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Southeast Europe
August 17, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 14
BUCHAREST BLOG:
Romania joins the bad boys of Central Europe
Clare Nuttall in Bucharest
The Romanian government has been acting like an authoritarian bully, thumbing its nose at criti- cism from the street and Brussels as it pushes ahead with plans to take direct control of the the justice system as well as decapitate the highly respected National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA). A violent crackdown on demonstrators in Bucharest on August 10 has shocked the nation and only served to sully the government’s already poor image as a progressive European democracy.
The initially peaceful protest outside the govern- ment building on Victory Square turned violent after riot police repeatedly fired tear gas into the crowd and turned water cannons on the protes- tors. The crowds had swollen to around 100,000, bolstered by members of the diaspora some of which had flown in from their new homes specifi- cally to reinvigorate the flagging protest move- ment. Romania has become used to protests as the population has become radicalised by the ruling parties repeated attempts to undermine the country’s inchoate democracy and inoculate itself from prosecution for graft, lead by the pioneering anticorruption institution of the DNA.
One protester, interviewed by bne IntelliNews’ correspondent at the protest, said the police were “trying to make us terribly mad” with their intense and unprovoked use of tear gas, adding he feared the crackdown at the protest was a “first step to dictatorship”. Mobile phone footage released in the days after the protest shows unprovoked and brutal attacks on protesters, as well as attacks
by suspected provocateurs on the gendarmerie – football thugs brought in to provide a justification
Effigies of PSD leaders dressed in prison stripes appeared at protests in early 2017.
for the use of police violence, intended to intimi- date the increasingly vocal citizenship that are determined to hold the government to account.
Once eager for Brussels’ approval, as it sought a more central role within the EU, in recent months the government in Bucharest has followed a Euro- pean-wide trend of increasingly authoritarianism that blithely ignores the European values that are part and parcel of EU accession. The government has repeatedly shown that it is prepared to ignore criticism from institutions in Brussels and west- ern governments in pursuit of the interests of the ruling elite.
The Romanian authorities are following the ex- ample set by other countries that joined the EU in the first wave of Eastern enlargement in 2004 — specifically Hungary and Poland — that have challenged Brussels’ authority and sought to as- sert 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 undermining 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 institutions, but unformed institutions are clumsy tools of control and the