Journalist Maria Ressa. Photo: Earvin Perias / AFP / Profimedia
Well I put your head on the electronic door. I am Andrei Luca Popescu (ALP), journalist and deputy chief editor at Panorama. This is the weekly newsletter “Panorama with ALP”, to which we invite you to subscribe for free, to receive it directly by email.
We are talking today about the reflex to dress the sick democracies with poisonous cures and which can censor, as they do in Romania now bulb, CNA or CNSAS. But also about how I tried to clarify the famous journalist-disident Maria Ressa why it is not quite good that I canceled the elections, and she made me clear that the other is the problem: the people were left out. Then, it is Victor Ponta's turn to laugh again, with the Danube waters: ice on the shore.
Why don't the fist policy go in the mouth as a dressing for democracy
When you have a sick democracy, as it is insolently mocked, but rightly, Trump's Dull, JD Vance, the reflex is to slam some coercive dressings, with anti-democratic venom. When you do not have functional institutions, moreover, you populate them with incompetents and political pillar and potentiate them with easy power to abuse, the danger is even greater.
Until I enter the Romanian struggles, with the dubious security movements of democracy, made by bulb, CNA or CNSAS, I tell you an episode that has made me think. In Perugia, where professionals gathered from all over the world, at the International Journalism Festival, I was fortunate to change a few words with Maria Ressa, a well-known Filipino journalist, sentenced to prison by Dictator Dutterte.
While giving autographs on the volume of Romanian translation of his book, “How to face a dictator”, I was insistently asked, and a few colleagues from the press: “Is it bad that the elections were canceled?”. Initially, we rode. What to answer in a few seconds of such a general question, especially when asked by a sow like Ressa?
Someone told him that the judges of the Constitutional Court have doubted the Constitution on the knees, to take this measure. I told him that the authorities did not present conclusive evidence about the involvement of Russia in the Romanian elections and that we would have preferred to have done their job before the elections, as it was normal.
“Okay, but it would have been better to go forward with the elections, under these conditions?”. Convinced that Russia undermined our democracy through Călin Georgescu, Maria Ressa seemed to be built, putting us in the same pot as Georgia: well you canceled the elections. “You are an example!” Retrospectively speaking, maybe she would have blocked the path to Dutete's power if he could. And I couldn't condemn her for this, because in her case it is about survival. What if the people voted?
Continuation, on panorama.ro.
