Facing the End of my Romanian journey

I’ve been engrossed these past few days in a book about Romania called Children of the Night – the strange and epic story of modern Romania by Paul Kenyon (2021) which is a gripping and superb read - even if the sub-title is rather misleading since the book is not about contemporary Romania. It actually ends on Xmas day 1989 - with the trial and summary execution of the 2 Ceausescus just a few days after the dramatic scenes in the television studio.

The opening pages follow Vlad Tepes and his 2 sons making an unfortunate visit to the Ottoman Court in the 15^th century - but the book is devoted to the century which separates young Princess Marie’s train journey in 1893 to her future in-laws in Bucharest from the violent events of 1989. It paints a vivid picture first of the personalities at he Royal court and then of the dominant characters during the turbulent politics of the inter-war period as the country descended into right-wing and ultimately Fascist rule.

The Romanian communist party at the time consisted only of a few hundred people but the country’s common border with Russia (and western indifference) ensured that it was quickly under Soviet domination – broken only in 1958 when the Soviets withdrew their troops and the country moved to a more independent role save when Ceaucescu stupidly subjugated the country and its people to the misery of IMF tutelage and the forces of Big Capital in the 1980s.

I had not expected the book to be so captivating – with the interwar period in particular being largely unknown to me.

And reading it encouraged me to go back and update the text of Mapping Romania which I had produced in 2014 – you’ll find the new version here. But I’ve changed the sub-title from “Notes on an unfinished journey” to “Notes on a 32-year journey” since it looks to be ending. Although the cost of living is still reasonable here in Romania, I am a bit isolated - with few friends but 3 daughters in the UK who are keen for me to return. Despite the huge problems of the NHS, I would prefer to put my (eventual) trust in it rather than the non-existent Romanian health system. I've set January as the provisional date for my return.

Challenge to Rule of Law in Europe

2004 saw 10 new member countries admitted to the European Union. Just 2 countries were judged not sufficiently ready – Bulgaria and Romania – on grounds of their levels of corruption and judicial incapacity. They were both eventually admitted to the EU on 1^st January 2007 – but, uniquely, subjected to an annual inspection through a new procedure called the Cooperation and Verification mechanism (CVM).

Coincidentally, these are the 2 countries in which I have lived since 2007 – indeed I had no sooner returned to Romania from an 8 year stint in Central Asia than I took up a position as Team Leader in Sofia in a project for training regional and local officials to ensure the country’s compliance with EU legislation.   

Schengen and the Euro give Bulgaria and Romania additional reasons for feeling the smack of second-class citizenship – particularly because after more than a decade they have not managed to satisfy the taskmasters in Brussels on judicial reform. The requirement for annual reports on judicial aspects and corruption continued until 2019 when it was replaced by the Rule of Law Mechanism (RLM) which necessitates an annual report to be submitted to the Commission by each and every member country.

Bulgaria and Romania had by then become the least of the EU’s concerns - Hungary and Poland had quickly instituted significant departures from the rule of law – packing courts with political appointees, severely limiting media freedom and making political use of European Funds. And some older member countries such as France and Spain were considered to have questionable aspects to their judicial and constitutional systems 

Much of this had passed me by – what caught my attention at the weekend was the release of a critical report commissioned by an Irish MEP Clare Daley on the 2021 assessment by the European Commission - which engages in a dialogue with member countries about their submissions.

Her report – called Binding the Guardians – is just over 100 pages long and was written by a well-known political economist Albena Azmanova who basically analyses how well the European Commission is fulfilling the task of holding member countries to account for their observation of the Rule of Law. It starts, brilliantly, by suggesting four tests for the Commission’s work - 

We suggest that, in order to effectively comply with the rule of law while conducting its annual rule of law surveys, the Commission needs to be guided by (at least) four norms:

·       clarity of communication,

·       thoroughness in addressing rule of law violations (that is, in the full range and depth of detail),

·       equal treatment of the subjects of power, and

·       impartiality in the use of power (in the sense of not having a narrow partisan-political agenda).

Obscurity is a fertile ground for arbitrariness, omissions tacitly condone what is omitted, favoritism disempowers some, and partisan-political considerations harm the common good.

Azmanova then applies these tests to the Commission commentary and finds the following problems

·       A dangerous conflation of “rule of Law” with aspects of procedural democracy

·       Vague, overly-diplomatic language

·       Restricted focus - The Commission report delimits its range to four areas: the justice system, the anti-corruption framework, media freedom, and ‘other institutional checks and balances’.

·       Failing to include the operations of the private sector 

At this stage, I’m conscious that I recently took a vow of brevity and that I am about to share excerpts from the report which will double the size of this post…..so having tantalised you with the summary, I’ll continue shortly

How does a country go about constructing a hopeful future?

It’s been fashionable recently to write about how countries fail – but the challenge of finding countries which have put together a winning formula and emerged as both economic and socio-political successes has proven much more difficult. Germany, Japan and South Korea are about the only cases quoted – with tiny countries such as Estonia and Singapore also being acknowledged.

But all, save Estonia, go back to the post-war period…..

Right now Bulgaria is without a government since the populist who carried the most votes wasn’t interested in forming a government and  - despite the flashy cars and new office blocks - neither it nor its northern neighbour, Romania, have made any sustainable progress in the 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell.

A couple of decades ago, global bodies were shoving “good governance” down the throat of recalcitrant countries as a precondition of admittance to select clubs such as the EU – although any efforts to comply were immediately relaxed on admission.

And progress in countries such as Hungary and Poland has been in a consistently rapid backward direction – with others such as Bulgaria and Romania not even trying very hard in the first instance. Both are still (after more than a decade) subject to the “conditionalities” of the Compliance monitoring of judicial systems – with the efforts Romania has certainly made in that sector being consistently challenged in recent judgements in the European Court of Justice in what increasingly looks to have been collusion between the country’s Prosecutor and its Secret Services.

All this I have covered in posts in the last decade. But I have – like most of the literature – devoted almost no space to how such countries might end the vicious downward spiral and find ways to return some hope to their despairing citizens. Alasdair Roberts put it very well in his “Strategies for Governing” - 

We must recover the capacity to talk about the fundamentals of government, because the fundamentals matter immensely. Right now, there are billions of people on this planet who suffer terribly because governments cannot perform basic functions properly.

-       People live in fear because governments cannot protect their homes from war and crime.

-       They live in poverty because governments cannot create the conditions for trade and commerce to thrive.

-       They live in pain because governments cannot stop the spread of disease.

-       And they live in ignorance because governments do not provide opportunities for education.

Almost 3 years ago, one of Romania’s foremost analysts shared a despairing article but was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward  

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.
It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.  

 At the time I indicated my support for such approaches embodied, for example, in the Future Search method. It’s how I started my own political journey in 1971 – with an annual conference in a shipbuilding town facing the decline of the trade on which it had depended for so long….But any venture would have to demonstrate that it can deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others shown by the fact that, in 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany)

For my money Social Trust is one of the fundamental elements of the soil in which democracy grows. From the start of the transition countries such as Bulgaria and Romania have been caught up in a global neo-liberalism tsunami which has been corroding that soil….

South Africa is the country people select when they want a recent example of positive reconciliation. Clearly Nelson Mandela was an exceptional visionary – but he did not work alone. He brought with him the support and assistance of the sort of people Dorel Sandor was referring to – professionals not associated with the “toxic present”.

But where are they to be found? What professional, religious or other groups can inspire the trust that Bulgaria and Romania need?

Earlier this year I indicated some of the toolkits available for those seriously interested in building a country back together.

But they can be used ONLY when a country has taken the first step and brought together the warring factions to forge a new future together.

Crowds and Power in Sofia and Bucharest - III

 How, 30 years on, is post-communism doing?

I’ve been living in Bulgaria and Romania since 2007 – for a decade I enjoyed crossing the Danube, with the last 100 km stretch of the drive on the highway through the Balkans and the sight of the Vitosha mountain which dominates Sofia always bringing a particular thrill.  

The last post focused mainly on the Sofia street protests of the past 3 months – with a brief reference to the fact that only in Romania has the Crowd succeeded in toppling governments – three times in 30 years…and twice in the past five years.

This post looks at what two recent books by well-known authors born in these countries have to say about the “progress” the two countries have made since 1989 and considers the prospects for effective change

 

In the 1990s there was an interesting body of literature known as “transitology” which was effectively a retraining scheme for those in redundant Soviet and Eastern European studies University Departments as they tried to adjust to the new reality of “liberal democracy” and “free-market capitalism”.

The integration of many of these countries into the European Union seemed to leave the others in a state of suspended animation – still “transiting”.

Except that the “integration” had not gone as planned – some countries (such as Hungary and Poland) had clearly reneged on their commitments and were challenging the “rule of law” canons; and others (such as Bulgaria and Romania) had been unable to satisfy the monitors that they had even got to the required judicial standards. Indeed Philippe Schmitter, one of the doyens of the field, went so far in 2012 as to talk of “ambidextrous democratisation”

 

Bulgaria's world-renowned political scientist Ivan Krastev has (with US Stephen Holmes) written one of the surprisingly few books which attempt to assess the fortunes since 1989 of the eastern countries – although it’s primary concern seems more that of “the crisis of modern liberalism”. It’s entitled "The Light that Failed – a Reckoning” - published last year, with the Bulgarian translation appearing next month.

The book starts with a chapter on the psychological effects on central European countries of the “imitation game” they were forced to play and the demographic shock as millions left the country for a better future elsewhere; followed by one on how Putin’s Russia moved on in 2007 from imitation to “mirroring” Western hypocrisy; a chapter on Trump’s America; and a final one which takes in China.

 

The authors argue that part of the nationalist reaction in Hungary and Poland was the shock of realising that the European "normality" they had hoped for had been transformed into an agenda which included homosexuality, gay weddings and rights for Romas. But their emphasis on the “psychology of imitation” totally ignores the brazen way west European countries and companies exploited the opening which the collapse of communism gave them to extend their markets in both goods and people - with the consequences touched on in the first post and brilliantly dissected by Alexander Clapp in a 2017 New Left Review article “Romania Redivivus”.

 

Talk of “transitology” disappeared more than a decade ago and was absorbed into the Anti-Corruption (or governance integrity) field which grew into a "name and shame" industry - complete with league tables and Manuals. But the world seems to have perhaps grown weary even of its talk…  

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a Romanian social psychologist - appointed, in 2007, as Professor of Democracy studies of the prestigious Hertie School of Governance in Berlin - with a unique understanding and knowledge of the issue. This was her blunt assessment in 2009 of the situation in Romania

 

Unfortunately, corruption in Romania is not only related to parties and businesses, but cuts across the most important institutions of society. Romanian media has gradually been captured, after having been largely free and fair at the end of the 1990s. After 2006, concentration in media ownership continued to increase in Romania. Three owners enjoy more than two-thirds of the TV political news market.

 As long as Romania was a supplicant for entry to the EU, it had to jump through the hoops of “conditionality” to satisfy Brussels it was behaving itself. When Poland, Hungary et al were let in in 2004, the pressures started to relax - but The European Union’s Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) replaced that conditionality in 2007 and Bulgaria and Romania are still subject of an annual check of their legal and judicial health. Mungi-Pippidi therefore concluded her 2009 assessment with a simple observation - 

At the end of day, “democracy promotion” succeeds by helping the domestic drivers of change, not by doing their job for them. Only Romanians themselves can do this.

 Her latest book  "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" (2020) is a must-read for anyone who wants to know why a quarter of a century of trying to build systems of government that people can trust has had so little effect in ex-communist countries. It starts with a sketch of Switzerland’s political development which reminds us that Napoleon was the catalyst for a 50-year period during which the Swiss embedded the basic structures we associate with that country.

It is, however, Denmark to which most countries (according to Fukuyama) aspire to – although a study of its history suggests that, contrary to Dahrendorf’s optimism, that was more like a 100 year journey.

 

Her description of her own country, Romania, is quite damning –

·         From 2010-17 there were 600 convictions for corruption EACH YEAR – including 18 Ministers and one Prime Minister, Generals, half of the Presidents of County Councils and the Presidents of all the parliamentary parties

·         The Prosecution system became thoroughly politicised through its connection with the powerful intelligence system – the infamous Securitate which was never disbanded

·         The level of wiretapping used is 16 times the level of that used by the FBI

·         Romania heads the league table of cases brought to the European Court of Human Rights dismissed for breaching the right to a fair trial – with a half of its cases so failing

·         The annual CVM reports on the country are always positive and make no mention of any of this – on the basis that “questions about the intelligence services are outside our remit”!!

·         TV stations run by those convicted of corruption have provided damning evidence of the prosecution service threatening judges and fixing evidence

 

One of Romania's most famous political analysts gave an extensive interview a couple of years ago which was important enough for me to summarise as follows –

·         the so-called “revolution” of 1989 was nothing of the sort – just a takeover by the old-guard masquerading in the costumes of the market economy and democracy

·         which, after 30 years, has incubated a new anomie – with the “social” media dominating people’s minds

·         “European integration” has destroyed Romanian agriculture and industry - and drained the country of 4 million talented young Romanians

·         After 30 years, there is not a single part of the system – economic, political, religious, cultural, voluntary – which offers any real prospect of positive change

·         Even Brussels seems to have written the country off

·         The country is locked into a paralysis of suspicion, distrust, consumerism, apathy, anomie

·         No one is calling for a new start – let alone demonstrating the potential for realistic alliances

 

Dorel Sandor has clearly given up on the politicians and confessed to a hopelessness for the prospect of any sort of change in his country

 

“The stark reality is now that we do not have political parties any more. The Romanian political environment is in fact an ensemble of ordinary gangs that try to survive the process and jail and eventually save their wealth in the country or abroad. That's all! Romania has no rulers. It has mobsters in buildings with signs that say "The Ministry of Fish that Blooms".

One of the reasons why the EU is not too concerned about us is that it is that they reckon that you can only reform a driver with a car that works. We are a two-wheeled wagon and two horses, a chaotic space, broken into pieces. What's to reform? So it's a big difference.”

 

But he was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward

 

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.

It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.

 

I have a lot of sympathy for such approaches – embodied, for example, in the "Future Search" method. But effective social change rarely comes from such an elitist approach; any such effort would have to demonstrate exactly how it would propose to deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others in the country.

In 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany).

 

The revelation of the collusion between the infamous Securitate and the Anti-Corruption Agency (DNA) has understandably fanned the flames of paranoia for which the Romanians can be forgiven - given the scale of the surveillance of the population the Securitate enjoyed under Ceausescu. Little wonder half of the population are Covid sceptics

 

Conclusion

In the 1980s it was Solidarity in Poland; Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia; and reformers in Hungary who were challenging the power structure – I remember taking the opportunity of being in the country to visit the Party’s “White House” in Budapest in 1987 to talk with a spokesman for the latter.

Bulgaria and Romania, on the other hand, were monolithic and frozen societies – with the only sign of discord being the odd Romanian poet – and on the Danube where protestors against a chemical plant included a few establishment figures such as Svetlin Rusev.

 

But the street has become much more active in the past decade – even if it is the more educated and “entitled” who are prominent there. And it is “the Crowd” that the power elite has always feared – particularly in the last century eg the infamous “Revolt of the Masses” (1930). And who can ever forget the moment when the massed crowd turned against Ceausescu in December 1989 – within minutes, he had been hoisted from his balcony by helicopter and, within days, summarily tried and shot.

 

It’s noticeable that the figures whose words I’ve quoted – Dahrendorf, Canetti, Krastev, Mungiu-Pippidi and Sandor – all represent the intelligentsia. I was brought up to take their words seriously - but they are not activists!  

The sadly-missed David Graeber was one of the very few such people prepared to get his hands dirty… to work across the barriers that normally divide people and to try to forge new coalitions…

 

The Crowd needs people like Graeber who understand how to bridge such barriers…………..particularly between the “downtrodden masses” and the “entitled”

Where is Bulgaria’s Graeber? There are, actually, several eg Vanya Grigorova – the economic adviser of the labour union “Podkrepa” (Support) and leading left-wing public figure – who has been travelling the country to present her latest book on labour rights and how to claim them. A year ago she gave this interview to Jacobin, which positioned her on the side of social change in Bulgaria and the region.

 

Both Covid19 and the greater concern about global warming - as embodied, for example in the recent Extinction Rebellion – suggest that the “normality” being sought by the entitled is a will o’ the wisp.

The Sofia protestors would therefore be well advised to widen the scope of their agenda. After all, smaller countries generally seem better able to “do” change viz Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Singapore, Estonia, Slovenia – particularly when they have women at their helm who have a combination of trustworthiness and strategic vision!!

 

Especially for them I updated my list of essential reading for activists – adding my own “opportunistic” theory of change which emphasises the element of individual responsibility as well as the dynamic of the crowd viz

 

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity – through proper analysis, mobilisation and integrity. It involves– 

·         speaking out about the need for change

·         learning the lessons of previous change efforts

·         creating and running networks of change

·         which mobilise social forces

·         understanding crowd dynamics

·         reaching out to forge coalitions

·         building credibility

 

I grant you that the time for preparation is over in Sofia; and appreciate that some of this may come across as rather elitist but the process it describes is still a crucial one – prepare, analyse, network, speak out, build coalitions, mobilise, no hidden games…..It’s a tough combination……

Crowds and Power in Sofia and Bucharest - II

The Nobel-prize winning author Elias Canetti was born in the Bulgarian city of Russe on the Danube in 1905 and would have had quite a few things to say about the protests in Sofia. Better known ironically (thanks to his own autobiographical efforts) as one of British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s many lovers, his “Crowds and Power” (1960) vies with Le Bon’s as the classic treatise on the subject. The book - a  strange mixture of anthropology and social psychology and now, understandably, enjoying a new lease of life - warned of the unpredictable ebb and flow of the crowd. It is, most definitely, not a Marxist take on the subject – for which one should turn to criminologist Matt Clement’s “A People’s History of Riot, Protest and the Law – the Sound of the Crowd” (2016)

Vlad Mitev is a young Bulgarian journalist who also lives in Russe and has a trilingual HYPERLINK "https://movafaq.wordpress.com/category/limba-език-language/english/"Bridge of Friendship blogHYPERLINK "https://movafaq.wordpress.com/category/limba-език-language/english/" which covers political and cultural developments on both sides of that last section of the river Danube. He’s also editor of the Romanian section of "HYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/"BaricadaHYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/""HYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/" , a leftist journal based in Sofia which boasts Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian writers. He and I worked together on an early draft of this piece before deciding to focus on what we each felt we knew best. I’m also grateful for the insights I’ve gained over the years from Daniela, my Romanian companion and conspirator,

Ralf Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as “Reflections on the Revolution of our Time”. In it he made the comment that it would take

·         one or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently liberated countries of central Europe;

·         maybe five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy; and

·         15 to 20 years to create the rule of law.

·         some two generations to create a functioning civil society there.

 

What had in 1989 seemed a bloody Revolution in Romania was later exposed as more of a simple regime change. Personnel and systems remained in place and it was to be 1996 - with the election of Emil Constantinescu as President - before new winds started to challenge the old systems and structures of power. By then the scions of the country's privileged families were being inculcated in the pro-market celebratory doctrines that pass for education in American Business Schools; and the country's (strong) intelligentsia had spent several years quaffing at Friedrich Hayek's fountain.

 

Privatisation was at last allowed to let rip – with the local oligarchs soon becoming indistinguishable from the politicians.

When Bulgaria’s PM Ivan Kostov was asked why crony capitalism was flourishing under his rule, his revealing comments was

 

“Bulgaria is a small country. We are all cousins”

 

Eastern Europe as a whole was offered a deadly deal which has almost destroyed these countries – almost 2 million Bulgarians and Romanians prop up the British and German economies; Bulgaria has the unenviable position of losing its population at a faster rate than any other country in the world - and Romania is not far behind. And the pensioners who are expected to exist on a monthly pension of less than 200 euros a month – when the prices in the shops are at western level.

 

Austrian and Italian companies have taken over the jewels of the Bulgarian and Romanian timber, banking and agribusiness sectors after the massive privatisation which was made a condition of their membership of the EU and NATO.

That last has meant of course militarisation, high expenditures on military procurement and reduced social spending. Bulgaria recently concluded a deal for American fighter aircraft at a cost of 2 billion dollars – placing it at the top of the global table for increased military spending since 2010 – with a 167% increase (Romania is at 150%)

 

The Bulgarian protests

But it is the EC Structural Funds with their hundreds of billions of euros which lie behind the ongoing street protests in Sofia - directed generally against the country's systemic corruption and, specifically, against Prime Minister Borisov (who used to be the bodyguard of first the ex-dictator Zhivkov and then PM King Simeon II) as well as the Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev - whose raid on the offices of popular President Radev in July raised big questions.

Unlike previous street protests in Sofia, this one has attracted wider support – for example from a previous Justice Minister, Hristo Ivanov who launched a mock incursion on the Black Sea home of one of the country’s political oligarchs

 

The incident transformed Ivanov’s image from detached intellectual to maverick politician setting the terms of public debate, and his centre-right Democratic Bulgaria coalition doubled its support in the polls. “This was not simply the PR action of the year but of the decade,” said Petar Cholakov, a political analyst and sociologist from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

 

The two countries separated by the River Danube don't usually have a great deal to do with one another - one is strongly in the EU/Atlantic Alliance camp - the other's 150-year-old ties with Russia still reverberate. But, in recent years, Romania (at least in western eyes) has made significant progress in fighting corruption - measured at least in terms of the number of politicians and ex-Ministers it has managed to put in jail. When Bulgarian activists began to call this out, the power structure tried to defuse the situation by appointing a crony as Prosecutor-General. This is a position which, unlike in Romania, has never been the subject of any reform.

 

Vlad Mitev’s recent Open Democracy article Bulgarian Protests - battle over anti-corruption gives some of the background to the Sofia protests

 

The Romanian anti-corruption formula was popular in Bulgaria until 2017-2018. Romanian anti-corruption had gained its fame under the leadership of the former chief prosecutor of the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) Laura Kövesi, now chief prosecutor of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

 

As Romanian Chief prosecutor from 2013 to 2018, she presided over numerous arrests of politicians, widely reported in the international press. The “Romanian model of anti-corruption” was lauded in the western media as an exemplary model for delivering justice and building the rule of law. The model of anti-corruption based on a powerful Chief Prosecutor’s office thus came to be seen in Bulgaria as a path towards a European standard of living. The Bulgarian middle class seemed to envy their Romanian counterparts...

 

But a subsequent article by Mitev in “Baricada” laid more emphasis on the class nature evident in the protests – which the western media has totally failed to pick up -

 

It is interesting to note that in the earlier wave of anti-oligarchic protests in Bulgaria in 2013 the protesters were called by media and society “the beautiful and the clever ones”, which was a direct reference to the narcissism of their representatives’ and to the abyss that divides them from the “ugly” and “stupid” masses. Romania has an almost exact notion of the same type: “the beautiful and the free youth”, which gets abbreviated as “Tefelists” (TFL – tineri frumoşi şi liberi – beautiful and free youth).

These are important signals that important parts of the overall population feel distant and maybe even ethically superior to these protesting elites, who in turn believe that it is they who hold the ethical higher ground. And these notions have been used by politicians in a divide and conquer manner.

 

What was imported from Romania was the idea of an unrestrained Chief Prosecutor which suited Bulgaria’s new man Geshev down to the ground – as Mihai Evans explains in a recent Open Democracy article.

 

As the system is currently constituted there are simply no checks and balances that can rein in the conduct of the Bulgarian Prosecutor General, a position which is largely in the political gift of the government. The holder of this office has effective command of the entire judicial system and can stop any investigation, including a hypothetical one against himself. This has resulted in conduct that reached a nadir in a shocking series of events which saw a senior prosecutor murdered after making strongly worded criticisms of the then Prosecutor General. This appalling episode has never been satisfactory cleared up by investigators or the legal system. The family of the murdered man took a case, Kolevi v Bulgaria, to the European Court of Human Rights whose ruling was that Bulgaria must engage in extensive reforms of the prosecutors office.

 

Over a period of more than a decade, largely coinciding with the governments of Borisov, it has failed to do so. As a result, as Radosveta Vassileva, a fellow at University College, London’s Faculty of Law argues: “Bulgaria is permanently torn by scandals regarding non-random distribution of case files, abuses of judges and prosecutors who resist political orders, purposeful destruction of evidence by authorities etc.”. In recent years Bulgaria has been repeatedly convicted of violations of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights for failing to ensure the rights of the accused. The Specialised Court for Organised Crime, a parallel system of courts ostensibly established to combat corruption have failed to convict a single politician (in contrast to Romania where dozens have been imprisoned, including the leader of the ruling Social Democrat Party last year). Legal scholars have accused both countries of failing to provide fair trials.

 

The Sofia protesters’ demand of a reform to the Bulgarian constitution (with the chief prosecutor’s prerogatives being curbed, the political influence over the judicial system curtailed and the judiciary strengthened) certainly suggests a continuing degree of faith in Bulgarian institutions or at least in their capacity to reform and be held accountable.

 

Pre Covid Hopes of “Normality”

"For a normal Romania" was the slogan used by the campaign of the ex-Mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu in last autumn's elections as he fought to retain the Presidency he had surprisingly grabbed in 2015 from the jaws of defeat. The slogan expressed the dreams of many - not least the millions of younger Romanians (and Bulgarians) forced to emigrate in search of that dream.

 

Street protests in both countries are nothing new - although only in Romania have they succeeded in recent years in toppling governments. A so-called Social Democratic (PSD) government fell in 2015 as a result of a deadly fire in a Bucharest nightclub which exposed the scandalously lax regulations sustained by the greasing of hands.

Another scandal which engulfed Romania last summer started with the murder of a teenager whose terrified phone-call to the police was totally ignored. The revelation of the scale of the collusion between the Secret Service, prosecutors and the Anti-Corruption Agency in the country (a veritable Deep State) eventually led to the collapse of that PSD government as well - and the re-election in the subsequent Presidential election of the slow-witted but polarising Transylvanian Klaus Johannis

 

Bulgaria and Romania may have joined the EU in 2007 after a bit of a hiccup but they both still operate under a judicial cloud in the form of The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) which subjects each country to an annual check of its legal and judicial health. Neither Bulgaria nor Romania are happy with the continued EU scrutiny but have at least managed to avoid the threat of sanctions which continues to hang over Hungary and Poland. And both countries have, largely, managed post-1989 to escape the right-wing virus to which they were exposed in the interwar period. For that we should all be profoundly grateful.

 

But neither country has been able to shake off the legacy of its past - which is much longer than just the half-century of communist influence. The Ottoman Empire had several centuries to engineer human souls – with the Greek Phanariots being given a measure of licence in Romania to exploit the locals whereas the Bulgarians lived under the direct yoke of the Ottomans.

In that respect, Dahrendorf was a bit optimistic in 1990 in suggesting that it would it take only 20 years to embed the Rule of Law and 2 generations (say 50 years) for civil society to be properly functioning! 

I’ll continue this post later