How the Internet Sparked a Revolution in Romania

This was my discourse.

I don’t love my country, half the time I loathe it with a vengeance, the other half I spend ignoring it from my escapist ivory tower of foreign cinema. Romania’s never come through for me, in fact it’s let me down on all possible levels: scrappily adaptive have-nots and treacherous higher-ups and everyone in between, this is a people neck-deep in greed, a nation ever devolving into more corruption and crasser dereliction of duty. Don’t be fooled by those expat- or tourist-spun fairytales who praise Romanian hospitality or our not-so-lean cuisine. Our reported generosity is just a play for some return (if not a tit-for-tat handout as such, surely a tick in the Almighty’s “nice” column – we’re religious to a fault). We fawn over foreigners and turn a blind eye to our own people.

These are all facts I used to cling to. They are no less real now, after the presidential win just snagged, by a whisker by Klaus Iohannis. But… let me back up a spell.

I’m a child of divorce whose childhood trauma has nothing to do with my parents’ splitting up and everything to do with my family’s never-ending, oft decried financial woes. Among the few memories I retain from my childhood, going to McDonald’s reigns supreme – it happened so seldom that it felt festive. Still, I have my mother to thank for growing up in a state of perpetual hunger… of knowledge. Nowadays, millennials are expected to change no less than seven careers during their professional life, but back then my mom couldn’t have known any of that. And yet, this prescient, mignon force of nature had me take every type of class there was – from choir practice to piano lessons, I dipped a finger in all available pies. One of those, the Bard’s deliciously versatile language, ended up defining my life.

Since I was in secondary school, I’ve always known I had to leave my country, an overpowering desire that gathered speed until, in high school, it gelled on a deep molecular level with my innate (or maybe contextual) hypochondria. I would probably die a miserable penny-pincher like my folks if I stay here. And my COD would likely be something curable that takes an ugly (my bet’s on infectious) turn for the worse in a healthcare system gone to seed.

Doctors work on a kickback-by-kickback basis, teachers barely pass their boards, on-the-job training’s a joke hardly anyone plays along with and, on the paltry government salaries they get, who can even blame them? Our history may have been chock-full of noteworthy, inspirational leaders, but the world-weary history teachers we had couldn’t be bothered to instill any trace of nationalism in my generation on the back of that heyday. So, yes: after securing our daily bread one workday at a time, we’re sending out resumes abroad and strategizing a better tomorrow in a safer elsewhere.

These are my convictions. They are all still my truths but, now, at this late hour when the country is filling the streets, drunk with the taste of victory, I wonder if… maybe… I might one day stand corrected. Something has rocked them – me – to the core.

While no one’s blaming anyone, but we wade on and on through filth, there is one glimmer of hope, which comes from our youth. Our brilliant entrepreneurs (here’s just one example), our Internet-savvy millennials, and, yes, even the few healthcare professionals who choose to save lives here for pennies instead of abroad, for thousands of [insert any Western-world currency, it will still best our RON). The private sector is reeling from over-taxation, but our CEOs are looking more in step with the capitalist ethos than ever before. With every passing day, meritocracy seems more at home here and, dog-eat-dog as it may well be, I find that to be a good omen. But never, before today, had I felt like this, after all, individualistic trend could ever translate into something cohesive, substantial, least of all that it might change the face of politics. Now, the breath of fresh air hailing from abroad has just hit Romania hard, right on the head of a fishy socialist leftover party that had been rotting all the way down to its lowly, nostalgic Romanian grassroots.

Incidentally, I was a Pol Sci student – and there was a time when I was enamored with the philosophical undercurrents and top-level workings of the body politic. But college was an island where ideas roamed free and inspirational case studies covered the whole wide world – stopping short of our own little slice of hell. Over the course of three years, my interest in politics went from mild, to active, to gone, landing me in the fairy land of Tinseltown before the ink on my degree was even dry. I’d decided there was no breaking away from all the lying, the backpedalling and the grubbiness at the top.

But tonight, for the first time in my life, Romania has surprised me. The narrow, but defendable (more on that below) victory of Klaus Iohannis over (non)Victor Ponta was a blow for many of us, the young people who’d long given up on Her. And it was all, lo and behold, a direct upshot of our own (excellent, touted and proven, but never used on this scale) command of… the Internet. The (crypto)communist mindset that had outlasted Ceaușescu, living large and in plain sight within the leftist social-democrat party (PSD), was trounced by netizens. Despite the (Ponta-led) PSD’s familiar jabs that played to the rural masses, despite well-publicized freebies offered to the strapped rural majority, despite the refusal to furnish the unbribable diaspora with sufficient voting booths and, incredibly, despite Ponta’s 10% lead in the first round of voting – the run-offs were carried by someone who didn’t play up his Christian beliefs or engage in bluster on TV.

Compared to the first round of voting, voter turnout today – as I’m sure you’ll be reading in tomorrow’s papers – was three-fold. That hasn’t happened since 1990, nor have so many of the Romanian diaspora come out to vote since… well, ever. That’s also because this community of economic refugees, Romanians’ brothers and sisters, sons and daughters so cash-strapped they had to look abroad for a way to make ends meet for the families they reluctantly left behind, has never been so large. They revolted against the wantonly disorganized voting system set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs abroad on the 2nd of November. In just two weeks’ time, the disgruntled diaspora sparked a revolution online that now, when the Romanians abroad found themselves looked down on again, having to spent hours queuing for a ballot many didn’t even get to cast, came to a head. Facebook was on fire over the last 14 days, with Romanians finally getting a handle on the true meaning of nationalism – and standing tall, together in rage, courtesy of… Mark Zuckerberg, of all people!

Iohannis’ success, online and consequently offline, will live on in the history books – but it’s worth noting that it was also the Internet’s resounding romp over TV, and smart, young(-at-heart) netizens’ win over the citizens still hooked on the panem et circenses broadcast by our biased networks. What happened today on the interwebs is nothing less than a 21st-century replay of the Kennedy-v-Nixon televised debate. And that, a youth-led revolution, the first bells tolling for a communist past not even the Romanian New Wave can seem to get away from, is something I’d never dreamed I’d get to witness and be part of. So, yes, I may stay here for a while longer, see what happens… and what gives.

I don’t want to live in a Europe-shunned sticky-fingered bubble where handouts are our leaders’ go-to tools, where Church and State scratch each other’s backs, and where the fourth estate blatantly takes sides. Maybe I won’t have to, now that the Internet’s own boys and girls, i.e. Gen X-ers and Millennials of voting age, have sprouted a voice.