Teodor Melescanu - a former diplomat on a crusade for Cotroceni
Now 59, with two and a half decades of diplomacy behind him, after four years and a month as foreign minister, after a brief one year in PDSR as vice-president, spokesman, head of the national support committee for Ion Iliescu, Teodor Melescanu, a leader of a Parliament party, wants to be president of Romania.
In 1997, the public figure Teodor Melescanu was involved in two major events: he left the PDSR blaming its lack of courage to call things by their names and for not breaking with the mistakes of the past.
He registered the Alliance for Romania as a foundation with a social-democratic orientation with social-liberal elements and escaped a libel suit because the plaintiff, a Hungarian political leader angry with Melescanu for referring to his alleged Romanian origins, abandoned the case, saying the foreign minister had lost his political significance.
In 1999, Melescanu dreamed of a social-democratic government next to PDSR and PD, although, as he said, ApR, PD and PDSR have older scores to settle, given their joint history and the tempestuous break-ups that generated them.
"Older scores and common past" have made some people look at Melescanu and his party in every way. Teodor Melescanu is "perhaps" the most feared adversary to the PDSR candidate in the second round, as Adrian Nastase says, always a diplomat.
But, after Nastase's party colleague, Ioan Mircea Pascu, ApR is "misleading the electorate," being a party of "material opulence" and "political mercenaries."
As for the Democratic Party, references are only good. According to minister Radu Berceanu, Melescanu "has solutions sung on a clarion and grows in the polls," and has a solution for every problem facing Romania, while ApR is a party of reformed Securitate collaborators, which stole votes from PDSR and now wants to steal the PD electorate.
The incorrigible ex-transportation minister Traian Basescu also concluded that Teodor Melescanu never launched a message and did "what he knew best: he talked much and said nothing," succeeding in two ways: "fooling the people that his party is new and growing in the polls without saying anything."
Among the "clarion-sung" solutions are: reform of the presidential institution, either by increasing or reducing prerogatives; strengthening the prime minister's role, and renouncing the political algorithm. The other solutions are local and circumstantial.
For instance, when, during a visit to Ialomita county, he inaugurated a mobile senatorial office within a bus, great interest for agriculture prompted Melescanu to promise the peasants to support the output of canned goods and that his party's MPs would press to solve the diesel oil issue.
Still, the former foreign minister wants to run for President because he rates himself, according to the polls, as one of the three personalities most credible to the electorate, and his party serves him as the competent person Romania needs, fully qualified for head of state.
Petre Roman sets out to conquer the Presidency barricade
After stashing away his red sweater and university smile, Petre Roman, 54, went through every possible political experience, save for head of state. He was a deputy, a senator, head of government, Senate chairman, is a party leader and a foreign minister.
He was and remains a partisan of categorical sentences, spoken in few words but wrapped in holiday packaging. In March 1994, he called for early elections, while in June he categorically refused giving his signature for the motion to suspend the President of Romania, Ion Iliescu.
On September 26, 1991, he resigns as prime minister, pressured by more than 20,000 miners from Valea Jiului, arrived in Bucharest on a vindictive expedition. The anecdotal history tells of Roman leaving the Victoria Palace by jumping over the fence.
After leaving the Government, Petre Roman would discover the principle of a lasting government, that of his successor, Nicolae Vacaroiu: "You, me, you father."
This did not prevent him from saying, a few years later, that firearms would not be used against miners as long as the Democratic Party was in the Government.
No matter what happens, Roman's takes "the side of reason, wisdom and general interest of the Romanian economy." Because "any transition is difficult, and exiting this condition is impossible without a solid national consensus."
Beyond the elegance, Roman knows how to settle a score. In 1996, he signed a government collaboration accord with the CDR, proclaiming the fundamental goal of this alliance as being "the total removal of the Iliescu regime."
But previously, he had stated that the CDR programme, "Contract with Romania," is a collection of principles, wishes and premises, a pallid copy of the "Contract with America" that won Bill Clinton the 1992 elections.
The leader of a centre party, Roman has had attitudes to match. In November 1998, he said the ideological delimitation from his coalition parties was not "hostile" but "necessary" as a form of responsibility before supporters.
Then he went on to discover that the degrading standard of living was not a fatality but a natural outcome of transition, without which Romania would have been unable to accomplish the reform. Adjacently, "poverty can stop reform." Therefore, "Romania can be governed better and more efficiently," and PD "cannot accept the idea that only this much can be done."
In 2000, the Democratic Party still wants to define itself for what it has to do - after, last year, Roman said the PD would not leave "the country in hardship" as the "government formula" replacing the current coalition has not been accomplished yet, "bringing the hope" and being a "light" for the populace.
The solution, therefore, would be that the Government should accomplish "a minimal job" and "engage in the household's spring works."
As for the foreign minister's party, it did not have a "duplicitous" attitude for the Government, but was confronted with the "duplicitous reality" of government, which "originates from the very centre of the act of government."
Ion Iliescu, a former head of state, tries again
Of all candidates for presidency, Ion Iliescu, 70, is the most adept politician, the only one who has had this responsibility before. In 1996, when he ran and lost, he encouraged people to vote for the only man who could "defend the many from the charge of the political right."
Shortly before handing over the constitutional mandate as head of state, he pardoned, by presidential decree, the last six former members of the PCR Political Executive Committee (CPEx) and then he joined the PDSR.
As an opposition leader, he criticised everything that could be criticised. He said the opening of a Hungarian consulate in Cluj was a weakness of the Romanian diplomacy.
He told party members in sector 6 that "a mass action" should be unleashed against the National Television. In 1997, the PDSR found that IMF and World Bank funding was "not exceptional," given that the Ciorbea government behaved in a "undignified manner" in meetings with the World Bank president.
He has voiced concern for the "incisiveness and proletarian combativeness" of attorney general Sorin Moisescu.
He called "aberrant and impertinent" the words of Ion Caramitru, who said the former head of state should waive his revolutionary's certificate. The PDSR leader said in Targu Jiu in 1998: "That fool, Emil Constantinescu, bragged that $60 billion would pour into Romania if he is elected," a statement he would later disclaim.
He has considered that the words of the UECD president, Wim van Weltzen, were "an offence against the Romanian state."
But there was constructive criticism, too. In 1998, the former president of Romania, Ion Iliescu, said US President Bill Clinton's recognition of his affair with Monica Lewinsky was "a lesson of efficiency of the democratic system," from which Romanian politicians "have a lot to learn."
In 1998, he said in a meeting with leaders of Transylvania leaders that Romania was led by "cretin-democrats."
Iliescu authoritatively leads a monolithic party, constantly on the first place in the polls. In 1997 there have been a few attempts from regional branches - Sibiu and Galati - to propose Ion Iliescu as the honorary chairman. The proposal was categorically rejected.
Furthermore, at the National Council in September 1997, Ion Iliescu demanded the delegates to stop criticism against central party leadership.
PDSR is a party that has not experienced major internal clashes. On the contrary, last December, the PDSR Gorj head, Nicolae Mischie, said he sued the organisers of the "Poarta Sarutului" folk festival because on the night of the show, party president Ion Iliescu, who was accommodated nearby, could not sleep for the agitation.
Still, why would Ion Iliescu want to run again? Because he feels physical strength has not deserted him and he is not "the kind of individual to give up a battle, a struggle that is not at all easy."
Theodor Stolojan, the man who believes small business is Romanian in nature
When financier Theodor Stolojan, 56, former finance minister, former president of the National Privatisation Agency, former prime minister, former World Bank employee, showed signs of rush to enter political life, liberal Valeriu Stoica urged him to defeat his "hesitations" and make it snappy.
"I would be very glad if he did it faster, because politics is like marriage: if you keep refusing, you risk ending up an old maid."
In his rarefied world of money and macroeconomics, Stolojan is not at all hesitant. A simple parsing through his judgements shows him as a decisive man: Romania must speed up privatisation, the sale of all state-owned goods; establish a strict control of the budget and money in the economy (in 1998-1999 Stolojan was inspector general of the Finance Ministry's state revenues Department); a transparent and simple restructuring of potentially profitable enterprises, with their debt restructured or even cancelled; encourage small and medium private companies that have the capacity to adapt faster to the market economy. Small business is the very nature of the Romanian native, he believes.
Stolojan doesn't have any major political past. He has been a premier in transition, politically uninvolved, but backed by PDSR, a party that has been courting him ever since. The PDSR executive president, Adrian Nastase, in 1996 offered the former premier Theodor Stolojan a place on the PDSR lists for parliament elections.
"I believe that Theodor Stolojan must continue playing a major role in the country upon his return," Nastase said. "I recognise value when I see it," Stolojan said, also in 1996, when he flew in from the USA to witness Ion Iliescu's launch of candidacy.
Former PDSR prime minister Nicolae Vacaroiu said in November 1998 that a government led by Theodor Stolojan could find technical solutions to pull the country out of the crisis.
Also PDSR, in October 1999, proposed that Theodor Stolojan should be the Romanian negotiator for integration into the European Union.
Stolojan politely turned down PDSR's offers, and of Ion Iliescu he said: "Iliescu did not agree that relatives and close friends of PDSR members should hold some positions, but he learned from those in the coalition that it doesn't matter what the press says, so he will no longer blush and do as they say."
Also last year, president Constantinescu asked former premier Theodor Stolojan to become involved in improving the Romanian economic milieu. But Stolojan became politically involved, because the PNL, a party that won't have a presidential candidate now that Emil Constantinescu is out, wants Theodor Stolojan.
Stolojan is the man who said: "You can't expect the populace to bear with an austerity programme as long as the public official goes to reunions in a Jeep Cherokee."
Mugur Isarescu, the candidate with a fear of politics
The revered former governor of the National Bank and a transition premier, Mugur Isarescu, 51, has been, in the last few days, collecting consensus in buckets. It is hard to believe that in the last ten years, this public person with opinions so expectable and an authority so recognised, had moments when he was pinned against the wall. And still, it happened.
In November 1994, Isarescu was accused, in a report compiled by the Romanian Court of Accounts, of grave breaches in NBR management. Ion Iliescu saved him from the popular rage, and Isarescu thanked him in a very personal manner: "Mr. President is a person who has personal opinions, but he also has opinions that derive from his function." The following year, the poet and politician Adrian Paunescu dragged Isarescu before the Senate to demand explanations for the crumbled exchange rate.
The then PSM senator Adrian Paunescu said the National Bank had become an "independent republic" - which accomplished what "ethnic extremists" failed - and a "lever" for the IMF to depreciate the leu.
Before his NBR governor's mandate expired in 1997, he ran for director of the World Economy Institute. But in 1998, Isarescu is again named to run the NBR, following a Parliament vote.
Four days later, the new governor explained in an interview why he stayed with the central bank: because the Russian crisis was in full swing and the situation in Romania was worsening, and a public refusal of another mandate would have equalled a flight from difficulty.
Because the governor's job was an honour to any economist, in a world where "loans are easier to take than to repay."
The most long-lived official since the revolution admitted he has remained on his job because he had the professionalism, the capacity to communicate and inspire trust to his partners, and a lot of patience.
After his first mandate, he bewailed the fact that the NBR failed to achieve a more able, more intelligent combination of connections to the Government.
He said that monetary policy, if left alone, without support from the other economic policies (fiscal, budget and revenue), could sometimes do more harm than good. In 1998, he never considered entering politics. And if he were to follow a doctrine, it could only be one promoting the National Bank's action: "The market economy with a high degree of liberty, an open economy, to join a united Europe."
In 2000, Isarescu is the head of Government. And regardless of his function, he is the same person who in 1998 told ASE students: "The market is far from being a commercial space. It is a cultural space. An agora."
The market culture begins with the truth of prices, manufacturing costs, exchange rates and interest rates, plus the fundamental belief that efficiency will promote not work itself, an insignificant fact, but the recognition of work by the society."
Pentru alte știri, analize, articole și informații din business în timp real urmărește Ziarul Financiar pe WhatsApp Channels
