held debates and spread material to convince people that the future of the country was at stake. In a sense, it was. Almost the entire political establishment supported the referendum. To the surprise of everybody, the referendum result could not be validated because only 21 per cent of voters cast their votes. In order for it to be valid, at least 30 per cent of the voting population was required by law.

This resounding victory over the retrograde and populist agenda that threatens to put Romania on an anti-European course was also a victory over the violent discourse that had taken over Romania in the last decade. What is perhaps even more important, this victory was brought about not by an intellectual movement calling for social peace, nor by the church calling for tolerance and decency (in fact, the church discourse was maybe the most vicious of all), but by the ordinary citizens who refused to take part in this masquerade of a referendum. Since these kinds of victories are always short-lived and fragile, it is the task of new social movements and political parties (such as the USR, DEMOS or RO+) to break with this toxic tradition and replace the discourse of violence with a discourse of tolerance – of which the whole of Europe is in dire need.

Paul Gabriel Sandu has a PhD in philosophy from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Liviu Dragnea, polarisation, Romania