Since taking office, Minister Vasile Dîncu has suffered the fatigue of the politician who hides his incompetence and inadequacy in a sea of ”artisanal” words, to quote from him. His latest statements on negotiations with the Russians as a solution to the war in Ukraine have also awakened Klaus Iohannis. The head of state publicly asked him to stop reading the press, humiliating a defense minister from a NATO country bordering Ukraine.
This public reproach received by the head of state, who is also the head of the army, can only be followed by resignation. Vasile Dîncu’s fate seemed sealed after his party line leader, Marcel Ciolacu, had also accused him of verbal incontinence. “When you are Minister of Defense, you no longer have beliefs, you have a policy of the Romanian state. I repeat, the president has duties. We must have a coalition discussion with the prime minister. It is not necessary to have personal opinions and beliefs in a period of conflict, “Ciolacu said in an interview for Evenimentul Zilei.
But Vasile Dîncu did not stop talking. Here it is overflowing, Thursday, at TVR Info. He scolded the two of them for falling like idiots in a “user configuration” and answering some “crafty” questions. President Iohannis has even returned the reproach, this time by sending it to the “print magazine”, with the argument that President Macron and other NATO leaders have also talked about the negotiations with the Russians. When you end up lecturing in public to your direct bosses, to whom you wisely explain that they don’t know much about the war with Ukraine, all you have to do is start packing.
Many, therefore, saw Vasile Dîncu return from the NATO ministry in Brussels with his resignation signed on the plane, bound for Bucharest. The talkative minister not only did not resign, but on Monday morning he rushed to Victoria Palace first thing in the morning. After an hour, the government announced curtly, via the spokesperson, that the discussions concerned “the meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels and calibration of public communication at the level of the Ministry of Defense in a government context ”.
“Calibration of public communication” is an understatement, a bland formulation to describe the avalanche of nonsense poured into the public space by the defense minister since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. It is not clear whether General Ciucă temporarily saved the Defense Minister from bullying, so as not to give satisfaction to the opposition, which awaits Dîncu in Parliament today, or if he avoided the precedent of his resignation, so as not to open the question of a wider reshuffle.
The head of the government is less likely to have given Vasile Dîncu time to prepare an honorable exit. Rather, Prime Minister Ciucă avoided, in the name of “political stability”, a crisis in the coalition. The PSD would not have agreed out of the blue to admit that only a few of its ministers needed to be replaced and would have demanded that one or two heads also fall from the Liberals. Ciucă would have seen himself in a position to choose who to distance himself from the government among him: Virgil Popescu, Lucian Bode, someone else? This is where things get complicated. Each of the aforementioned has negotiated a support above, precisely because their names appear on the radars every time there is talk of reshuffling.
Let’s say that the Pesedists and the Liberals would finally agree on who to kick out of their party. But then the natural question would arise: who leaves UDMR? They are all good, only liberals and pedestrianists have done stupid things? In short, once the Pandora’s box was opened, Prime Minister Ciucă would immediately find himself in the middle of a scandal in the coalition, the last thing he wanted. A scandal means political instability and a coalition crisis you never know how it will end. If Prime Minister Ciucă were to pull the broken thread in the government now, he would risk tearing half of the fabric.
All Prime Minister Ciucă is doing now is postponing an inevitable showdown. Almost half of his government ministers have accumulated debts during their tenure and hang like a boulder on the government’s image: Lucian Bode (BMW, Schengen), Cătălin Predoiu (Laws of Justice), Virgul Popescu (constantly attacked by the PSD on energy bills), Vasile Dîncu (the exit and the mistake), Alexandru Rafila (blinded by the war with Raed Arafat), Kelemen Hunor (Tușnad), Tanczos Barna and Eduard Novak (both with a long history of mistakes). Finally, add Nicolae Ciucă to the top of the list, obsessed with the plagiarism scandal and directing the case to a favorable NLP judge.
Can this government drag on for another six months, until May, when the government is expected to rotate? If protests begin in the country against the backdrop of the rising cost of living (high maintenance bills, galloping inflation), Prime Minister Ciucă can no longer avoid “bloodshed” in the coalition. So, who will solve a possible and increasingly foreseeable failure of Romania’s accession to Schengen? President Klaus Iohannis will under no circumstances assume anything, just possible success. If Romania lacks Schengen, who will pay politically: a few ministers or the entire government led by the premier?
