Or is it? While the United States is demonstrating how messy elections can become even in a country with a long democratic tradition, Romania serves as a reminder that fledgling democracies always have the potential for disaster. The short history of post-communist societies is filled with examples of politicians of Tudor’s ilk who mounted serious bids for power. Some of them–Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic–succeeded, dragging their countries back toward authoritarianism and isolation. Many others, though, quickly faded back into the fringes where they belong, allowing their countries to develop healthy political institutions and take off economically. The choice Romanians now face may seem like a no-brainer, but there’s nothing automatic about the outcome. What seems obvious from afar can look very different up close.
Even on the ground, it can be hard to read the signals. When Poland held its first free presidential elections in 1990, I drove around the country following the main candidates. Along the way, I picked up hitchhikers and asked about their leanings. Several talked approvingly about “the American” in the crowded race, Stanislaw Tyminski. A Polish emigre businessman who had returned from Canada, Tyminski promised Poles that they could start living like Americans overnight and ranted about anti-Polish conspiracies. I dismissed my informal sampling as badly flawed, but I was startled on election night to discover that it had been right on target. Tyminski emerged from the back of the pack to take second place, giving everyone a scare until Solidarity leader Lech Walesa beat him decisively in the runoff. Today Poland is the region’s major success story and Tyminski is largely forgotten. What might have been is pretty awful to contemplate.
Demagogues like Tyminski promise their followers anything. Poland was still a poor country then, and many people were enraged by the pain of “shock therapy” designed to catapult it from communism to capitalism. Tyminski simply asserted that, if elected, workers would receive American-size paychecks right away. In 1993 Russia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky garnered a quarter of the vote in parliamentary elections by promising his countrymen cheap vodka. (He also demanded that the United States return Alaska, proposed that prostitutes be sent into space to boost the morale of astronauts and charged that the Jews started World War II.) Using a similar script, Tudor promises to set Romania straight by ridding it of “traitors” and “mafias.” Casting himself as Robin Hood before the TV cameras recently, he handed over his gold Rolex to a child. The implicit message: everyone can become rich if he’s elected.
Crude, yes. But those tactics produce results because of the failures of Romania’s “democrats.” In 1996 a coalition of centrist parties took over the Parliament and presidency from Iliescu and the other ex-communists who had been in power since Ceausescu’s downfall. Western countries applauded the result, and France made a strong bid for including Romania in the first round of NATO expansion. The effort fell short, but the country seemed assured of favorable consideration in the next round if it launched economic reforms and maintained a steady course. Instead, the politicians squabbled among themselves, corruption flourished and few reforms were implemented. Romania continues to be mired in poverty, with 40 percent of the population making less than $35 a month. As the Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and others moved rapidly toward integration with the West over the last decade, the Romanians hardly budged. This makes many of them a receptive audience for a putative savior promising easy solutions.
When voters believe the demagogues, they pay a huge price. Slovakia remained a pariah, effectively out of the running for NATO and EU membership so long as Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar–a populist with an authoritarian streak–remained in power. The voters finally turned him out two years ago, and Slovakia has been making up for lost time ever since. There’s more than one lesson in this for the Romanians. It took both former communists and economic liberals, who now rule in a fragile coalition government, to defeat Meciar. Romania’s Iliescu is hardly an ideal candidate. When he served as president in the early 1990s, he, too, balked at pushing economic reforms. But his leftist party pledged last week to work with the centrists on a common program, which offers at least a modicum of hope that the country will get serious about playing catch-up.
After the collapse of communism, many voters quickly became disillusioned with the choices they were faced with in free elections: populist demagogues, ex-communists, often ineffective, squabbling “democrats.” They’d ask: “Is this the best we can do?” In my travels around the region, I’d explain that Americans and Western Europeans often feel the same way. And after the latest U.S. elections, I could certainly make that point more forcefully than ever. But any democratic system must reject the truly dreadful choices–or it self-destructs.
