Politics is Hell: Trench Warfare in the Lower House of Parliament
December 6th 2017 was not a day like any other in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies. It was a day of open warfare, the first day the Iordache Committee laws were being discussed. After more than 12 hours of debating, the day ended — inconclusively — close to midnight. The law concerning the status of members of the judiciary was adopted “article by article”, and is a step away from becoming law: the Parliament has to vote on it again.
The day started solemnly with an acknowledgement of the passing of Mihai I, the former king of Romania, a media event that the coalition was adamant to exploit and hide the passing of the first of Iordache’s laws through the lower chamber on Wednesday. But opposition politicians, especially those from the small but vehemently anti-corruption Save Romania Union (USR) were not keen to “let democracy in Romania die with the king” as one MP later described it.
So one by one, in the morning, opposition MPs lined up in front of the podium and called for other points on the voting agenda to be moved up — to no avail, however. Once the voting process started at around 10:00, opposition MPs switched to a different tactic. They tried to ask for a debate on hundreds of new amendments that were included in the law concerning the status of magistrates, but were promptly cut off by the session president. In a surprising turn of events, the session president was not the actual Speaker of the House, Social Democratic Party (PSD) President Liviu Dragnea, who was in attendance, or the front man for the entire Committee debacle, Florin Iordache. Instead, the PSD picked vice-president Gabriel Vlase, a no-nonsense, calculated politician who knows how to barrel down and push sessions forward. He lived up to his name: USR MPs were barred from presenting their amendments, even those that strictly addressed the many glaring procedural faults of the Iordache-rubberstamped legislation, faults no doubt arisen from the haste with which the legislation was propelled through Iordache’s super-committee.
When USR MPs, having had their microphones cut, took a stand on the Chamber podium by reading out their amendments one by one through a loudspeaker, the session president simply barreled on with the vote. Only in Romania can you have two concurrent people reading different legal amendments at once in the same room of Parliament.
The opposition’s stalwart and stubborn stand was not easily taken by MPs from the governing coalition, especially once the latter started live streaming the session on Facebook. Sources say that one PSD MP, deputy Nicolae Bacalbașa, called one of the USR MPs a “monkey” alongside insults of a much more personal nature. Bacalbașa is perhaps best known not for his legislative activity, which is severely lacking if not nonexistent, but for the rare honor of having been suspended from PSD and Parliament for making lewd gestures at a female opposition colleague.
But even more egregious were the acts of PSD Senator Serban Nicolae, another PSD MP temporarily suspended from the party, under public pressure follwoing his first attempt to butcher anticorruption legislation in early 2017. As a senator, Nicolae had no business being in the Chamber of Deputies but he was there nonetheless, no doubt to gloat, as one of the main contributors to the Iordache laws. When Cosette Chichirău, USR MP, started filming and inquiring over Nicolae’s presence and called PSD leaders “thieves” and “prison-bound” Nicolae started insulting Chichirău, calling her “stupid”, insulting her appearance, and claiming to be in possession of photos showing her engaging in acts of a sexual nature. This was all live-streamed on Facebook, something Nicolae, a long-time flaunter of public decency couldn’t care less about. Indeed, Nicolae has cared little for his public image and how close it is associated to corruption ever since his time driving back from prison his former boss, Cătălin Voicu, a notoriously corrupt PSD Senator. But the insults spread like wildfire over social media and it is likely that soon Nicolae will have to spend another stint suspended from the party.
As evening approached, the number of MPs steadily dwindled but all the coalition needed to pass its amendments was one more MP than the opposition, something that invariably happened even as public pressure was mounting outside. Hundreds of protesters showed up outside the Parliament, banging drums, blowing horns and chanting against those in power. Several were reported as having tried blocking the streets and had gotten into scraps with law enforcement. Pressure was also mounting on the inside, with one USR MP calling for all employees of the Parliament to be given a day off on Thursday as they had been working for 12 hours non-stop, something the law says has to be properly compensated with rest. The motion was, of course, denied.
The PSD and their allies can’t stop now. After all, they had already registered the law as passed. Indeed, it was reported several times that on the Senate website the first Iordache law showed up as having passed the lower chamber, even before MPs voted it on it. Is this wishful thinking on the part of the overconfident or the certainty of the powerfully corrupt? Only time will tell, but, for now, in both Parliament and the streets, the opposition #Resists.
