Ion Iliescu deceived us: there is no “original democracy”, there is no alternative to freedom
Ion Iliescu, in 2017. Photo: Mihai Posumschi / Agerpres
I lost not a decade, but more than that.
In the confusion of the 1990s, Ion Iliescu launched the idea that Romania will go, intelligent and adaptive, on a special road. We will not be in communism, not in capitalism (a word that it almost did not speak), but on the third way. We were going to have, according to his own expression, “a gradual transition”, not a “shock”.
Constantin Stroe: Mining delayed with 8 years the Renault investment in Romania
But Iliescu's speech was not, in reality, an economic one. The consequences, of course, were not delayed to appear in the economy and in the low level of life.
The mining aroused by Ion Iliescu led to the delay of foreign investments, with concrete examples. Constantin Stroe, the former director of Dacia, told how Renault was in 1990 ready to return to Romania, the French wanting to counteract the Audi investment in the Czech Republic, where the Germans had bought Skoda.
It's a transparent, edifying case.
Renault came into discussions and invited the Romanians, who were to see the Lille factory. Only, shortly after, the scenes of violence in the University Square and the center of Bucharest appeared. A country in which the “unofficial army of the regime” punishes civilians was not a free country, with a system of justice and, therefore, not profitable in the long term. The events made the French give up.
Renault returned only in 1999. Today, Renault Dacia is the second company of Romania as a turnover, according to the up-to-date ranking.
Whoever enters Parliament
Not only in the economy, but also in politics freedom was not real. Because freedom is not divisible.
Liiceanu, Pleșu, Dinescu and Hăulică candidate in 1990 on a list of independents, at the first free elections in Romania. They failed to enter the Parliament.
In a recent interview (I apologize, in the chase of the events I escape my link), Viorel Hrebenciuc said that if the intellectuals came to ask him, he “solved” him. He would have put them in Parliament breaking votes from Ion Iliescu's party, who had enough. This is how he proceeded with the UDMR, which he helped, Hrebenciuc added.
Even assuming that the statement is brave over decades, it expresses a state of things from what the “third path” means, an “original democracy”.
No, there is no other way than freedom.
