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bne September 2018 Southeast Europe I 45
trend of increasingly authoritarian- ism that blithely ignores the European values that are part and parcel of EU accession. The government has repeat- edly shown that it is prepared to ignore criticism from institutions in Brussels and western governments in pursuit of the interests of the ruling elite.
The Romanian authorities are following the example set by other countries that joined the EU in the first wave of Eastern enlargement in 2004 – specifically Hungary and Poland – that have chal- lenged Brussels’ authority and sought to assert their own national sovereignty. By contrast, the later entrants Romania and Bulgaria seemed, until now, consistently keen to align themselves with the EU and its values.
Now this is changing as Romania, like its northern neighbours, has earned the opprobrium of the EU with its onslaught on the justice system and the undermin- ing of the anti-corruption fight that has been a beacon in the region where all the new EU members are attempting to tackle corruption with mixed results.
The underlying issue is that membership of the EU means adopting its institu- tions, but unformed institutions are clumsy tools of control and the tempta- tion is to revert to the use of corruption and client-sponsor relations that are sim- pler to operate and have the advantage of personally enriching their executors in the process. Add to this the client- sponsor system means political power accrues to the individual controlling
the system and in the rough and tumble of the post-Socialist world politicians are reluctant to weaken their personal power by strengthening the power of institutions that are in the best interests of society, as they are often engaged
in politically existential struggles with other less scrupulous rivals. As a result to a great extent across the entire region corruption is not a problem of the sys- tem: it is the system.
The backtracking in Romania started shortly after the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and its junior coalition partner the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (Alde) were returned to power in the December
2016 general election. The following month, the new government adopted a controversial decree partly decriminalis- ing abuse of office, a charge frequently used by prosecutors against officials who had stolen state resources. Forced to back down and cancel the decree by the biggest mass protests since the fall of communism, the government didn’t give up. Instead it went on to launch repeated effects to chip away at the effectiveness of the judicial system and the DNA over the following 18 months.
By mid-2018, the parliament had approved a series of controversial changes to the criminal procedure code. In a return to the original course of attack by the government, the planned amendments to the criminal code include a redefinition of abuse of office, which would partly decriminalise the offence. Other changes concern the
Iohannis must comply with a request from the justice minister that he dismiss its iconic head Laura Codruta Kovesi, widely seen as the doyen of the anti- corruption efforts in the country.
Unsurprisingly, these efforts have met with criticism from the EU and western governments. The latest annual Co- operation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) report issued on Romania last November warned of challenges to judicial independence and a slowdown in the reform process. Bucharest’s efforts to overhaul criminal legislation later sparked an ad hoc expression of concern from the European Commission in June, which stressed that the “fight against corruption and ensuring an indepen- dent, professional judiciary is of para- mount importance”. A few days later,
12 of Romania’s international partners, including France, Germany and the US,
“In recent months the government in Bucharest has followed a European-wide trend of increasingly authoritarianism”
justice system, and have been criticised for limiting the freedom of expression of magistrates and weakening the role of the Superior Council of Magistracy (SCM), as the guarantor of the judi- ciary’s independence.
The DNA is the embodiment of the anti- graft efforts and represents the transfor- mation of the system to all that the EU means in terms of a functioning liberal democracy based on accountable institu- tions. As such it has been the target of the revanchist forces that want to keep the old client system, as well as protect their ill-gotten gains, as the changes threaten the liberty of the elite – as sev- eral high ranking politicians have found to their cost and are now in jail.
The government’s efforts to discredit and neutralise the DNA, which has spearheaded efforts to bring corrupt top officials and businesspeople to justice, have finally paid off. In July, the Con- stitutional Court ruled that President
called upon the country to consider the potential negative impact of criminal law amendments.
Another illiberal democracy
The attacks on judicial independence in Romania, and the violence at the August 10 protest, have drawn comparisons with the so-called “illiberal democra- cies” in the Visegrad region. Poland, like Romania, has clashed with Brussels over its judicial overhaul, while the values of the governments in both Budapest and Warsaw are at odds with those of the bloc. The root of these illiberal democra- cies is the pull and push of where ulti- mate political power lies: in the hands of politicians or in the institutions they are supposed to manage that are specifically designed to cap personal power and make it accountable.
Where Romania differs from, for example, Poland or Hungary is that the agenda of the government doesn’t appear to be driven by idealism, but by
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