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H av e We R e a l l y Lo s t i n R om a n i a ?
After harsh economic reforms that generated popular discontent, bureaucrats realized
that the center-right parties were going to lose power in the next elections. As the PDSR
was already favored by the opinion polls in 1999, public officials that seemed to be loyal
to the new politicians changed sides again and began to prepare themselves for a new
government to come.
It is here that we should discuss the first government crisis that occurred at the end of
1997 and split the governing coalition until the prime minister was replaced. The Demo-
cratic Convention did not get enough votes in the 1996 elections to govern the country
alone and had to ally itself with the Democratic Union of Hungarians (UDMR) and the
Democratic Party.
5
In December 1997, the Democratic Party, concerned about its own
decreasing popularity in the polls, decided to provoke a government crisis and asked for
the resignation of Christian Democrat Prime Minister Victor Ciorbea. The DP withdrew
its ministers from the government and threatened to remove support for the coalition
in parliament. The crisis lasted about four months, the prime minister resigned and the
Democrats got back into the government.
But the first crisis of the governing coalition unleashed all the tensions and fights among
the partners that continued without abatement afterward. The divergent interests of the
parties were disclosed. When the first Christian Democrat prime minister started to inves-
tigate illegal businesses of former governments, some PD ministers (once in power) were
on the “black list.” They wanted the searches stopped and finally demanded removal of the
head of the investigative unit.
VI. Ghost Hunters:
How to Arrest a Phantom
Besides fighting corruption and poverty, the political agenda of the center-right govern-
ment included many other themes that were not really relevant at the moment, but were
being pushed by radical civil society groups. The symbolic trial of Communism, disclos-
ing secret police informers still in public office, property restitution, the “secrets” of the
1989 revolution (terrorist violence, Ceausescu’s trial, etc.) and the miners’ repression of
the student protest in Bucharest in 1990 were all themes that divided society and the po-
litical class. Some of these issues divided the governing coalition itself and often also cut
across individual parties.
This double agenda of the center-right government – institutional and economic reforms
on the one hand, and what was called “moral reform” on the other – created a contradic-
5
The Democratic Party was a faction of the former National Salvation Front (FSN), heir to the Communist
party. They called themselves reformists within FSN and founded their own party in 1991 requesting more
rapid reforms. Their voters were somehow more similar to those of the right-of-center parties, even though
they were considered center-left. The Democratic Party upon its founding actually provided the first govern-
ment team (from 1990 to 1991), before the miners, with the support of ex-Communist hardliners, brought
them down. They had some experience in government business, but also maintained links with the Commu-
nist-era bureaucracy.
