“A fragile coalition with weak parties and strong services cannot eliminate privilege” / Predictions for 2026

“Romania will remain a country with a public opinion strongly influenced by secret services, their influencers, “security” televisions and useful idiots”, writes Alina Mungiu Pipiddi, in an opinion piece in which she makes seven predictions for what will happen in 2026, including whether the coalition will hold out and at what cost, or whether the cut of magistrates' pensions will succeed.

1. The truth about canceling the election

The “truth” about the cancellation of the election will not be known, because it is already known, but for various reasons — of which incompetence is only one — has not been properly communicated. Georgescu could and should have been disqualified for declaring zero funding and zero expenses, a violation of election law (Donald Trump was convicted of a single undeclared payment made through an intermediary).

Instead, CSAT preferred to invoke obscure reasons. Since the CSAT includes practically all those who lead Romania, the official message has become confused and contradictory, which cannot be communicated. As no one has been changed or even sanctioned — not even Rareș Bogdan, who used PNL public money to support Georgescu's campaign — communication will continue as before, with all the related political and institutional costs.

2. State reform upside down

Romania will remain a country with a public opinion strongly influenced by secret services, their influencers, “secure” televisions and useful idiots.

In this context, no one will have the courage to even start the discussion about the CSAT reform, this “parallel executive”, stronger than the elected government and a constitutional anomaly of the Romanian democracy, although money borrowed from the EU for defense risks entering the black and ineffective hole of all our defense purchases. Instead, the attack on the Constitutional Court, the institution that should check the executive and often does, will continue.

This reversal of priorities is also fueled by “experts” in constitutional law who express their opinions from positions paid by military or security structures.

3. Special pensions: partial and incomplete

The attempt, justified on both ethical and fiscal grounds, to cut special pensions and raise the retirement age for certain categories will have limited results. At most, it will partially affect the magistrates, who are almost unanimously against it, as evidenced by the appeal to the CCR made by the plenary of the High Court, over a hundred people, not just the boss and her gang.

The budget impact will be reduced and the reform will not reach the secret services or the military. The government will continue to take money from categories that cannot exercise such veto rights.

A fragile coalition, with weak parties and strong services, cannot remove privileges in a state without objective public opinion, where everyone considers what he has “rights” and what others have “privileges”.

4. Justice: the beginning of a destructive cycle

Romania is entering a dangerous cycle for justice. Public campaigns built on selective truths produce social resentment and provide the pretext for massive political intervention in the judicial system.

International experience shows that where the executive “reforms” the judiciary by force—from Peru to Albania—the result is not a better judiciary, but a more politically dependent one.

Yes, there are influential groups in the judiciary, including some close to the PSD. But there are more and they have choices. Internal competition is preferable to executive control. Reform should start with prosecutors' offices, where political power already has influence, not by using government-dependent prosecutors to demand general purges and filtering through services. In Albania, vetting promoted by the EU meant that the government-controlled secret service purged corrupt opposition judges, leaving those in power in their place.

The situation is reminiscent of Poland during the time of the Kaczyński brothers: partially real justifications were used to subordinate justice. The services, through the press and their influencers, fuel this climate and push the new and unprepared presidency of Nicușor Dan into political traps. If it continues like this, Romania risks proceedings at the Court of Justice of the EU, as Poland had, which lost them.

The solution is not for the powers of the state to “reform” each other, but for each to reform itself, under the pressure of civil society. That's how democracies work.

5. GOLD: A lot of noise, little results

Polls will continue to announce spectacular victories for AUR, especially to hold together the governing coalition. In reality, without a major election and a party of opportunists, trailblazers and people with parallel agendas, AUR won't win anything meaningful in 2026.

The fragmentation of the far right will continue and reduce its political effectiveness. George Simion will be attacked not only by ideological opponents, but also by internal rivals. The political capital accumulated by Călin Georgescu will not be able to be fully transferred to anyone and will break into various currents.

6. Coalition: mediocre quality stability

Although unable to create a professional communication – not even a single and coherent spokesperson – the governing coalition will endure. No party is significantly better than the others, and a better prime minister than Bolojan does not exist at the moment. The president has made stability his primary goal. No attempt at meritocratic reform is being announced, with the World Bank's old goal of creating a professional human resources service in government shelved. It is probably perceived that meritocracy would destabilize the situation.

With a little luck, Romania will enter a phase of stability in 2026, but at a mediocre level of governance. The country ranks first in the EU for the growth of corruption in the last decade, and there is not even the outline of a real plan to combat the phenomenon. It seems tacitly accepted that the price of stability is tolerating corruption. Instead, we pull strings and pay PR to sneak into the OECD, whose quality continues to decline as it takes in the likes of Mexico, Colombia, or the new aldeas.

Nicusor Dan will not be suspended, especially if he is more cautious, but he will continue to lose popularity in his own camp, because the expectations of this camp were too high for the realism of the president, who chose not to start any kind of battles with serious stakes, but an uncertain end.

7. Education: the production of functional illiteracy and pseudo-doctoral schools continues

After the “reformist” minister Daniel David, who succumbed to both austerity and nominal reforms, the problems in the education system remain the same. The scandal surrounding Marinescu ignores, like the one surrounding Ponta in the past, the elementary fact that 25 years ago the supervisors gave their doctoral students 2-3 books of theirs to copy and that was the doctorate. Not to discuss the fact that at least some law doctoral schools should be closed and that even today at CNACTDU doctorates in which Descartes' first name is Gabriel come for accreditation, showing that no member of the Commission has read the thesis shows that there is no real interest in the reform of doctorates, the flame of which is agitated only periodically and for political reasons.

The same with functional analiteracy, whose reproduction is guaranteed in the future. Civil society does not have the energy to eliminate outdated baccalaureate, absurd school programs or academic monopolies debating literary details in a system where students finish school without knowing who Machiavelli or Shakespeare were, but there is always something about Cărtărescu.

Professional communities are partly selfish and partly demoralized after decades of bogus reforms and low wages to have any initiative. The loss is not only educational but democratic. A population that knows how to use applications on the phone, but does not understand the world in which it lives, does not become a mature electorate. The increase in functional illiteracy will be seen more and more clearly in the next elections, when a mass of voters who know how to book airplanes with the phone but believe that if you get vaccinated your tail will grow will gather to give it political expression.

This text was also published on the Clean Romania platform.