It is moral to state aloud what you are, it is moral to be consistent in affirming your own beliefs, it is moral to think in the long run, it is moral to affirm your own identity. It is moral to have the courage to say you are different from the others, even if the others represent, for the time being, the majority.“The mother of all fools is always pregnant” (Romanian proverb)
Maybe there’s no other saying that best describes the act of the Romanian Parliament last Tuesday of unanimously approving the amendments to the Pension Law which reduced the VAT to 5% for basic foodstuff and excluded all the pensions under 2,000 RON from being taxed. But the tragicomedy was just at its beginning for an entire nation was made witness to the pathetic excuses of the deputies and senators, ministers, men and women of state, all ignorant of the text of the law, all voting like a herd according to the rule of the thumb of their whip, Mircea Toader.
Just listening to some of these statesmen speak, la crème de la crème of the Romanian political class, was enough to make you shudder: “Nobody reads all the laws, more so the Ministers who rush from their department just to vote and then leave immediately. […] Everyone behaves like this, the whips are responsible to make sure they vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’” (Elena Udrea, Minister of Development and Tourism, quoted at ‘the Godfather,’ B1TV).
If the previous antics of the Romanian government coalition were pretty much ignored by the western media (such as the fraudulent vote on the same law a month earlier), this recent ‘accomplishment’ received utmost attention and coverage from the main news websites and papers. CBS, Le Courrier de Balkans, Les Echos, The Economist and MSNBC, they all took turns at reporting on last Tuesday’s vote.
Both CBS and MSNBC wondered about the logic of slashing the VAT tax on foodstuff only three months after the same government hiked the same tax from 19 to 24%. Les Echos and Le Courrier de Balkans quote the post facto excuses of the governing party’s whip, Mircea Toader who blames “a communication breakdown at the moment of voting” and who calls for a government emergency decree to fix the error. Le Courrier also mentions the fact that all 290 deputies present have voted for the VAT reduction and the tax exemption of all pensions less than 500 euro.
Probably the most scathing report belongs to the British magazine the Economist, which, through its Eastern European blog, ‘Eastern Approaches’ has little hope left for Romanian politics. The blog does not consider this an isolated incident, but something representative of a “weary tradition of dysfunctional policy-making in Romania, where laws often appear to be drafted minutes before parliamentary votes with little thought to long-term strategy or financial impact.” The Economist also quotes a World Bank report on this matter, which supports the magazine gloomy conclusions, concluding with a preview of the non-confidence motion initiated by the opposition parties which will be discussed on Wednesday, October 27th and, given the dissatisfaction within the governing party ranks, could succeed.
„The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” (Thomas Jefferson)
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