Ioana Lupea: "Traian Basescu laid the equality sign between vote and justice".
"The people is not validating mafia men. (...) We can't say that the electorate is so0lidary with a corrupted man." In free translation. if the people votes you, you are clean. This is the amazing statement made by president Traian Basescu for Realitatea TV, sanctioned correctly and necessary by by Corina Dragotescu, in yesterday's "Cotidianul". The head of state brought an argument for his surprising conclusion the presumption of innocence which could be taken into consideration by the electorate, unlike himself, the media and other politicians. Only that the voters are expressing at the ballots their personal opinions, and not their knowledge about the system functioning, moral judgments and even less judicial sentences.
The principle of presumption of innocence, mandatory in a state, is not the one that confirmed as mayors and president of county councils suspected, investigated or trialled for corruption candidates. Georghe Falca, the son in law of the president, Radu Mazare or Marian Oprisan were voted first of all because they were already in the function, and they had the leavers for mobilizing and conditioning their electors. They would have been elected anyway, even with a penal sentence. The former French Prime Minister Alain Jupee, sentenced to 18 months of prison for an affair of fictive employments, was installed with 56.62% of the votes, as mayor of Bordeaux. The majority vote doesn't wash his sins.
An elected doesn't become suddenly innocent under juridical and moral report, but only validated as proper for the occupation of a public function, based on subjective criteria. The preference for one candidate in front of another, is said by recent studies of social psychology, is determined by the physical features common with the electors from a group. Even though the elections were conceived as an instrument of selection, in certain conditions, they are producing counter selection, and the worthy for the task are defeated by the unworthy. The examples are many in the course of history. Ion Iliescu didn't won the presidency because he deserved it more than Ion Raţiu, Emil Constantinescu or Theodor Stolojan, and the vote he received three times is not absolving him by the responsibility for the "mineriads".
Under the rule od numbers, Traian Basescu is mistaking the quantity with quality, is fetishing the elections turning them into moral trials and courts. He makes it from personal reasons. He is the uninominal elected and author of the great project "the moral reform of the political class though elections". Or, at least for these elections, like is noticed by Corina Dragutescu, the project failed. Flattering the voters, Traian Basescu covers the resistance for reform of the parties, including PDL, which had propsed unfit candidates from the moral criteria point of view or owners of penal files. The people validated mafia men because they didn't have a viable alternative. But the people shouldn't be touched even by a flower and PDL exonerated, Train Basescu laid the equality sign between vote and justice.
If the head of state doesn't find the values for which he has been elected in 2004 useful anymore, for us they are. Democracy specialists are warning that a democracy that submits the inevitable to poor selections is risking to lose the support of its own citizens.
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