Just a miracle

"Just a miracle may make PDSR not win the general elections this year". This is the most of the Romanian analysts’ conclusion who have recently taken part in a debate organized by the Liberal Study Institute, an organization founded by the Liberals. It rarely happens in the history of a democracy that an electoral fight should be cut off into pieces like that long before the moment when its official results are to come into public attention. For almost a year, the diagram of the electoral percentages has been looking hideous and threatening. An endless chain of potential votes for a single party, PDSR, side by side with a lot of political "dwarfs", starting with CDR (the Democrat Coalition in Romania), ApR (the Alliance for Romania) etc.
In the party systems’ theory, such a situation on the point of being confirmed through elections is a completely aberration. It doesn’t include in any typology at all. We are actually facing a system completely unbalanced in which a single party finds itself in the potentially situation to dictate any political arrangements behind the actual elections. A Party quasi-monopoly as it is. This is happening in Romania after ten years of democratic exercise.
Nowhere in the Central and Eastern Europe, excepting the CSI region, such things can happen. More weird and maybe more seriously, is the fact that this quasi-monopoly might be put into force by a party that was on power long enough. In other words, we can’t talk even about a novelty or a so-called system revolutionizing when a "genuine" political force capitalizes the need of a profound change of the society. It’s about a restoration, which through its raw data, namely the electoral percentages, tends to give back the "formers" more credit than they had had in their glorious past.
In our opinion, according to the analysts’ conclusion quoted before, there is nothing left than to aim at the "sanity" of our political system.
But what has been going on lately, it doesn’t seem to leave a chance to such development. Obviously, the whole responsibility for achieving this, let’s say, goal belongs to the main actors of the ongoing power. It is them who are the real opponents of the "monopolist" PDSR bearing the whole responsibility if our political system may leave the track. Nevertheless, it’s too much for our political parties to think of that in a country that seldom looks further into the future.
As it has already been ascertained for some time, the main parties on power, excepting the Christian Democrats who can’t claim anything any more is to insure a place in the future administration side by side with PDSR. The Babiuc crisis and all that keeps coming into shape on the level of the relations within the governing coalition shows that this is the only strategy taken seriously into account. If things were to evolve in this respect, it would not be unusual for us to face the greatest political farce in the last ten years, eventually. Sociologically speaking, we are talking about an underhanded effect. It is about that situation in which, even though all parties follow the same objective, their actions have as a cumulated effect a counter result. In our case, the coalition parties may find themselves in the position in which they will not take hold even of the future Opposition, the Parliament respectively, in their run to grab a place in the future administration next to PDSR. It’s the case of PD (the Democratic Party), PNL (the National Liberal Party) and PDSR (the Party for Social Democracy in Romania). It should have been more profitable for each of them if they had cooperated. But it seems that our political system doesn’t allow them to do this any longer. They seem to be damned to act even against their own interests. Though their calculations look perfectly rational and maybe they are.
Anyway, we are now facing, at least theoretically, an interesting situation. 2000 may bring forth more intriguing surprises and more spectacular results than the PDSR’ s winning the elections by an overwhelming majority. It’s not impossible for us to witness the very beginning of the present political and implicitly Party system’s partition. (By Pavel LUCESCU)