Romanian politicians and the attraction of the European Parliament (salary)

On June 7, Romanians will go to the polls to vote for the 33 MEPs who will be representing them in Brussels for the next five years. It is the first time when Romanian MEPs are elected for a full mandate, after Romania’s accession in 2007. But the prospect of spending five years in Brussels, mingling with the European elite, is not the main attraction for Romanian politicians. Unlike the current MEPs, who get paid the same amount as the members of Parliament in their respective countries, the MEPs to be elected in June will all receive a basic monthly salary of around 7000 €. While that is not exactly good news for representatives of countries like Italy or Germany, for the Romanians this represents a huge increase from their current salary of around 1200 €.

Moreover, this seems to constitute the main reason behind the “war of candidates” that is taking place within the main Romanian parties. A good enough reason, it seems, to give up ambitions for a career at the national level and to stay away from the spicy, circus-like political arena in Bucharest for a while. Interesting to note that in the rush of signing up for candidacy, most of the politicians forget to consider, or completely ignore the final goal and what it entails: becoming a member of the European Parliament. There is no substantial debate, one can hardly hear about proposed programmes and ideas; the motivation seems to remain on a superficial level, of a rather material nature, and this is easily visible for an insider as well as an outside observer.

Still, such a great competition should not be in itself something bad, quite on the contrary. With or without the right motivation, it is quite a good sign that Romanian politicians start getting interested in politics at the EU level. Arguably, the parties should organise a very thorough selection procedure to make sure the best candidates get on the eligible places of the lists. Well, here again, Romanian politics style kicks in. No, there is no democratic way of choosing the candidates and determining their place on the list.

Every party seems to have an “inner mechanism” for that purpose and, come to think of it, this practice is pretty much in line with the Brussels job market: any party member can send in the CV, but in the end, a “jury” formed by party leaders gets to choose the top candidates, and, guess what, no transparency or accountability can be traced throughout the process.

This is why it is very likely that we will end up with MEPs such as Elena Basescu (picture), the daughter of President Traian Basescu (a 28 years old model who became stagiaire in the European Parliament, for one of the Romanian MEPs), or the Presidential advisor and the Government’s spokesperson. The opposition (PNL) also have a tough decion to make, since lots of high ranking and ambitios members were left with their careers jeopardised by the failure in the 2008 parliamentary elections. Furthermore, to complete the surreal picture, MEPs who have been quite active in Brussels in their current mandate (Corina Cretu, Adrian Severin), are in danger of not being offered an eligible place because they are not (always) following the mainstream position of their party (PSD).

Three worrying thoughts:

1. the material incentive proves to be stronger than any political motivation to candidate for an MEP mandate; even worse: in the presence of the former, no one even bothers anymore to invent the latter;

2. The system used to select the candidates is far from being democratic and transparent; even worse: I suspect no one even bothers to present it as such;

3. The European Parliament is not present in the Romanian media in the context of substantial debates and analyses; even worse: it is now further discredited by being linked to names that have nothing to do with serious politics. And no one even bothers to notice that.