2016 doesn't seem to be shaping up to be a great year for politics.
I'll try to keep my comments on the U.S. presidential election off the blog (at least for now), though I will simply say that we are praying hard for the November contest. But here in Romania, we just suffered through a round of local elections that left many disappointed... including us.
On Sunday, June 5, every town in Romania held its local elections, selecting its mayors, city council members, and county-level representatives. In Lupeni, 9 different men ran for mayor, representing a wide variety of parties: the PSD (one of the largest parties in Romania; ex-prime minister Victor Ponta was the leader of the PSD until he
resigned under scandal last year); the PNL (the party of the current Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis); the nationalist Romanian and Hungarian parties (both rather extremist, though obviously in different directions); and various other smaller parties that I know little about. One of the things I appreciate greatly about the Romanian political system is the viability of multiple parties; the country doesn't seem to be locked into the duality of the American system. This comes with its downsides, though, as it also means that opposition votes can get quite divided.
We've written a bit before about our
concerns with the former mayor of Lupeni, Cornel Resmerița, a PSD party member who was arrested last year by the national anti-corruption bureau and is still under investigation on corruption charges. Because he was barred from running, his son, Cristian Cornel Resmerița, ran for the PSD instead. He won. If the name is no indication, it seems likely that the son will follow in his father's footsteps... and we are really disappointed.
Somehow it's not a surprise, though. The name recognition is hard to overcome, especially when you have 8 other candidates on the field. But over the past few weeks, the election campaigning has worked up to a fever pitch... well, as feverish as anything gets in a small, fatalistic-feeling town. We don't have a TV, so we don't know if there have been ads. But there
have been posters -- rows and rows of the same poster slapped on buildings and shop windows, with the name of the candidate, a generic slogan, and a severe-looking picture of the frowning wannabe-mayor glaring down at you. I don't really understand the logic of putting up dozens of the same exact poster, side-by-side, on the same bulletin board, but that seems to be the way things are done here. Sometimes shops will display multiple posters for different candidates, leaving you to wonder who's really supporting who. Beyond the posters, the only other campaigning I'd seen were pamphlets, often handed out by large groups of people who strolled slowly down the sidewalk of Lupeni, dressed in party colors, walking in a huge group down the sidewalk and pushing flyers into the hands of passersby. (The PSD also organized a carnival in the park, gave out balloons to school children, and visited retirees in their homes to promise bags of groceries in exchange for a vote... tactics which seem an awful lot like cheating to me, but we won't get into that right now.)
What I
didn't see was any sort of real dialogue about the candidates and the issues. None of the posters had a website where you could go to learn more, and I don't think most of the candidates even had a Facebook page. There were no public forums or debates. The closest we got to hearing the nine candidates' positions on various issues affecting Lupeni were slogans like "People first" and "All together for Lupeni," which mean just about nothing. And listening to people talk about the election at the market and on the maxi taxi and in the evening after church, it soon became terribly apparent: this way of doing politics sucks.
America's civic discourse is awful and ugly right now in many ways, but at least it exists. And much of it is still productive, thoughtful, and issues-focused, even if it's the vile stuff that most often makes the news. Here in Lupeni, the level of democratic participation and discussion hasn't gotten there yet. These elections made it painfully obvious that buying votes with bread and circuses (literally) still really works -- and there's not yet an alternative. On Facebook and in the streets, I hear tons of Lupeni's people saying how dissatisfied they are with corruption and apathy and the Resmerița dynasty, and yet -- without an organized opposition, without voter education and open discourse about the alternatives -- he still won. It's discouraging and daunting and confusing, and leaves me wondering all sorts of things. When it comes to politics (something I am pretty passionate about in the States), I wonder often about my role here as an outsider. I wonder about trying to encourage democratic discourse, since being outsiders sometimes allows us to see things in a different light and propose new ideas. I wonder about having opinions about politics at all, since, being outsiders, this is in so many ways not something we understand deeply enough, not our battle to fight, not our community to defend. I wonder about the best way to show my disappointment, since the election didn't seem truly free and fair. I wonder about the best way to keep believing in hope, when many in the community continue to make choices I don't understand.
I wish I had some way to end this post well, some lesson learned or neat end to tie up. But I don't. Just like it hurts to see someone you love make bad choices, it hurts to watch Lupeni -- a community I have come to love -- make a choice that I am afraid is wrong. For now I'll be trying to pray for Resmerița Jr., and debriefing the results with our friends who are also disappointed. And then we'll put our heads up and keep on fighting the good fight.
