On Tuesday, Romanian Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan made a calm and didactic show of force, even academic at times on the subject of spending and job cuts in the local administration.
The extent to which Ilie Bolojan will continue to play this way in the long term is still unclear – only the passage of time will tell.
For the moment, it is becoming more and more certain that Bolojan is at least open to a this ‘disruptive’ approach’. Another certainty, an objective reality, is the fact that he has no choice but to proceed in this manner if he really wants his reforms to pass, and not just to remain at the stage of conceiving and proposing the most delicate reforms.
Perhaps, on Tuesday, the most spectacular was the moment when Prime Minister Bolojan exposed, and then exploded a bomb for the public that someone inside the coalition and the government (the Ministry of Development, as indicated by the Prime Minister) tried to discreetly place – proposing job cuts which would only have an effect on paper, but with no real effect in practice, more precisely the so-called cuts would not help reduce the budget deficit.
For posterity, but also for the sake of relevance and reasons behind his thinking, here is Ilie Bolojan’s explanation.
“We see that between the maximum number of positions where the Government can act and the actual number of occupied positions are 32%, which means positions or vacant positions have not even been created. Therefore, when you make 25% cuts (…) it means that you do not reach any occupied positions because you get a little above them. And when the Ministry of Development proposed a 25% reduction, we realized that, in fact, we are doing what we have done before: we are telling people that we are going to make cuts where the effect is almost nil, because they only ax positions that hypothetically have not been created or vacant positions and the real effects on cutting costs is almost nil. I have seen this several times and I cannot afford in Romania’s current situation, as the prime minister to come with such solutions to the general public. For this reason, we proposed making a fair and honest analysis about Romania’s local administration.”
As I said above, it is difficult to weigh from now on whether this prime minister will be able to see things through to the end, but it is clear that he does not intend to enter the well-known Romanian dance of ‘salvation’, that previous post-1989 governments did before him, producing false reports with a lot of fanfare, that could have come from Ceausescu’s Golden Age.
What’s worth noting, however is that the country’s prime minister himself has turned into a whistleblower, alerting the public opinion to the fact that some still rely on “fake” solutions (this is the term used by Bolojan), while alerting the coalition, as well as the head of state, that he, Prime Minister Bolojan, is not going to endorse “fake” solutions.
It is hardly surprising at the level of government and at the level of ministries there are today individuals or groups that lead the world when it comes to reforms and the management of critical moments – in fact, if it had been something new, today the boulder of a budget deficit of the immensity of the one inherited by the Bolojan Government would not have hung on the country’s feet. The historical fake has arranged such sediments that today explode in our faces.
Amazing, of course in the best possible sense, is the fact that there is finally a prime minister who makes a separate opinion and shows himself determined to reject this traditional modus operandi, with numbers and common sense on the table.
In a country where politicians steal from the scales more than vendors at the market, and in any case, with an infinitely greater malignant impact, Bolojan on Tuesday rewrote a decades-old philosophy and forged a new path.
To what extent this courageous and at the same time essential step in the context of the existing challenges will be appreciated and at the same time encouraged by both public opinion and at least some political actors, remains to be seen. But what is certain is that the prime minister has set a new bar and new terms of comparison that can hardly be able to be ignored from now on.
It was the reforms and the absorption of European funds (such as the cut-offs proposed by the Ministry of Development and revealed by the Prime Minister) that, year after year, transformed the Romanian state into a cumbersome and inefficient machine, burdened taxpayers and deprived citizens of public investments that would have made their lives more bearable.
On Tuesday, Ilie Bolojan tried to break definitively with this odious tradition. But his brave, radical and common-sense approach won’t be enough if public opinion refuses to understand the importance of the moment, if the governing partners (including some from his own party) seek revenge, if President Nicușor Dan will not offer him the necessary support and endorsement.
