The Failed Presidents of Eastern Europe

  With each passing day, I am more and more convinced that the Ukrainians have fallen into the same political trap as Romanian voters did when they elected Iohannis as president in 2014.

To be sure, Iohannis did not have the necessary national political experience : until his election, he was the mayor of a Transylvanian city atypical for Romania, nor was he a member of the Liberal Party (he had been active in the German Forum). No, he was elected because Romanian voters thought that by endorsing a Saxon they would get a better treatment in Brussels and that they would be accepted faster in the Schengen area by the EU:

"The election of Iohannis is undoubtedly linked to high expectations and hopes. But these alone do not fundamentally change the political situation in Romania,"  a leading German CDU MP said. "Doubts about Romania's accession to the Schengen Area persist (...) (Romania) will not achieve this goal in 2015," he added. The reaction of the chairman of the Bundestag Committee on Internal Affairs comes in the context in which, recently, the president Klaus Iohannis declared in the German press that he will make efforts for Romania's accession to Schengen to take place in 2015. "( Adevarul newspaper from 2015)

In turn, Zelensky was elected president without any previous political experience. In my opinion, the Ukrainians voted for him because of the supposed connections that someone of his ethnicity might have in Washington. Ukrainians seem to have believed - wrongly, as it comes out - that the mere choice of Zelensky as president would secure their admission into NATO. ( Unfortunately, neoconservatives of Jewish origin's perceived domination of US State Department structures had created a vulnerability for the United States, which is currently being exploited by the likes of Zelensky. )

Both Iohannis and Zelensky were also elected with a mandate to end corruption, which has not happened. Instead, Iohannis became - ironically for a descendant of Hitler's allies in Transylvania - a vocal champion of campaigns to combat anti-Semitism in Romania ...

The two presidents both belong to microscopic ethnic minorities from Romania or Ukraine, which unfortunately do not have a history of harmonious coexistence with the majorities of the two states. This fact makes their selection for their state's top job  even more inexcusable.

The consequences of choosing the two presidents are worrying, to say the least. Romania's domestic political instability has become chronic over the past year, while Zelensky has managed to endanger peace across Eastern Europe through his uninspired neighborhood policy.

It is obvious today that at the instigation of domestic and / or foreign services, both peoples made a colossal electoral error. I am curious to see, however, how all this will play out in the end.

When History repeats itself as a Farce

 

On the 20th of October the US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin visited Bucharest, where he met with President Iohannis and Defence Minister Ciuca. A day later, President Iohannis designated Ciuca as the next Prime Minister of Romania, to replace the disgraced Vasile Citu. 

At first, General Ciuca sought a parliamentary vote of confidence in a PNL minority government and failed. For his second attempt, President Iohannis enlisted the help of Romania's social democratic party (PSD), which he brought - against the wishes of many Liberal party members - into a coalition with the ruling Liberals, not before destroying the former coalition between the Liberals and a smaller centre-right party, USR Plus.

Iohannis - who for years has campaigned and got re-elected as president on an anti-PSD platform (which was regularly labelled by him as the "red plague") - has thus stunned most members of his Liberal party, as well as the country's leading writers and artists who had hitherto supported his policies and presidential bids. Moreover, he single-handedly imposed Citu as the new president of the Liberal party and provoked the expulsion of the incumbent party president, former PM Ludovic Orban, who was against undoing the coalition with USR Plus. (To fully understand the character of Iohannis, it's worth mentioning the fact that it was Ludovic Orban who had convinced his party members in 2014 to accept Iohannis and to support his presidential bid.)

Lloyd Austin came to Bucharest in the middle of the crisis provoked by the political clumsiness of the Romanian president. In all probability, he was the one who advised Iohannis to promote general Ciuca to the post of Romanian PM, the first general to lead the government since the end of WWII.

A historical retrospective is in order here. In 1940, Hitler was preparing the invasion of the USSR and badly needed Romania's oil reserves and military help. As a result, general Ion Antonescu was the prime minister selected to lead Romania during the war, with the support of Nazi Germany. The tragedy of Romania after 1945 sprung from the nefarious alliance concluded by Antonescu with Hitler, which ended up in the occupation of the country by the victorious Red Army.

As Marx was fond of reminding his readers, history can only be repeated twice: first as a tragedy, and the second time as a farce. 

To put things into perspective, it is fair to say that Putin is nowhere near as fierce an enemy of the West as Stalin once was. Lloyd Austin's efforts to prepare the Eastern flank of NATO for a Russian invasion of Ukraine are largely misguided. What's more, the American Secretary of Defence is guilty of gross interference in Romania's internal political affairs and of playing an identical role in Romanian eyes to that of Hitler in 1940. In other words, Lloyd Austin behaved in Bucharest like a Hitler 2.0 of sorts, provoking the ire of the Romanian intellectual and artistic elites who feel they're witnessing a grotesque political farce all over again.