Everything for Everyone

A campaign with few ideas, with mediocre strategies, with things the Constitution doesn’t cover, but with very high electoral promises. Nothing new! You could say this for sure when reading today’s collection issue, "Elections in the 20th Century".

"The campaign regarding nowadays’ elections apparently didn’t show anything more than the campaigns in the past. The same stodgy literature in the political press, the same seductive promises - that will never happen". This is a fragment from the "Universul" newspaper from the 25th of May 1926. Today, they are as true and present. The electoral campaign gathered all the Santas, Santa Claus, Santa Nicolae, Santa Andrei etc. It filled their bags with promises and overturned them on people’s heads. "Here, take, seem to say the Romanian politicians, take ‘cause we have >, for the unemployed, for peasants, for businessmen, for the bright, for the young, for pensioners, for women, for strawberry collectors, for children…" I don’t remember an electoral campaign after 1989 as rich in promises as this one. The politicians, the political parties adopted the "all or nothing" method. And they promised everything! A campaign with few ideas, with mediocre strategies, with things the Constitution doesn’t cover, but with electoral promises greater than Santa’s presents. If the parties fulfil their promises then, after the elections, will bathe in milk in honey, and the people won’t have anything else to do but stay in their houses and get ready to eat from the politicians’ own hands. Cars’ wheels will be made out of free-soy salami, and the coins, for a better circulation in the European Union and in nature, will be made out of pressed cheese.

I am not sure whether these promises will bring the citizens to the voting on the 28th of November or whether they will send them away. I don’t know whether the people believed all these promises or not and whether they will vote accordingly. But I am sure that very few of these promises will be kept. And, this is how, for once more, the voting will become politicians’ best ally, but Romania’s and our greatest enemy. There is nothing greater than going to bed on the night of 28th of November in a country bathed in politicians’ milk and honey promises and waking up on the 29th of November in a country sunk in maize porridge, alms and garlic, since Saint Andrei’s Day is the day after!