The Eternal Prime Minister Boc

The player (that sometimes seems to be the president of the country) has announced the prime-minister (that never looks like the prime-minister he is supposed to be), that he"ll be sitting on the sidelines for a while, during the talk that they had yesterday on the subject of the government reshuffle:

"You do what you want, I"m not getting involved any longer", Traian Băsescu is rumored to have said, when Emil Boc apparently tried to express his disagreement with the idea of a radical change of the Government roster. Of course it could all be part of the image that"s been cultivated: the president knows his stuff, and the PM is incompetent (leaving the ship, Captain Băsescu?!)

It is rumored that Basescu would have wanted a "major reshuffle" and that is why his cronies (Elena Udrea, Raluca Turcan, Sulfina Barbu / Sever Voinescu, Zamfir Iorguş and Vasile Gherasim) voted in favor of a mass-resignation of the members of the Government in the meeting of the PD-L parliamentarians which was held on Wednesday and was helmed by the leaders of the party.

But Boc is happy with the performance of his ministers, so up until yesterday afternoon he had only sacked two of the ministers that weren"t his -Sebastian Vlădescu (of the Finance Ministry) and Mihail Dumitru (Agriculture), neither of them being a member of the PD-L.

Instead of a "big reshuffle", Boc once again succeeded in doing something of no consequence, just like most of the things he does.

September 1st was crucial for Romania: ministers were supposed to undergo a performance evaluation, and be replaced with others, more credible than the ones that have been completely overwhelmed by the crisis, the announcement of a credible program for stimulating the economic recovery was supposed to be presented.

That"s what we are now all hanging on, our own work won"t help us - we used to work before the crisis and we are working hard now. And we are living badly.

The crisis is not our fault.

The crisis is the fault of the lousy government.

September 1st should have been an opportunity to get a better government.

But all we got is Boc.

Boc.

By evening, the fifth Boc government seemed to have six new members, after Sebastian Vlădescu, Mihail Dumitru, Mihai Şeitan, Gabriel Sandu and Radu Berceanu had one by one been spit out by the reshuffling machine. Their revocations were accompanied by the announcement of Minister Adriean Videanu that he would be willing to give up his position as minister to have more time for managing the party. Confirmations and denials came rushing in as did the possible nominations of replacements for the ministers that were let go.