Romania: systemic and unopposed corruption in the state institutions

“On the Barricades” s05e06

For our second segment of this week’s “On the Barricades,” we turn to the situation in Romania. Despite the relative political stability, compared to the major crisis in Bulgaria we looked at in the previous segment, Romania too is seated with a deep crisis of democracy. The hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski examine some mechanisms by which the secret services and security apparatus completely dominate the political system, leaving little room for even fighting among oligarchs – managing to jail any political actors who get in the way of their enrichment from state funds or who try to take power from the institutions for themselves. They get around the supposed judicial reforms to make sure bribery rules in important court cases; or they opportunize on the past academic plagiarism of politicians to blackmail them, for example. Scandals are either backed up or silenced by the corporate media.

The hosts also discuss a trend seen both in Poland and Romania of members of state using their position to promote themselves for a better position within NATO– in cases sacrificing the interests of the people without even attaining their own careerist end. The leadership of both Romanian and Polish governments were bought, very cheap, by the CIA to conduct operations and torture ‘terrorists’ at the Black Sites, in the early 2000s, for instance.

The Social Democrats, the closest thing to a bearer of a social democratic tradition and with a stable electorate, has been co-opted and makes for very weak opposition, not unlike the Socialist Party in Bulgaria.