The Romanian president needs to overturn the tables
Nicușor Dan announced Monday’s party talks while at the NATO summit, but they appear to have begun already—informally and outside Cotroceni, through indirect signals and political trial balloons.
- The PSD made a panicked call for responsibility: “We have the duty to denounce political egos and to think first of all about those who gave us the vote of confidence. We have the duty to build a majority for the citizens, not for the politicians.”
- The leader of the UDMR Hungarian party, Kelemen Hunor, publicly addressed other parties, the PSD, PNL and USR, urging them to bury the ax: “We must stop blaming each other and find something we can agree on.”
- According to sources, Cotroceni sent similar messages through the press, suggesting that the president wants to appoint a prime minister by the end of next week and will apply pressure to make it happen: “The president will put pressure on party leaders to stop delaying,” a presidential source told HotNews.
Maybe this time there will progress, or maybe not.
The only certain thing is that the crisis has lasted more than two months and we’ve seen this “Monday consultations”, before with declarations of intent and calls for responsibility. And the result, each time, was zero.
Let’s not to forget that the crisis was triggered by the PSD and later dragged out by Dana and the PSD.
Let’s look at these three points:
- The PSD appeal has one lethal flaw: it has zero credibility. Why? It has shown over these last two months that it is afraid of taking responsibility at any level. One, it started the crisis, because when it overthrew the Ilie Bolojan Government, it had no solution ready. It has also perpetuated and aggravated the crisis by refusing to find a majority or negotiate a functioning minority.
- Kelemen Hunor’s appeal is correct, but it is valid only in form and it is not valid in substance since, the post-May 5 political context will not allow for everyone to bury the hatchet and reset.
- As far as Nicușor Dan things are complicated and meaningless. The impetus (based on sources) is that the president is trying to make a fresh attempt to unblock the situation. However, he is at best clumsy, and at worst power-driven.. On the one hand, he expresses a desire to end the crisis by the end of next week. On the other hand, he seems very ambitious: he will put pressure on the parties to reach an agreement. He starts from the modest “I want” and goes to the more virile “I do”. When you engage with extremes, you miss the basics. So he says “I want” –the crisis to end by he end of the week. We all want a lot of things, but the simple fact of expressing a desire can be irrelevant if you can’t act on it. It’s irrelevant that Nicușor Dan wants to unblock the situation, because he apparently wanted it before, and nothing happened. As for the idea of putting pressure on the parties to deliver a government, the problem is that he isn’t able to do it. In the two months and more crisis, Nicușor Dan hasn’t put pressure on the parties except the PNL. And what he did was underhand and dishonorable and in vain. He put pressure on the PNL but it backfired and energized public perception of the party as well as endangering democracy itself. So, what Nicușor Dan will do this time is a mystery. But from what we’ve seen so far, it will likely be problematic and won’t work. As Nicușor Dan himself has said, he lacks the tools to force parties to say yes when they want to say no. His own admission of presidential impotence—both unusual and damaging to his negotiating position—will not have gone unnoticed by the parties meeting with him on Monday.
- The party leaders facing him will adjust their strategies accordingly, putting him at a serious disadvantage. That is why Nicușor Dan’s position is not only complicated but increasingly incoherent: he is preparing the consultations by signaling through advisers and sources that he will pressure the parties, even though only days earlier he admitted that he has no real leverage and lacks the tools to force their hand.
The rest of the text can be read here.
