In April 1931, Carol II installed a cabinet of “technicians” led by Nicolae Iorga at the Victoria Palace. The great historian brought prestige, erudition, but it brought neither a party, nor a majority, nor the levers of real power. The important decisions were made elsewhere, in the royal camaraderie and behind the scenes that had installed him. The experiment collapsed after thirteen months, and its lasting effect was poisonous: the public concluded that parties are useless, parliament decorative, and politics a backstage business. In the following decade, the extremes that would bury Romanian democracy grew on this ground.
The scene is replayed these days in Bucharest, with different costumes and with a different vocabulary. A month after the censure motion signed by PSD and AUR brought down the Bolojan government with 281 votes, Prime Minister-designate Eugen Tomac promises the Parliament a cabinet made up “entirely of technocrats”. Paper can handle anything. Parliamentary arithmetic, less so.
It's just that Mr. Tomac has neither the erudition nor the prestige of Nicolae Iorga, but, more seriously, no parliamentary party, no majority and no instrument to continue the reforms started by Ilie Bolojan.
The government that is now taking shape is, in the conditions, in the nominations and in its logic of operation, a government under the political control of the PSD, offered to the public under the neutral label of technocracy.
And the formula avoids the core problem of the crisis: the absence of a functional parliamentary majority. A designated prime minister can survive from one negotiation to another; for difficult reforms, a majority is needed to sign them. What is being tested these days is the possibility of separating power from responsibility: to govern without a signature, to decide without a mandate, to collect the benefits without paying the costs. Democracies that tolerate this arrangement empty themselves of their inner content.
He who sets conditions, leads
The facts are public and verifiable. Only one party openly negotiated with the designated prime minister and set conditions: PSD. VAT reduction on basic food and medicine, indexation of pensions, increase of the minimum wage. Legitimate claims as a political program, only that such terms are negotiated only with a government you consider your own. A truly technocratic cabinet would discuss its program with all or none of the parliamentary forces. When a single formation sets the list of deliverables, the tag on the door of the Victoria Palace becomes irrelevant: the management contract has already been signed, and the beneficiary is based in Kiseleff.
The nominations confirm the arithmetic. A former adviser to Sorin Grindeanu from the time when he was prime minister would arrive at the Ministry of Development; at Agriculture, a former secretary of state from the Năstase government; at Transport, a director promoted by the current PSD leadership to the boards of directors of state companies. Portfolio selection says it all about intent. Development, Transport and Agriculture are the ministries with the largest discretionary budgets and the lowest political risks: they finance the town halls, there the Anghel Saligny program works, there the territorial loyalty of a party is built. The ministries where the painful decisions of the fiscal adjustment will be made remain, significantly, outside of this interest.
The PSD toppled a government it was part of, then refused to propose a prime minister, even though it is the party with the most mandates in Parliament, and is preparing to support a cabinet it can control without turning it over. He thus obtains what no assumed government would have allowed him: influence over the public purse, immunity from the costs of the adjustment in 2027 and 2028, and the freedom to censure his own instrument at any time in Parliament. Power without a signature is the purest form of power without liability. Whoever triggers a political crisis remains responsible for its solution; PSD toppled a government five weeks ago and has not yet put on the table, publicly, the formula it is willing to take on.
The precedent that should have vaccinated us
Romania has seen this film before, with the same genre. In November 2015, after the Colectiv tragedy, President Iohannis installed the government of “technocrats” led by Dacian Cioloș. The PSD voted for the investiture, discreetly placed its people in the cabinet, and a year later it was in total opposition against the government it had supported, winning the December 2016 elections with a historic score of over 45 percent. The technocratic label left politics untouched and only moved it into the dark, where the electorate could no longer distinguish who decides and who answers. Those who forgot the lesson of 2016 risk repeating it in 2028, with the related interest.
It will be objected that Romania cannot afford a prolonged crisis: the largest budget deficit in the European Union, European funds conditional on reforms, financial markets that charge each week of the blockade. The objection is correct in its premises and wrong in its conclusion. Precisely because the fiscal situation is serious, an executive forced to ask for the consent of the PSD for every important decision is a guarantee of paralysis. The PNL leader, Ilie Bolojan, formulated it succinctly after consultations: “a government without political support cannot continue reforms“. The adjustment that follows requires a government capable of saying “no” to exactly the party that dictated the terms of its installation. The proposed construction makes this impossible by definition.
There is also a second beneficiary, more discreet and more dangerous. AUR has loudly positioned itself against the Tomac government and thus consolidates its monopoly on the status of “anti-system” force, while in Parliament it votes, month after month, in tandem with the PSD. Every day that the democratic parties seem to exercise power without accountability is a day of free campaigning for those who promise to blow up the whole system.
This is the mechanism by which illiberalism grows: rarely by forceful blows, almost always by disillusionment.
The escalation has begun. On Tuesday, George Simion called for the suspension of the president and launched a “survey” on Facebook on this topic, and Călin Georgescu urged the parliamentarians to start the procedure against the “illegal president”. It is worth recalling the framework: the Constitution allows the suspension of the head of state only for serious violations of the fundamental law, and an appointment of a prime minister that does not suit a party is light years away from this threshold. The move has another function: it turns a government crisis into a siege on institutions and shifts public energy from the question of “who governs and with what program” to a permanent referendum against the state. In one point the sovereignists are unwittingly right: this crisis really calls for arbitration. Except that the arbiter is the Parliament, by vote, with a visible signature.
The stake that can be seen from Moscow
Beyond the internal calculations, there is a stake that other capitals are also reading carefully. The Oslo Peace Research Institute last year counted 65 armed conflicts involving at least one state, the highest level since the end of World War II. Romania is a NATO border state, with a war a few hundred kilometers from Iași and a Russian disinformation campaign that is constantly working to erode trust in institutions. A government without a clear political mandate, suspended between an honest prime minister but without electoral legitimacy, and a party that commands from behind the scenes, is a strategic vulnerability, easily exploited by anyone interested in proving that democracies do not work.
Political accountability is part of the same security infrastructure as the military and diplomacy. The voter who knows who decides can sanction or confirm at the polls; the voter from whom the command center is hidden comes to suspect everything and everyone. A society that suspects everything becomes fertile ground for anyone who sells simple certainties and guilty of service.
Getting out of the crisis requires something simple to formulate and inconvenient to practice: assumption. Whoever wants to govern should say it publicly, sign it, and answer to the voters, with all that entails in the tough fiscal years ahead. If the current formula does not meet the 233 votes, the road is constitutional and in sight: resuming consultations and building a viable majority around an assumed program, without predetermined scenarios and without administrative artifices that replace political responsibility. Any other formula prolongs the crisis through ambiguity and transfers its aggravated costs to the future. In 1931, the experiment of technicians without power lasted thirteen months; however, the payoff came at the end of the decade, when there was almost nothing left to govern. The Romania of 2026 no longer has the luxury of repeating the exercise just to find out the result.
