By Bogdan Iancu
Bogdan Iancu, LL.M., S.J.D. (CEU-LEGS 1997, 2006), Associate Professor at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Political Science, Department of Political and Constitutional History and Theory
Romania has entered the Union in 2007, together with Bulgaria and as a Big Bang afterthought. Both countries joined with Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) strings attached. The CVM, a sui generis stopgap whose very name conjured up ambivalence, was initially meant to lapse after three years. It was formally lifted only in 2023, albeit actual monitoring was discontinued for Bulgaria in 2019 and for Romania in 2022. Due to their geographical and cultural vicinity, accession twinning, and the CVM, these two countries have repeatedly been analogised, most recently with respect to Schengen enlargement. They are dissimilar in that, although the CVM formally applied very similar conditions to both (anticorruption, judicial independence), only Romania created strong anticorruption institutions.
In the Romanian public discourse, anticorruption was, on account of the CVM, equated with the rule of law, whereas anticorruption supporters, promoters, entrepreneurs portrayed themselves and also tended to be viewed as axiomatically ‘European.’
Deep political-constitutional crises, intersecting with the CVM, erupted in Romania in 2012 and 2017–19. Consequently, the country started to be compared to Hungary (in 2012) and Poland (especially after 2017). Romania was now represented as an equally dangerous illiberal state, where valiant European rule of law defenders had to stonewall equally dark authoritarian forces. The blunt semantics of backsliding were mustered to shorthand quinquennial slips interspersing five-year forward slides towards the local version of the Rechtsstaat.
The analogy to Hungary and Poland is not fully without merits. Romania has a GDP three and a half times that of Bulgaria, a much larger population (sixth in the EU) and territory (twelfth largest in the Union). Like most of the troubled East, albeit slightly less than Bulgaria and the Baltics, Romania is also deeply unequal. Bucharest is now (PPP per capita, Eurostat) more affluent than Budapest, Athens, Madrid, and Berlin. As a result of past legacies and skewed distribution of the considerable accession benefits, the capital and a handful of bigger cities stand as an archipelago of relative affluence in a country where the percentage of household units with indoor plumbing remains the lowest in Europe. Cleavages also overlap, though to a lesser extent, with historical-territorial units, especially when it comes to differences between the formerly Austro-Hungarian parts of the country and the so-called ‘Old Kingdom’ in the south and northeast. In this latter sense too, Romania, a post-imperial, late modernizing agrarian society, is somewhat similar, other things being equal, to Poland. In Romania, however, unlike in Hungary and Poland, aggressive Euroscepticism has mercifully not become an issue – or at least not until recently.
Demography translates into political divisions. Smaller cities, rural parts, and the ‘Old Kingdom’ tilt more towards the local center-left Social Democratic Party (PSD), whereas the center-right is on the whole more concentrated in bigger urban areas and post-1918 territories. The sizeable Romanian diaspora votes almost unanimously right of center. Political divisions in turn reinforce and are also influenced by the constitutional design of 1991 which established a semi-presidential system. Presidential and parliamentary terms were desynchronized in 2003, which has generated a pattern where the presidency falls to the right, with the balance tipped on occasion by the diaspora vote. Conversely, the PSD has formed left-dominated majorities as part of various alliances. Left-dominated governments thus ‘cohabitate’ uneasily with right-dominated presidential administrations.
Anticorruption, a European conditionality, gave expression to this bundle of local tensions and exacerbated them to the breaking point.
For over a decade and a half, all politics revolved, Brazilian-style, around antigraft on steroids: televised arrests, endless speculations about this or that file, agitprop mobilization, and no small measure of higher-purpose instrumentalism (e.g., wiretap fragments and indictments were routinely and selectively leaked to the friendly press). The social democrats bore the full practical brunt of anticorruption, partly because their politics is indeed marked by Balkan post-communist patrimonialism, but arguably also because center-right presidents had power of the pen over appointments to high prosecutorial positions. Presidents also hold swaying power over the powerful Romanian intelligence service, with which anticorruption prosecutors sedulously collaborated at the height of the anticorruption campaign on the basis of classified protocols. Two such memorandums of inter-institutional cooperation were declassified in 2018 and subsequently voided by the Constitutional Court in 2019.
As anticorruption became a quasi-constitutional meta-discourse, deftly monopolized by the center-right, it became enmeshed in other discourses, such as latter-day anticommunism and, more problematically, forms of social racism.
A quiver-full of boilerplate tropes was conscripted into propping up the anticorruption equilibrium: diaspora as engine of Europeanization, voters for ‘the corrupt’ as ‘captive electorates’, and the like. Anticorruption heroes and heroines rose. Some of them became fallen angels, to be soon replaced by new defenders of the faith.
As a result of demographics, the morphing of anticorruption into ever-more radical strains, and the partial overlap between narratives, the center-right tweaked. A newly formed anticorruption party, Union Save Romania (USR), appeared as a spearhead ‘European’ complement to the older, tamer, mainstream center-right National Liberal Party (PNL). The USR worldview fuses at the hip a radically selective kind of ethical and penal populism with the bovarism of big-urban, slightly younger and more affluent milieus. To wit, the current party president, while acting as minister of transportation (2020–21), came up with the idea of using NextGen funds to purchase hydrogen trains for a relatively short route as a concession to EU Commission demands to invest in green energy.
This may be viewed as emblematic, since the desire to invest EU rail-earmarked funds in the most expensive toy imaginable for the big-urban Spartan classes (just like in Japan!) appears to have been primarily symbolic.
Millions of Romanians journey and commute by communist-era trains along beaten-up old tracks, between small urban and countryside routes, or to the Romanian Black Sea shore where unfashionable people still vacation with their Helot families. On some routes, trains travel more slowly now than in 1989 but that is not necessarily a concern for hybrid SUV drivers or city-break afficionados. The archipelago is well connected by domestic flights.
This tense anticorruption status quo and various associated narratives first cracked during the pandemic. A party that had been fully neglected by the mainstream media received over ten percent in both houses of parliament, with particularly high percentages in Spain and Italy (where large communities of Romanians reside). AUR (acronym for ‘gold’) is an ultranationalist, ultraconservative, Eurosceptic faction. It currently stands at about 20% in the polls. An even more unsavory offshoot is now credited with as much as 8% favorability.
In 2021, the new political configuration resulted in a German-style GroKo of social democrats and national liberals midwifed by national-liberal President Iohannis. Once the war in Ukraine had broken out, stability truly became the new order of the day. When Romania applied for Schengen inclusion, the CVM was reluctantly suspended in 2022, then lifted the year after.
With it, a 15-year long staple discursive and practical obsession (anticorruption, no matter that it is carried out locally, is equated with ‘Europe’ and ‘the rule of law’) was further diluted.
To be sure, whereas stability is a desirable feature, it should not be prioritized zero-sum at the expense of other values. Meanwhile, corruption as such continues in many forms, from spoils politics, through nepotism and clientelism, all the way to the political weaponization of anticorruption institutions.
There are many lessons that can be drawn from this Romanian/European story. The most important of them are arguably that rule of law is the result of a complex balance and that democracy cannot function without a degree of homogeneity. Furthermore, the most useful, or rather least problematic, liberal constitutional type of homogeneity is a modicum of social and economic equality.
The quick-fixes of EU enlargement (formal institution building and specific policies) and post-accession instruments such as the late CVM are insufficient to assure an equally democratic and lawful form of stability.
This is particularly true in societies that had, also before their communist regimes, never truly experienced genuine modalities of constitutional government.
Romania’s GDP has increased ninefold in the trail of the accession, a true economic miracle. Life-changing possibilities opened up for millions. However, whereas EU enlargement can heave aggregate prosperity at its peripheries, the Union in its current, incompletely federalized form cannot fully shape or determine the social and economic conditions for long-term liberal democratic stability. This will be a challenge in and hopefully the achievement of the coming decades.
