Draft Four: The Romanian story wars continue

A new chapter begins.

A year’s worth of elections is finally over.

This coming week, Nicușor Dan, the mayor of Bucharest turned surprise independent presidential candidate, will be sworn in as president, and Romania can officially begin a new chapter.

A new chapter, yes, but we’re still in the same story, one that arguably has been building for a decade now, when the mainstream political order crumbled because it had failed to deliver. All its flaws and corruption were exposed 10 years ago in the aftermath of the Colectiv club fire. That moment gave rise to new political movements and fueled an anti-establishment rhetoric that became the norm and the rallying cry. Even independent media cultivated, albeit unintentionally, the idea that the Romanian state and all its institutions are out to get you, or steal from you. (In time, some of these forces – USR especially – have largely failed and have been sucked into the mainstream narrative, although they act like it’s not the case.).

Politicians then tried to reassert themselves through legislative overreach, which led to years of protests. Then the pandemic came – a chance for Romanian institutions to proactively and transparently address and navigate a public health crisis. They didn’t. The measures were severe, inconsistent, ridiculous, and if you looked for any kind of empathy or reassurance, some guidance or, God forbid, a vision, silly you. Not only did the President and other political figures botch this, they only empowered a right-wing reactionary force and its conspiracy theories about vaccines, the police state, Romania as an EU slave etc.

The last few years were a slog, with mainstream parties in power paying hundreds of millions (yes, you read that right) to media – ostensibly as post-pandemic support, actually for propaganda. Add to this rising inflation, and a war on the border.

The mood turned sour, nihilistic, and, as the 2024 election season began, one knew it wasn’t going to end well. You know what happened next – candidates appearing out of nowhere, elections cancelled, and, eventually, a delayed contest between two candidates telling an anti-system story, because it’s the only story that works. (I wrote about their battle two weeks ago).

Nicușor Dan prevailed, and Romania dodged the authoritarian-reactionary bullet.

For now.

*

On Sunday night I walked to Cișmigiu Park to see the celebrations for Nicușor Dan. People were waving Romanian and EU flags, chanting his name, chanting victory, and also chanting against his opponent, George Simion.

For a while, everyone expected Simion to claim victory despite the evidence and to ask for somebody to stop the steal. He even prepared everyone for it, doing a Trump-like conference in front of the Parliament, complete with a baseball cap on the podium that was the Romanian equivalent of the Trump supporters adopting Hillary Clinton’s depiction of them as a “basket of deplorables”. In this case, the cap said “pleava societății”. Harshly translated it means the scum of society. (I actually found a website that sells the cap for about 12 euros, a 50% discount on its original price).

Eventually Simion conceded, and then, a couple of days later, filed a petition to get the results cancelled, claiming fraud in the Republic of Moldova and outside interference from France. He said he had to concede to spare the country from “a bloodbath”. All his acts and statements were diligently covered, and mocked by many in my bubble – some choose to believe Simion is delusional and a sore loser.

Sure, but I also found myself wondering a lot about what we miss when we cover the moment, instead of the whole story.

If we did the latter, we might get better insights into what’s next and how to prepare.

*

Simion knew the vote wasn’t rigged. He also knew he wouldn’t overturn the election. But the narrative demanded he put up a fight, as clumsy as the challenge was. The narrative needs this beat in the story to keep marching on to an eventual victory (maybe in 2028? In 2030?).

In this grand story, the fight Simion is leading is against a deceitful system of globalists and a local political cabal stripping Romanians of dignity, sovereign rights, traditions, and the right to a decent life – especially for the diaspora, who would like nothing more than to be Home. These are the broad outlines of the cause, broad enough that people with various pet issues and wildly different lives can join.

One of the ideologues of this far right movement, a lawyer, actually posted something on his Facebook profile the day of the vote, which summarizes the pain points Simion, Călin Georgescu and other authoritarian figures promise to address: the pandemic nightmare, war, climate craziness, abandoning faith and family, a ban on Christmas and Easter, being blocked from entering churches, masks, forced vaccination.

This is a powerful story. When you’re struggling to make ends meet, when you feel left behind or when you feel you don’t matter to the state (and you don’t), the fact that your suffering seems part of a plan that includes all sorts of fringe theories becomes irrelevant. You are seen. Your pain seems felt. You have champions. You can be vindicated.

What Simion has done this past week and will continue to do – and so will other vying for the role of Savior – is up the ante. There are Parliamentary elections in 2028, and if AUR keeps playing the victim, it can win. It doesn’t matter if they look ridiculous contesting the elections: as the hero in the story, they look like they are resisting. The enemies? Whomever is convenient: politicians, bankers, activists, scientists, the LGBTQ+ community, journalists, migrants, you name it. When one stops delivering outrage, they’ll move to the next one.

My prediction is that journalists will be a prime target in the short run, and migrants will be the next big enemy. My fear is that once the enemy-making ramps up, so does the risk of violence.

Călin Georgescu – who is not out of the picture – will also keep telling his story, in his more mystical rambly way. (My bet is he wants Simion as far away from him as possible). He will keep stealing lines from movies – as he did recently when he lifted from The Lord of the Rings – to call for unity, and patience, and strength. He’ll leave the explicit calls to violence to others, so can have plausible deniability.

People believe him because that’s the world the algorithms build, one in which something is repeated in your feeds until it becomes truth, and these algorithms make tech companies a lot of money. Division sells.

One important thing is to stop laughing at Georgescu or Simion, and also stop the antiquated practice of trying to catch politicians lying and being hypocrites. There was a time when that worked and was enough: when exposing a politician’s lie would make them pull back. Now Trump has taught the world that it doesn’t matter – you can just add another lie to the lie, or gaslight people that something was ever uttered.

I’m not saying don’t point out the lie. Do. But every time we expose the lie, the falsehood, the hypocrisy, we must also look at what it means for the story being told and address that as well. Sometimes a lie told on “an enemy platform” in an interview with an independent journalist, is just a way to prove to your base you can dupe the journalists or expose their biases.

Fact checking is not enough. There is also a need for a competing story.

*

The current president doesn’t really tell stories.

As someone living in Bucharest, his inability to do so has been the most frustrating thing. In a way, he is admirably disrupting the personality driven political industrial complex because he (largely) refuses to play the narrative game. He said he is firmly pro-EU, pro-Ukraine, and knows the hardest job in front of him is fixing the economy. He hasn’t articulated a vision, or a promise, he’s just promising to get shit done.

Yet without a story, others will impose their stories on him.

Some will hopefully bounce off fast – like the story the far right tries to sell that he’s going to take us into war. Or the cultural worry that we’ll all be wearing skirts – not a bad idea in the Bucharest heat, actually. But other stories will stick – like the ones the far left will tell of him as a neoliberal who’ll do the bidding of CEOs, and whose political imagination stops at reducing state spending. Some have already picked on him for thanking the Israeli PM for his congratulatory message: is this a sign he won’t follow other European countries in criticizing the war in Gaza and Israel’s genocidal actions on the ground?

When the story wars pit a faction with disregard for norms and rules against one that still abides by them (even when they take you into hypocrisy), the latter will struggle. AUR and other far right-wing authoritarians will once again push the institutions to their limit because their definition of winning is crushing them – it scarcely matters whether institutions will work again after that, as they’ll shift the blame.

For Nicușor, winning is not defeating an enemy, but creating conditions that everyone can largely agree with, and avoiding as much economic hurt as possible. When winning is making sure a country emerges unscathed from a crisis, the risks of disappointment is great. In Nicușor’s story, the central character is not him as a savior, but us, those that voted for him – his team recently posted a Facebook message thanking a wide swatch of population, trying to coalesce them into a force for change. That works when the spirits are high, but will it work when the enthusiasm fades?

*

The long-term stakes are great.

If AUR or another reactionary force takes the governing reigns, what kind of authoritarianism would we be heading towards? Their recent model-of-choice – parroted to a ridiculous degree – was Trumpism. But that’s scarcely the only competitive authoritarian regime available to copy, although its violence of language suits Romania quite well. (This is a great discussion on competitive authoritarianism, by the way).

That’s the other story we need to look at – reactionary parties are everywhere, and they are still winning elections and upsetting the political order. In most places, they come from the right, in some they are violent and repressive from day one. In others, like in Hungary, they take more than a decade to complete a hollowing out of democracy, shattering critical discourse in universities, civil society, and journalism. This is what AUR was poised to do, and might use the next few years preparing to do better. (One hope to the contrary is that right-wing infighting – which has just begun – might splinter and weaken all factions).

There is a chilling passage in a story about Hungary’s authoritarian regime, and how Orban built it without resorting to the stereotype of exercising state power through violence and jailing. The New Yorker journalist is writing here about meeting with a Hungarian social scientist:

We were in an Italian restaurant with white tablecloths, at a window overlooking a bustling side street—as picturesque as in any European capital. [Péter] Krekó glanced over his shoulder once or twice, but only to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard gossiping about professional peers, not because he was afraid of being hauled off by secret police.

“Before it starts, you say to yourself, ‘I will leave this country immediately if they ever do this or that horrible thing,’” he went on. “And then they do that thing, and you stay. Things that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, five years ago, you may not even notice.”

He finished his gnocchi, considered a glass of wine, then opted for an espresso instead.

“It’s embarrassing, almost, how comfortable you can be,” he said. “There are things you could do or say—as a person in academia, or in the media, or an N.G.O.—that would get them to come after you. But if you know where the lines are, and you don’t cross them, you can have a good life.”

*

It’s that good life everyone is after.

And that’s what reactionaries exploit – they promise the good life, they come to power and make sure they silence those who have a different idea of what it means. Then they don’t deliver the good life or redistribute prosperity for their voters as well. At best, they deliver revenge.

That prosperity does exist in Romania – we do live better than ever –, but it’s unevenly distributed. Bucharest is rich, with a higher GDP per capita than many European capitals in our region – adjusted for purchasing power it even beats Berlin, Vienna or Paris. The Bucharest GDP per capita is higher than Serbia’s and almost matches Bulgaria’s.

It is, of course, more than double that of the richer counties in Romania. The average wage is also 25% higher. Meaning: the mayor of the richest city in the country is now running the whole show. Can he preside over a government and legislature that brings more prosperity to those left behind? Or is he utterly disconnected? And can he tell a story of how prosperity could happen even in the aftermath of great economic turmoil?

There is no common grand vision of Romania – I certainly don’t remember one after the NATO and European Union boxes were checked. The divisions are obvious, and the temptation – for politicians, for journalists, for influencers – will be to keep telling stories that fuel anger. Anger drives engagement, engagement drives the spending of money to keep the mechanism running. Platforms are happy, democracies slide into vengeful authoritarianism.

Fighting the incentives to keep this status quo of the story wars will be difficult.

For politicians it means shutting up and showing up – how about crossing the country to let people vent, stop promising and start listening? Humbly accept you failed at delivering better services and even the semblance of a better life. (This is especially true for PSD and PNL).

For civil society it means learning about the mechanisms that perpetuate the problems, and start paying more attention to the larger stories and systems in play. We’ve been stepping in to do what large bureaucracies failed to deliver – especially in education, and social services –, but that’s not a viable social contract, and it risks turning change and innovation into something only the private sector can pull off.

For journalists it means renouncing the monetary incentives of click-bait headlines and breaking news to follow on covering solutions to the problems, and being useful to citizens as they struggle to navigate their way to a good life.

*

I wish it was all as easy as it sounds. I personally feel confused about what’s next and what my role is in whatever is next. I’m unhappy with this letter and how I managed to articulate my thoughts. It’s the best I could do in these circumstances. Maybe it’s the tiredness from six months of chaos. Maybe it’s my upcoming 44^th birthday. Maybe it’s just the unknown weighing heavily.

Thank you for sticking with me through the confusion, and feel free to share yours. The next letter will be a long list of things to read, watch and listen to during the summer.

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