Hi, 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 about the therapy sessions with the journalists and the people, which Nicușor Dan organizes at the Cotroceni Palace. And why he feels so good, after 10 years of aggressive silence and wooden language, to hear a president who cries smiling “debt”. It is a time when Romanians need to ventilate their frustrations. To feel that a political leader is as unhappy as them and tries to change something, drawing at least the correct directions. Then we stop at an imagined leader, who sings again: Sebastian Burduja.
Country diagnosis: Debardada. What does our moments with Nicușor Dan look like
We loved the moment “What do we have here?” of President Nicușor Dan, from the press conference this week, who came to resemble a therapy session for journalists, but also for the rest of the Romanians. “What is it with this debt?”, The leader from Cotroceni asked, with a mucalite disintegration, which I do not know how and from where he has unearthed, but he faces.
“Debdadada” is a country diagnosis suitable for the whole of Romania, not only for the talmeș-the special pensioners in the justice system, to which the president referred.
After 10 years of non -involvement and complicated or disinterested silence from the President of Romania, the opening of Nicușor Dan gives the opportunity for some discussions we need, even if many can be passed to the ventilation of the most popular frustrations. Conferences with the president of the country tend to turn into some sessors in which they are discussed, even though most of those topics are not related to the President's powers. We are missing to ask the president if there is Santa.
And this is not bad, because more than ever, the Romanians feel the lack of leaders to show that they are at least aware of the huge shit through which we browse everyday, on the boat called Romania. We need real questions and real answers, be they and only rhetoric. For some time, this aisle has been permanently occupied by the most retrograde, extremist and anti-Western figures.
Many are laughing at the former mayor when I see him tightening, holding his desk, to gather his thoughts and words in an answer, to questions with weight or uncomfortable. For me, this is a sign of good luck: the man really thinks about what he says and says something with meaning, not fodder and wood chips, as they jump out of the mouth of most politicians.
Another good signal? The president evaluates his level of knowledge in any field. It's not exactly something, but this shows that the man is aware that he does not know things and maybe he is wrong. Remember me the last political leader who was so honest.
Coming from the president, the political leader chosen with the most numerous votes, any finding acquires signal power. For the Romanian state system, accustomed to move as the wind from the boss office, it is necessary for the direction to be indicated. Otherwise, nothing moves.
Unfortunately, as Nicușor Dan, how many Romanians believe these leaders, notes, whether they tell them the truth and the real facts? For many, only the messenger matters, not the message. And when messengers know how to confirm the legitimate frustrations of people and manipulate them, like populists and extremists, people do not know how to discern the facts, they believe the word.
The system of retirements from justice, from which Nicușor Dan “took”, and the old debt of Romania. It is the perfect example of a system that, when it has bread and bread, and the knife, will be left to abuse, to increase its bone. Yes, magistrates must be a privileged category in any democracy, because their good state depends on an essential fiber of the state. In Romania, we see that only the financial benefits do not guarantee this, on the contrary.
To retire at 48-50 years, when a professional is at the height of his competences; to have a pension equal to the salary, unbeatable as it contributes; to grant your pix increases and salary growths, through lawsuits judged by the system you belong to; To combat and blackmail with the unbalance of justice any attempted fiscal policy that affects your income, even though the others support them; To support a caste system, which encourages you to leave it as quickly as possible, in your own financial head. This is the social and salary picture of justice.
The debt of the pensioners in the judiciary, which the president accuses, referred to the feeling of some who do not stop to take full advantage of privileges, but go on. They asked for their retirement without a term of entry into force, to be sure that they can shorten the legal bureaucracy and, at a fingertips, to get out of the system. Or it retires only to re -enter the state system quickly, as employees, cumulating some of the huge pension (the average is 5,000 euros).
All these come against the background of a deep social imbalance. The ratio between the average salary of a Romanian magistrate and the average salary of citizens is the highest in Europe. The Romanian magistrates are doing very well, on the financial side. At the same time, the perception of most Romanians is that justice does not work well, that it is not a place where they can find their justice.
Of course, the Romanian magistrates are overflowed with the work volume, they have a career with huge pressures, they work in an underdimed system and where the modernization hardly makes its place. But this does not give them the right to abuse a system that also privileges them.
Unfortunately, Debardada is not only with the pensioners of the magistrates. Debardada is the word word in the Romanian state, despite the fact that we also have institutions that do their job well. But with a condition, as Nicușor Dan says: “Everyone is waiting for the mayor, the prime minister to come, to say:” Make that. ” And if not … “. If not, the day goes by, the leaf goes.
From here, probably, the need to ask for answers to the president on punctual cases, but which denotes old diseases of Romania: sexual abuses from SNSPA, where the rector Pricopie and the Ethics Commission are raining in the case of Pieleanu; the aggression of a young policeman in a village in Caraș-Severin; The floods in Suceava. Nicușor Dan had answers for all and, most importantly, encapsulated in them the frustrations we all feel.
I do not remember them anymore, but I kept the conclusion of Nicușor Dan, a paraphrase of the sincerity of one of the most intelligent borne of Romania, SOV: “So we have to consolidate this state.” How? And by the more active involvement of the secret services, the president understood, who stressed that they only have to provide information, not to interfere over the constitutional limits.
And here is the point of inflexion that I, one, I expect with the greatest interest from Nicușor Dan: how will the activity of these civilized services of anyone, who proved us with peak and thick, in December 2024, have come to give dangerous failures or passivity for Romania's democracy.
For now, the president is willing to play. Between Basescu's toxic excess and Iohannis's submissive passivity in relation to the services, let's hope that Nicușor Dan will know how to find a balance.
