Klaus Johannis, in what was simultaneously his last public address as Romania’s president and his speech for Romania’s National Day, has apologized to the Romanian people.
This comes both as a result of chronic problems – those pertaining to years’ long discontent with Iohannis’s perceived passivity and indifference – and acute issues – the scandal that has arisen with the fulminating rise of controversial surprise candidate Calin Georgescu.
Though Romania’s constitution restricts presidential power significantly, many have condemned Iohannis for driving the Liberal party into the ground.
Indeed, PNL, which has always been in the lead, together with the main “socialist” party, PSD, now sunk to unprecedented depths – something nobody expected.
In his speech, at the reception for December 1st, Iohannis said that he is aware of his errors, that many of his decisions did not stand the test of time and upset the Romanian people, insisting that his intentions were clean all the way through, as pertains Romania’s security and prosperity.
He also apologized not just publicly justifying said decisions. Furthermore, certain statements suggested that he encouraged Romanians to vote against supposed Russian sympathizer Georgescu: “We aren’t voting in order to sanction or reward anyone, we are voting rather to remain a country of freedom and openness instead of collapsing into toxic isolation and a dark past”.
Critics have ping-ponged between calling Georgescu a fascist and a communist – apparently unaware of the fact that both movements contained nationalist elements in equal elements in Romania’s case.
In any case, Iohannis was very clear in his stance, warning that Romania is passing through a “populist phase of disinformation” and that voters should reject “the falsely pacifying discourse which hides an anti-European attitude”.
He also stressed that any result, regardless of outcome, should reflect credibility, probably referring to the widely controversial choice of Romania’s Constitutional Court to recount votes in an unmonitored and private context.
Carmen Iohannis, Romania’s First Lady, who has become increasingly withdrawn from the public eye in recent years, after both criticism of her perceived-revealing wardrobe and her involvement in the lawsuits involving the couple’s properties, was not present at the time of the speech.
Iohannis himself has been sorely criticized for the fact that he spent over 40 million lei on external travel in 2023 and 24.5 million lei in 2022.
When asked about this, he responded: “I don’t know how you define a luxury airplane. I travelled with a small aircraft”.
But Iohannis is known for his dry sarcasm – something he was appreciated for in the past, as he set limits in a memorable way, for instance, when he said “Jó napot kívánok, PSD […] Cut it out with the fiscal prancing”.
Jó napot kívánok is a Hungarian greeting, which Iohannis used ironically at an unsavory moment when PSD partnered up with UDMR, the autochthonous Hungarian party, for purely pragmatic – and artificial – purposes.
Now, though, Iohannis is dead serious – and left things on a sober note.
Time will tell if he can – or will – serve Romania at a EU or EC level, as he had hoped.
