Ion Cristoiu saw it with the cold eye of a man who has watched Romania perform itself for decades. The country, he said, no longer has leadership or a foreign policy. It has a soap opera, and a cheap one: swollen emotions, thin plot, villains and sweethearts swapped according to the episode, institutions used like stagehands. The tarmac kiss is the romantic subplot. The raid is the thriller beat. The annulled election is last season’s cliffhanger, never honestly resolved, only overwritten.

Consider the sequence as drama, because that is how it was delivered.

First, the people vote. Then the vote is declared contaminated. Then the winner of that contaminated hour becomes a character to be managed: investigated, delayed, displayed, diminished. Then, on the day the official couple flies to speak for Romania among nations, the unofficial rival is stopped in the street like a loose end. Meanwhile the presidency offers the world a photograph of affection, as if intimacy could launder incoherence, as if a kiss could stand in for a policy.

It is not that politicians have never performed. They have always performed. What has changed is the quality of the performance and the collapse of the distinction between governing and casting. A serious state can survive hypocrisy. It cannot survive becoming obvious. When the kiss is too perfect and the raid is too simultaneous, the audience stops suspending disbelief. They do not ask who is right. They ask who wrote this, and why the writing is so bad.

The boy in the car will not remember the talking points. He will remember the interruption of an ordinary afternoon, the sudden authority of men who do not introduce themselves as history, only as procedure. The presidential couple will remember, if they remember anything, the flash of the cameras and the satisfaction of a frame that traveled. Two inheritances, manufactured on the same day, in the same country, under the same flag.

Romania still sends delegations. It still signs communiqués. It still occupies a chair at the United Nations and speaks in the grammar of a normal European state. But the pictures are louder than the speeches, and the pictures say this: power is no longer argued. It is staged. Opposition is no longer defeated. It is interrupted. And the public is no longer a citizenry. It is a ratings market, asked only to keep watching.

An old saying insists that a picture is worth a thousand words. These two pictures are worth something harsher. They are worth the admission, already made by Cristoiu and already visible to anyone not paid to deny it, that the plot has escaped the government. What remains is costume, coincidence, and the faint smell of cheap perfume on a story that used to be a country. 

By Ovidiu Stanica