The Coalition for a Clean Parliament, Polirom, 2005.
This book (read it online!) is about an anticorruption campaign that took place in Romania in 2004 and which prevented nearly one hundred controversial MPs from being reelected.
While this campaign was considered “original” by many observers, the problems it addressed are widespread in the postcommunist world: political elites which at times look more like predatory elites, high state capture, constituencies with low civic competence and low interest in politics.
This situation looks at times hopeless in the Balkans and former Soviet Union. But it is not. By and large, what we present here is a success story.
On the occasion of the local elections in June 2004 and the legislative and presidential elections in November and December, Romanian civil society organized itself for the first time into a broad coalition for ntegrity in politics: the Coalition for a Clean Parliament (CCP).
Frustrated by the governmentís lack of effectiveness in fighting large-scale corruption, civil society took matters into its own hands. The CCP first determined the criteria that would make a candidate unfit for a clean Parliament. These criteria were 1) having repeatedly shifted from one political party to another in search of personal profit; 2) having been accused of corruption on the basis of published and verifiable evidence; 3) having been exposed as an agent of the Securitate (Ceau[escu’s former secret service); 4) being the owner of a private firm with important tax arrears to the state budget; 5) being unable to account for the discrepancy between one’s officially stated assets and one’s income; 6) turning a profit from conflicts of interest involving one’s public position.
The second step was to discuss these criteria with the leadership of the political parties represented in the Parliament. The most important ones – the Social Democratic Party/Humanist Party coalition (SDP+HP), the Justice and Truth Alliance (DA), and the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians from Romania (DAHR) – agreed with civil society criteria and process, and they publicly announced their support for the CCPís campaign. It was only Greater Romania Party (GRP), Romaniaís radical populist party, which resisted any cooperation.
The third step was to gather information about the candidates of these parties. CCP collected material published in the press over the years and researched the websites of various public authorities in charge of financial and commercial matters.
Then it double-checked the information. The fourth step was to draw up lists of those candidates who met one or more of the agreed-upon criteria for being unfit to hold a seat in the future Parliament. The resulting “black lists” were then sent to the political parties, with the request that they reexamine each case and decide whether to withdraw the candidate in question. The CCP also offered to analyze any cases where individual candidates contested its findings.
Step five consisted of the withdrawal by the political parties of significant numbers of their initial candidates. Some of the candidates appealed to the CCP, which approved or rejected their appeals and adjusted its lists accordingly.
The last step was to release the final CCP black lists in the form of nearly two million flyers, distributed in most of the 41 counties of Romania. The print press readership is low in Romania, which remains a rural country still.
Although most of the twenty-one millions of Romanians are literates, less than 20% read regularly political reports in newspapers. Due to elections on the party list system, people seldom know their representatives.
Smaller parties proved equally difficult to track. Hungarians tried to claim exception in virtue of them being a minority, and they were asked to resign positions they held in conflict of interest in order to be removed from the black list. HP was as a ground rule recruiting from other parties, so they were structurally opposed to such monitoring practices.
After elections they jumped in the boat of winners, for instance, although they had been allies of SDP. After the results showed that far more unfit candidates belonged to the ruling SDP than to the opposition, that party denounced the whole procedure and encouraged its candidates to sue Coalition members and ask the courts to stop distribution of the flyers.
In public statements and open letters, the pro-government HP (and its private television station Antena 1) accused the CCP of “conspiracy”, calling its members “civic terrorists” and “a bunch of criminals”. The SDP and the HP also asked the Central Electoral Bureau, Romaniaís highest electoral authority, to ban the CCP flyers, but judges from both the Bureau and the ordinary courts ruled in favor of the CCP.
Opponents of the CCP campaign found a more effective tactic, however. In many counties, they circulated fake flyers, using the CCP format but replacing the names of SDP candidates with opposition candidates.
Many domestic and international media outlets covered the activity of the Coalition, among others BBC, Reuters, AP, Le Monde, Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Die Presse, and countless other European newspapers.
Thanks to the combined efforts of both students and grassroots organizations such as the Civic Alliance and Asociatia Pro Democratia (Pro Democracy Association – APD), nearly two million flyers were distributed in almost every county in Romania. More than two thousand people, from students to union members, participated as volunteers in this campaign.
What were the results of the blacklist campaign? The CCP initially documented 143 cases of unfit SDP candidates, including some on the county level. Under pressure from civil society, the SDP withdrew about 30 candidates from its electoral lists. The CCP also dropped from the black lists some candidates who appealed its findings, so the final count of unfit SDP and HP candidates was 95. Among the other black-listed candidates were 10 from the opposition Alliance (which also withdrew candidates from 28), 46 from the Greater Romania Party, and 3 from the DAHR.
A final accounting shows that 98 candidates on the original black lists lost their seats, having been either withdrawn by their parties or defeated by the voters. At the same time, 104 black-listed candidates won reelection. Measured in this way, the CCPís rate of success was just below 50 percent.
On the other hand, the SDP fell from power. On the downside, while the new President, Traian Basescu, and the new DA-led government are struggling to find adequate means to fight against systemic corruption, Romanian civil society is saddled with defending itself against five lawsuits for defamation, filed by a former head of the secret service, a former minister of Justice, a former minister of Defense and a couple of other SDP top politicians.
If Oscar Wilde is right that one should be judged by the quality of one’s enemies, then Romanian civil society has made enormous strides with its Coalition for a Clean Parliament. By end-April, in any event, the Coalition had won the first round in nearly all the trials.
Read the book online>>>
Balkan Trust, Romanian Soros Foundation and Freedom House provided funding for the Coalition for a Clean Parliament campaign.