Reactions to the change of the interior minister

Directed explicitly against President Traian Basescu and Prime Minister Emil Boc, Friday’s protests held by the police had an unexpected epilogue: the resignation of the minister of the interior, Vasile Blaga.

He took the fall for the fact that the 6,000 policemen marched without authorization from the Government to the Presidency, where they threw away in anger their uniform caps and booed president Basescu, who was the target for the package of austerity measures that cut their wages by 25%.

The incident, without precedent in the last 20 years, bothered the president visibly, and Blaga’s refusal to fire the heads of the police and gendarme corps turned him into an undesirable in a government which is in fact led by the head of state.

In his place the Liberal Democratic Party, the main component of the government coalition, invested Senator Traian Igas, a provincial member of the Liberal Democratic Party, and therefore above any suspicion of insubordination.



He is now assigned the most important file of Blaga’s investiture – Romania’s admittance, next year, into the Schengen space- and also the equally important task of giving back the Police the image of rigor and discipline, damaged after Friday’s mutiny.

Predictably, for the Social Democratic and Liberal Opposition, Blaga is only a scapegoat for what the leader of the National Liberal Party, Crin Antonescu, calls “the dissolution of authority” under the Basescu- Boc regime.

The head of the Social Democratic Party, Victor Ponta, in his turn said that the president and the prime minister should be the ones that should have resigned, and accused Traian Basescu of just wanting to “get rid of Vasile Blaga”.

With inevitable nuances, the press is of the same opinion. Gandul writes that Blaga was the last “heavy” of this party, which should have been “retired” after the reshuffling on Monday, whose other victims are other two high ranking figures, Radu Berceanu from Transport and Adriean Videanu from Economy.

Without these three politicians, the government would be now “cut to the prime minister’s size”, meaning expunged of any personality capable of objecting to the decisions, no matter how chaotic, taken by Boc.

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Otherwise, Gandul also believes that “Basescu turned Blaga into the leader of the opposition”, and that, by turning in his resignation, the former minister could break openly from an increasingly unpopular president.

In Adevarul, however, political scientist Cristian Parvulescu said that he is convinced, that, together with the administrative and financial leverage that his portfolio affords him, Blaga “loses his influence within the party”.

On the one hand because “he cannot offer anything concrete” to the local branches, and on the other because, having no popularity with the public, “he does not draw votes”.

(Radio România Internaţional, Serviciul în limba engleză).