There Is Life After This Motion
- Sorana Ungur
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
“There is life after this motion,” said Sorin Grindeanu, the interim leader of Romania’s Social Democratic Party, after Parliament voted to bring down Ilie Bolojan’s government. He meant it as reassurance. In Romania, reassurance often sounds like something said over a body that is still warm. The no-confidence motion, initiated by PSD together with the far-right AUR, passed with 281 votes, collapsing a government that had been built less than a year earlier to stabilise the country, repair its finances and keep extremists away from power.
Grindeanu was right, of course. There is life after this motion. There is also debt, deficit, panic, political opportunism, EU pressure, a newly normalised far right, and the familiar Romanian talent for setting the house on fire while explaining that the flames are part of a long-term stability strategy.
For readers unfamiliar with Romanian politics, this requires a little decoding. PSD is the old, massive, post-communist machine that has spent decades presenting itself as the party of stability while periodically manufacturing chaos. AUR is the newer nationalist-populist force that feeds on distrust, anti-establishment rage, conspiracy culture and the feeling that Romania is governed by people who would sell the country for a committee chairmanship and a pension bonus.
The tragicomic part is that Bolojan’s government was supposed to be the adult solution to a mess largely produced by the adults now pretending to be shocked by it. Romania did not arrive at this crisis by accident. Years of electoral bribery disguised as social policy, public-sector expansion without reform, pension promises without money, and budgetary lying with patriotic background music pushed the country into one of the worst fiscal positions in the European Union. By 2024, Romania’s deficit had reached 9.3% of GDP. This was not a hole in the budget. It was a crater with a flag planted in it.
Bolojan was not brought in to be loved. He was brought in to do the thing Romanian parties always postpone until Brussels, the markets, or arithmetic starts screaming: cut spending, raise taxes, freeze wages and pensions, reduce public administration costs, and pretend this is reform rather than emergency surgery. His government’s fiscal package was meant to restore market confidence, avoid EU sanctions under the Excessive Deficit Procedure, protect access to EU funds, and stop Romania from looking like a country that had outsourced its budget to a wedding planner.
This is why PSD’s performance is so grotesque. The party helped build the house, helped approve the repairs, watched the electrician get electrocuted, and then joined AUR in blaming him for the wiring. Less than a year after entering a pro-European coalition meant to stabilise Romania, PSD voted with the far right to bring down the man sent to clean up the fiscal disaster that PSD-style politics had helped produce. The coalition created to protect Romania from extremism has now handed extremism a parliamentary victory photo.
This is not just another Romanian government crisis. Romania has those the way other countries have seasonal allergies. The deeper problem is that the so-called responsible parties keep behaving like unpaid campaign staff for the extremists they claim to oppose.
Then there is the president, Nicușor Dan, who was not elected in normal times and should not be judged as if he were. His victory in 2025 was sold, at home and abroad, as Romania’s democratic immune response after the Georgescu shock: the mathematician against the mystic, the pro-European reformer against the nationalist hallucination, the quiet institutionalist who would keep Romania from sliding into the swamp. Georgescu had won the annulled first round in 2024 after a campaign tainted by suspected Russian interference, was later barred from the rerun, and the far-right lane passed to George Simion, whom Dan defeated in the second round.
In other words, Nicușor was supposed to be the dam. But a dam that only issues statements about water pressure is not a dam. It is scenery. After Bolojan’s fall, Dan called for calm, ruled out early elections, and promised a new pro-Western government. All formally correct. All institutionally neat. Also dangerously close to enabling the very forces he was elected to contain.
Because if the president’s answer to PSD normalising AUR is to treat it as just another parliamentary arithmetic problem, then the so-called dam has become the notary of the flood.
The Romanian president is not an American-style executive president, but the office is not decorative by constitutional design. The Romanian president represents the state, safeguards the Constitution, mediates between state institutions, appoints a candidate for prime minister after consultations, and can participate in government meetings on issues such as foreign policy, defence and public order.
In other words, the presidency is limited, but not useless. Recent presidents have merely worked very hard to make it look that way.
Traian Băsescu, president from 2004 to 2014, operated under broadly the same constitutional architecture and still managed to be everywhere: in government crises, judicial appointments, televised conflicts, party calculations, foreign policy fights and every microphone within a five-kilometre radius. He was exhausting, often reckless, and sometimes treated the Constitution like a napkin on which he could sketch a new republic after lunch. But he was not decorative.
Klaus Iohannis, by contrast, turned the presidency into a waiting room with flags. Nicușor Dan risks continuing the tradition, only with better mathematics and worse timing. After the government fell, he ruled out snap elections and said consultations would begin for a new pro-Western government. Calm, responsible, constitutional. Also very close to asking a burning building to lower its tone.
At this point, Romania might as well replace presidential elections with the Miss Romania contest. At least the winner would look good in photos with foreign leaders, speak foreign languages, and understand that if the job has been reduced to symbolism, then the symbolism should at least be performed convincingly.
The last two presidents have offered roughly the political involvement of cardboard boxes. The difference is that cardboard boxes are cheaper, quieter, and do not require an official motorcade.
But the joke is only funny because the situation is not.
Romania does not lack institutions. It lacks politicians willing to use them responsibly. PSD does not want to govern the consequences of the austerity it helped make necessary. AUR does not need to govern at all in order to win; it only needs the mainstream to keep proving its point. And the presidency, instead of acting as a forceful mediator in a dangerous moment, risks becoming the official photographer of national paralysis.
The government has fallen. AUR has been normalised. PSD has once again confused tactical survival with statesmanship. And Romania’s pro-European direction is now being defended by people who seem permanently surprised that politics requires political courage.
Sources:
Comments