Consultations between the prime minister-designate with the three major parties from the former coalition did little to suggest that Eugen Tomac will get the votes necessary for the installation of his government.
On the contrary, judging by statements made by Ilie Bolojan and Dominic Fritz on Monday, the Liberals and the USR didn’t receive assurances to give Tomac who was proposed by President Nicușor Dan, the green light. And zero plus zero equals zero.
Judging by Sorin Grindeanu’s statements, it is logical that the PSD’s support comes at an exorbitant price for the prime minister-designate, the president and the country: assuming that the reducing the budget deficit is no longer an number one priority, after the reformist spirit launched by ousted prime minister Ilie Bolojan was buried in the rubble.
There are two elements that back this up, from Sorin Grindeanu, leader of the PSD:
- “To lower the VAT on basic foods and medicines up to 9%. To lower taxes on low wages.”
- “If the solution is to continue the Bolojan bankruptcy model, PSD cannot be part of these projects.”
So, the PSD’s condition sounds like this: we shake Tomac’s hand, but we do with Tomac everything we couldn’t do with Bolojan.
Following Monday’s consultations, we also learned that:
- The president already has sufficient doubts that Eugen Tomac will get Parliament’s approval, enough for President Dan to talk about a plan B even when he was in the early stages of plan A. According to the USR leader, Tomac said that Nicușor Dan will appoint a kind of technocratic prime minister if Eugen Tomac fails to get the votes for his cabinet.
And Monday it was reconfirmed that:
- The month that Nicușor Dan needed to build a parliamentary majority has passed in vain. Sorin Grindeanu said this on Monday, referring to the discussions he had had had with the president: “He replied that there is no clear majority made up of pro-Western parties. (…) We told him that we could try, but we could not present him with a clear majority.”
Monday’s consultations actually reinforced what had become obvious from the start:
- That Nicușor Dan doesn’t have much to offer PNL and USR.
- That if he accepts the PSD’s offer to support a “technical” government, Nicușor Dan will have absolutely nothing left to offer Romanians.
- That the strategy that the president adopted after the no-confidence vote led him down a bumpy road.
- That the technocratic government will have a hard time, and if it does pass (regardless of whether it will be led by Eugen Tomac or someone else) will find it almost impossible to govern coherently, efficiently until the next parliamentary elections.
- That history repeats itself easily, in a costly and defiant way when you ignore the lessons that are available to you.
Finally, it is almost comical that, judging by Monday’s consultations, the viable solution that Nicușor Dan has today is the same that he had a month ago: the appointment of Grindeanu and the PSD in charge of forming a government. And if Grindeanu fails, the appointment of Bolojan, because in the pro-Western parliamentary camp, the PNL is the second party.
It remains an unfathomable curiosity that the mathematician president struggles to impose a prefabricated solution, nonchalantly ignoring the data of the problem.
If he had done the same 40 years ago, Nicușor Dan would not have won any prizes for mathematics.
