Political meteorology

For some time, the Romanians discovered a new native talent: they are meteorologists. From the Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, who becomes initiated in the mysteries of the clouds formation from the meteorologists invited in the government meetings, to Ion Iliescu, who discuss at Cotroceni about the amount of the rivers flows with the ministries of Waters and Industries.
What EU adherence, what privatization strategy, where from money for the pensions indexation. Oh no, the most important thing is whether it rains or not. The domestic political agenda seem to have been fixed by the shamans of a tribe that lives out of the hay mowing and the mollusk fishing.
One of the big specialists in meteorology, who became conspicuous as a pathfinder in PDSR (Social Democracy Party) in the meteorological issue, is the current minister of Industries, Dan Ioan Popescu. Before the elections, in the autumn, probably when he was promised the function in the government, he had lent his ear to a prognosis that would have endangered the achievements of the portfolio. According to it, a terrible, Siberian winter would find Romania out of fuel and the country would freeze stiff. The calculation for such a scenario is as simple as that. If the promised frost came, the current minister would be right and we would freeze a little. It was not the first time, after all. If the temperatures kept pretty high, the same minister would become a cautious person, an official that thinks without pause, isn’t it, to the people’s possible problems. In both cases, he cannot but win. It was a modality to attract sympathy by imagining an emergency situation, in accordance to the most classical recipe of the propaganda.
Now, half winter passed, the nature didn’t manifest, so we didn’t need savors, but we have another emergency situation. The officials in the government talk about a drought of the gravity of the one in 1946. Be it so serious? Let’s get serious. Romania is no more the country in 1946, no matter how melodramatic they might get about this issue. We do not have now an economy ruined by the war, an agriculture that could not restart its crops. The irrigation system would represent, indeed, a problem, if it existed. The target of the current political psychosis is the drinking water. The big cities of the country seem to be, all of the sudden, condemned to thirst. Several days of denials were needed so that the people understand it was an exaggeration. Gradually, it was found out that the big cities are not at all menaced with the rationalization of water and that Romania is far from resembling a Saharan region.
Which would be the message of the new preoccupations of the administration?
Undoubtedly, this new daily agenda is more human, closer to the life of almost 50% of the population, who lives out of the agriculture cycles and indirectly supports the weather’s caprices. This is a more visible issue than the diminishing of the economic arrears, the rising of salaries and the law promulgation. The government descends now in the street, like a comrade, among people’s problems, it adopts their worries and cultivates its fears. The power gives up the sterility of the abstract subjects and offers palpable testimonies.
This is a combination between the basic, minimal needs and the measures that promise to have an immediate effect. By this manoeuvre, the Government keeps himself in the logic of the man found at the disposal of the natural phenomena. He fights, as much as possible, but he cannot control it all. He takes measures, but the unforeseeable could sometimes exceed the human capacity to react. Thus, it indirectly apologizes for the possible failures provoked by the caprices of the weather. If the Nastase Cabinet hadn’t discovered this drought, as one of the causes of the "disaster", it should have been invented and not only staged by the agency of a television channel politically allied.
(Mihai CHIPER)