In 1989 communism fell and we joined the “free world”, but with the old gang of political power, so almost 30 years later we have such giant machine of corrupt political control that it’s about to fall under its own weight. One major reason for all the bullshit is the Social Democratic Party, PSD for short, which was able to get a majority in the last parliamentary elections and are now in almost full control. Its been almost two years since and all they did in this time was to rewrite the law in order to decriminalize aspects of corruption they are accountable for. It's really bad, middle ages bad.
In two years we have three governments because our last two prime ministers, which were tasked by PSD to complete the agenda of changing the laws which affected them, refused to do certain things and they were instantly removed. So now we have a lady that does not even know to speak any international language or the Romanian language, to be honest. And people are angry as fuck, rightfully so.
Now we change to the more positive note, there is a big protest announced on the 10th of August because a large part of our diaspora tends to come back home in that period. If you did not know, Romania is in the second place for people leaving the country, second only to Syria and they have a war. Let that just sink in for a while, a country in the top third of GPD per capita in the world, with good social cohesion and very peaceful times and reasonably good wheater, is second in the world at people leaving; that’s how but the political situation is. But let’s get back to our diaspora, which came prepared.
One of our fellow countrymen, which works and lives in Sweden cam back home with a Swedish preferential license plate which says “MUIE PSD”, roughly translated to FUCK PSD. This caught the eye of facebook but the police took notice as well, so the guy started being stopped regularly, but all the paperwork was legitimate and the numbers were valid under international law. It took the police a week to find something under which they could remove the plates after political pressure was applied on them. So yesterday, they invoked something under international law and removed his license plate and took him in for questioning. This was filmed and circulated on facebook.
And the people took notice of this and started doing digital stuff, like rating the official page of the Romanian Police with one star and leaving pertinent or down write angry reviews. This took the page of the Romanian Police to 1.2 stars out of five in a little over a day. The fact that we have access to platforms that grant us instant communication is very empowering, we now have a digital plain in which the right to free speech is harder to diminish. And although this is not something that will change the world, the fact that we can now express our opinion in a very public way and affect the image of an institution that fails to do its job is a step forward. In this particular case we have a rating system used in a subversive way and I love it :).
