After a general survey by Sungur Savran and an article on Hungary by our friend Matyas Benyik, we continue our series on the elections to the European Parliament with Romania, with an article by Ana Bazac.
After a so long title, the information is banal. Because the leaders of both the social-democratic party in power and its coalition partner, the tiny explicit liberal ALDE, have acted in a vulgar corrupt way in order to escape the law, these parties lost. I used the word “corrupt” in the ancient meaning of damage or deterioration: the leaders have been using their political (and economic) position in order to acquire more power and direct and indirect benefits by behaving out of the law, and when some aspects of their arbitrary use of the rules and public property were prosecuted and known, they intended to change the law and even obtain the pardon and amnesty of the committed deeds.
The opposition – the liberals and the new neo-liberals – have copiously profited in a two and a half years of aggressive electoral campaign. And though they too have benefited of the 30 years of beyond the law consideration of the political power and the public property, voting, when they were in power or not, all the laws and supporting all the despoilment of the public assets as well as the destruction of all the spiritual values of public power, but also the laws defending the “upper” ones, as they too considered themselves, from the control of the plebs, including in justice, they have – it’s inherent, isn’t is? – focused on Justice and anti-corruption: and won.
Obviously, the policies of the social-democratic coalition were contradictory – and they are, do not forget, the elections were only Euro-parliamentary, and not parliamentary, though immediately after the first signs of victory the opposition and the president Iohannis claimed the demission of the government –: on the one hand, there are absolute neo-liberal and conservative policies, as the support for/privileges given to both the internal capital and the “corporate” trans-national companies and the material support of the “Royal House” and Pharaonic constructions of the Church, but on the other hand, there were “nationalist” policies as the law imposing taxes to the trans-national companies and the repatriation of gold reserve. As well as the project to tax the rich: but after it was furiously attacked, it was retired. And once more do not forget: the most aggressive attitude of the opposition came just after the SDP coalition has imposed last year the above-mentioned law of taxing the trans-national companies, has increased the wages of the public sector workers (in healthcare, education and administration – and this was the occasion to again increase, and more substantially, the pensions from army and services –), the nationwide minimum wage, and the pensions.
Obviously again, the SDP coalition lost because of its own behaviour concerning Justice. Already the SDP coalition has built a consolidated bureaucracy – within which the union bureaucracy is well-established – and a first reason of the struggle for power is just that of keeping/snatching the bureaucratic privileges, including that of stealthy arbitrariness in favour of the own and internal and external masters.
But while the general lines of the SPD and opposition’s policies do not differ essentially – they are both pro-capitalist and anti-communist, as well as vassal type –, the differences, as little as they are, have to be considered.
It’s a short/medium term consideration, but it’s necessary for the masses. If the opposition parties will win the next parliamentary elections, they will annul the taxes of multi-national companies as well as everything they will find opportune and correspondingly they will impose again a harsh austerity.
The opposition parties will more resolutely increase the military spending and correspondingly will continue all the way the privatisation of education and healthcare.
One of the (few) ideas of the opposition parties is that the “young people” and teenagers “will save Romania” – opposite to the useless pensioners –, i.e. will bear the neo-liberal slogans. And indeed, the teenagers are taught that it’s good and not at all harmful to make debts for pursuing higher education. No one says them that the number of jobs will shrink worldwide and thus they will not be able to pay their debts. The teenagers are taught that it’s normal and good when everything is private and one must sell everything and buy on credit. The teenagers are taught that the only normal is to think to oneself and for immediate and medium ends: to question the telos of things, the reason to be of the human life is absolutely unknown by those who have internalised the neo-liberal slogans. As it is to consider oneself as a member of the human species, and not only as an individual caring for himself and the dearest ones: in the neo-liberal (a liberalism without mercy) education promoted by all the parties, including by the “dissident” social-democrat intending to substitute the traditional one, there is no preoccupation for human solidarity with those far away from us, and not for the understanding of causes – beyond the immediate efficient ones – of the social and ecological phenomena. It is a conservative and narrow-minded education, adversative to the expected scientific spirit of the present times.
A feature of the Romanian right – and all the parties are right-wing, irrespective of their own denomination and of that made by the opponents – is that it managed so as no pretext of any protest be permitted. Consequently, there is no green party – though there were attempts to constitute some ones, but their formal “ecolo” spirit was so unconvincing that they collapsed and every party and government has taken over the “ecolo” slogans, intermittently manifesting them through spectacles of garbage collecting or warning articles without any following. Even the movement about 3 years ago against a contract between the government and a Canadian firm of gold extraction from the ancient site of Rosia Montana was not so much for ecological reasons than for attacking that government with the help of patriotic and anti-imperialist slogans. And though those slogans were not forgotten by the ordinary people, now there is no longer any opposition against the concession for half a century of the oil in the Black Sea and the “lucrative” use of Rosia Montana and the entire space of the country.
Also, there is no real left party. All, and especially the explicit right-wing parties, have advanced big words about nature and the poor, but drowned in fake discourses and arriving to compromising every idea of availability for activism for common goods and solidarity.
Nevertheless: are those short/medium term not so neo-liberal policies possible so as we being entitled to vote the party promoting them? Unfortunately, they are not possible. Not only because now to the masses’ ardent need of hope and radical movement giving hope the only answer allowed by all the leading strata is right-wing – at us and for the time being, one avoiding the extreme-right excesses but letting drop extreme-right messages between the “normal” and “respectable” right-wing messages –; and consequently, because every less neo-liberal intention is attacked by all the leading strata; but also/especially because in present the alternatives are no longer “democracy versus extreme-right”, neither “more state/social state/Keynesianism versus minimal state/neo-liberalism/Chicago boys’ capitalism”, and nor “social-democracy versus (neo)liberalism”. With all the present scientific progress, the crisis of capitalism in its last stage is so deep, its contradictions are so unsolvable (just because of this huge scientific progress, inherently global and globalising, bringing also the new conscience of the masses of human beings), that the only alternatives are outside and against the capitalist system. Any delay in the thinking and accomplishing of these alternatives – for example, and as Sungur Savran has pointed out http://redmed.org/article/european-elections-iron-and-cotton, by taking over the fake left messages focussing only on identity and ecology and separating these problems from the class relations – is a betrayal of the human species: we have in view both the savage and irrational militarism preparing new devastating wars, and the waste of every individual’s life even in a “peaceful” moment of this preparation.