Radu Mazare: Carpe The Public Dime
Even though politicians are public figures, few Romanian politicians have moved through the public sphere as splashily as Radu Mazare. The long-time mayor of Constanta — one of the biggest Romanian cities and arguably the swankiest seaside resort in the country — Mazare spent a total of 15 years fusing together the brand of the city by the sea with his public persona of a young and virile man fond of extreme aquatic sports, fast cars, attractive women and awe-inspiring — albeit politically incorrect — costumes. In the process, he and his friends and family seem to have appropriated parts of the city for themselves, causing the state damages of hundreds of millions of euros.
From freedom fighter to sugar daddy
Mazare’s story started with noble democratic ideals. Born in Bucharest, he went to Constanta to study at the Marine Civil Institute. While there, he became the President of the Student League, whose members he encouraged to take part in the 1989 Revolution. In 1990, he founded Contrast, a newspaper later renamed Telegraf. The publication was financed by the Free Romanians’ Union belonging to Ion Ratiu — a politician that strove to democratise Romania after the fall of Communism. Three years later, Mazare and his close university friends also founded a TV and a radio station.
In 1995, Mazare and another newsroom colleague were sentenced to six months in jail for slandering a judge. They had written an article falsely suggesting that she had had extramarital relations. They paid the compensation fixed by the court, but were saved from jail by then-President Ion Iliescu, who pardoned both. (In a surprising karmic act, a journalist who had criticized Mazare during a TV show in 2006 and was then sued by the mayor won the case at the European Court of Human Rights this summer.)
Mazare claims that the 1995 episode inspired him to try his hand at politics. In 1996, he became an MP representing the Democratic Party. In 2000, he ran for the city hall as an independent, and was elected with 66% of the votes after a campaign featuring mudslinging, media crackdowns, and displays of “force” such as personally climbing blocks of flats to repaint them.
Such questionable acts of magnanimity continued even after Mazare was sworn in. He gave disadvantaged people in Constanta food packages paid out of the city hall’s money. He also built flats for the poor and the young, and invented new taxes, such as an infamous barrier tax at the entry point in Mamaia (the premium sea area in the city), the irrigation tax, the quiet tax, the tax for the promotion of the Mamaia sea resort. This was probably why in 2003 he joined the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and became the President of PSD Constanta, going on to win another three four-year mandates running the city hall.
Due to the outsized concern he showed for Mamaia, Mazare was soon accused of being “Mamaia’s mayor” instead of “Contanta’s mayor”, but that didn’t affect him at the polls. On the contrary, with every term he managed to attract new votes that made up for those he lost for not having invested in the development of the city. In 2013, he was named one of the wealthiest Romanians according to Forbes magazine, and, judging by his press appearances, spent most of his time partying, travelling to exotic countries such as Brazil or Madagascar, and throwing shows where we wore elaborate costumes (maharaja, sailor, pirate, Cuban revolutionary and even a Nazi officer). He even posed ina Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired pictorial in a lifestyle magazine, and was featured wearing Baywatch-style uniforms in music videos that promoted Mamaia. One of them was actually paid for by the city hall, and it’s still unclear whether the €34,000 in fees were embezzled from city hall funds. The most recent video came as a confirmation of Mazare’s statement that “when you say Mamaia, you think of Mazare”.
Stormy weather
Someone else thought long and hard about him: The National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA). In 2008, Radu Mazare, together with the President of the Constanta County Council, Nicusor Constantinescu, and 35 other people (employees of public institutions, notaries, businessmen, real estate brokers, etc.) were sent to court by the DNA for having caused damages of €114 million to the Romanian state.
They were accused of having illegally restituted around 100 hectares of land in Constanta between 2002–2005 to themselves or to members of the group. The defendants had also illegally restituted certain parts of beach and prime beachfront property, which “can under no circumstance become the property of individuals or legal entities”. Apparently, the group determined the people who were legally entitled to the restitution to sell their succession rights or the lands themselves for less than 1% of their real value, after having made them wait for a solution for several years.
The controversial lands include the 27.000 m2 where the Aqua Magic water park had been built by a company mostly owned by Mazare’s cousin; the 8,307 m2 land on the shore of a lake, which became the property of the Mazare family; the 52,471 m2 in the biggest park of the city, which was restituted not to their rightful owners, but to a company whose shareholders were friends of the mayor, and which paid a price a hundred times lower than the real price for the land’s succession rights.
Since he resigned in 2015 after having been temporarily arrested, Radu Mazare has spent his time water diving and awaiting the resolution of his 4 court cases. In the first one, he was sentenced to a four-year jail suspended sentence. Which is not a problem for our hedonist. “Looking back, I see a life lived fully, and if I were to start over, I’d do the exact same things. […] I never did anything bad nor wished anyone harm, even though many have harmed me. I think that what’s most important is to make peace with yourself and with life, and then you’ll know how to enjoy it.”
