May the Country Perish, But Let’s Save the Early Elections

Thursday morning, on public radio, a listener from Bucharest offered to take in one of the children in the flood stricken areas till the child’s parents were rebuilding the home they lost.
The caller and her husband were people of few means and had an eight-year old child; they hoped their own child will play with the one they wanted to invite into their home for a while. "When he or she will go back home we will give him some clothes and bed sheets and a mattress," she said.

This was just one example of the million gestures that we came to call lately with an overused word: solidarity.
It goes without saying that millions of Romanians were touched by the television broadcasts which put them in touch with the plight of the tens of thousands of other Romanians struck by the devastating floods.

Loathed by politicians, looked down upon by its owners, the journalists were at the top of their profession (reports of Pro TV private station, for instance, could stand easily in any world anthology of television news). The news casts showed the disaster left behind by the floods, but also the humanity of people helping other people in distress.
Because of reports sent by young reporters on the ground the victims did not feel alone and millions of their countrymen felt connected to them.

One man alone seemed to have escaped all this, like living in another country, or better yet, on another planet. The man is our own President, Traian Basescu.
He locked himself up in the presidential office and for days it looked like he was not aware of the disaster. Total silence was his only reaction.
We got a few glimpses of him though: once, when he showed his interest in the last ruling of the Constitutional Court and, a second time, at the opening of an art exhibition.

On Friday evening though, we understood that Basescu knew all the way about the disastrous floods in Romania, because he spoke to the nation.
According to Basescu, nothing much happened in Romania.
Some people died, some homes were turned to pieces, people ran out of their homes in the wee hours of the night for fear of being swept away by the thundering waters, children and elderly people were weaving their hands to be rescued from roof tops, corpses of dead animals filled the streets, the crops were brought to the ground, the national roads and railway tracks were swept away like little twigs, people lost the homes they worked for their whole lives, the villages were swamped in water and mud, the diseases were on the brink of spreading.
So, why state it was an emergency situation? Why ask for help from other nations?

No, no, no, said President Basescu.
Did he show his support to the people in distress? Well, he first waited for the waters to recede and then he proceeded in visiting some of the not-so-badly hit regions.
He cracked jokes he and his sycophants laughed at, ate apricots and let the nation know that on November 4, his birthday, he would like to have a glass of champagne on a bridge he wanted rebuilt by that date.

That should be right after the early elections the ruling centrist coalition is pressing for would have taken place, elections that it will undoubtedly win with120% of the votes cast.
All this indecent behavior took place not far away from places people were mourning their dead or the loss of their livelihoods.

So why would Basescu behave that way? Because he lacks common decency?
Obviously not. He had a point to make: things are not so bad, but only hyped by the media. Hence, the logic conclusion would be that early elections are totally called for.

To arrive at this unnamed conclusion Basescu did even more: he trashed the media, accusing it of prompting an "uncalled for mass hysteria."
To back his claim that decreeing an "emergency situation" was uncalled for, he went that far as to misquote provisions of the Law 453 of 2004, which states the instances when such a status is enforced and army is called in to take-over the salvage operations.
Enforcing the above mentioned law would have called the army to the rescue of the stranded people; would have appropriated private means of transportation for public use - namely rescue operations; would have given the army the mandate to guard the possessions of the people leaving their homes for safer, higher grounds; would have given a signal to the outside world that Romania needs its help.

A calamity in the meaning of Paragraph (b) of Article 3 in Law 453/2002 did occur, and yet Basescu kept stating it did not for one purpose only: to not call an "emergency situation" status because that would have interfered with the legal provisions of calling early elections.

Basescu also said that budgetary resources should be first used for rebuilding the infrastructure, and only afterwards for rebuilding the homes lost by hundreds of people.
Thus authorities got a signal from the highest position of authority that they may forget about helping people out of their misery.

Basescu thinks of early elections as a magic want expanding his powers beyond the limits set by Constitution, even. To that end he pursued to undermine the authority of his own prime-minister, to weaken the National Liberal Party, partnering his own Democrat Party in the ruling coalition, to bounce the latter around, from the left to the right of the political spectrum, etc.
Basescu is ready to call in early elections was Romania to turn a sea-bed, while he, the eternal sea-captain, would stay on the shore shouting to the voters below: "Do swim well, please!"