Romania’s Social Democrats Sold Out To President Basescu

Romania’s President Traian Basescu accomplished an extraordinary feat: to turn irrelevant the only major opposition party, the Social Democrat Party, or PSD.

The last case in point: the PSD filed a useless no-confidence motion to comply with Basescu’s wishes, while all political analysis and count of likely favorable votes in Parliament showed it shouldn’t have.

The motion fell by 235 votes against, and 145 votes in favor, with some of the PSD parliament members voting alongside the ruling coalition.

This was an expected outcome, since the Greater Romania Party, in opposition, already had said it would not support it and the Conservative Party had decided Sunday to stay in the coalition fold.

It haunts me the idea that PSD sold out to Basescu, who wants the liberal Calin Popescu Tariceanu out of the PM seat, but has no constitutional powers to make him step down.

The PSD proved it worked for Basescu with its renewed, excessively violent campaign against Tariceanu’s Government, far beyond the typical tone of an opposition party against the politicians in the top office.

That the PSD chose to go ahead and file a no-confidence motion in spite of all the obvious sings which should have cautioned it against the move only reinforces my take that PSD does not belong to its followers any longer.

The top-ranks in the PSD were easy to blackmail, since their fortunes were amassed via botched privatization deals which resulted in a true plunder of state properties.

They played to the tune of Basescu to not end up investigated by anti-corruption prosecutors.

Thus former PSD party top leaders Ion Iliescu and Adrian Nastase fell from grace and office, and Mircea Geoana came to the top; he is a mediocre but ambitious guy, ready for anything to reach at the top and stay there.

Voters may not be aware of the inside dealings but surely they read correctly these signs, hence the PSD plunged in the polls. Their lost votes went to the ruling coalition, which makes for the surprising end result that the latter did not lose in the polls, in spite of its disastrous performance on the job.

The PSD should have known better than to fall in the trap Basescu set for it: his plan was to tarnish the party image.

The PSD top people, both in terms of party ranking and personal wealth, escaped the prosecutors’ investigation so far. But not for long.

Basescu accomplished an extraordinary thing: to finish the main opposition party and thus Romania’s democracy. Now Basescu can finally rule in peace.