The Minister of Interior"s Coronation Masquerade

A military band was playing the honours in front of the Ministry of Interior yesterday. If you were looking around, you would be seeing the Hilton and Cretulescu Church. No plane in the sky. It was only once that Revolution Square was used as an airfield: during the Revolution, when Ceausescu"s helicopter took off. The military band had never played since. They were hiding in the trombone.

In the absence of the plane, Mircea Geoana, the dual president (of PSD and of the Senate), got off the car. He was welcomed by Dan Nica, the dual vice president (of PSD and of the Cabinet). They walked in front of the guard of honour standing at attention. Geoana must have loved the moment. It must have reminded him of his childhood, when his daddy, General Ioan Geoana (an Interior Ministry general, what a wonderful coincidence!) was taking him to military parades. The only difference would be the operetta uniforms of the soldiers around him now. Much like in a scene from "Coana Chirita."

Inside, lots of men in black suits or parade uniforms (the Ministry of Interior staff) lined up on two disciplined rows when the master of ceremony announced: "Mr. Mircea Geoana will be here shortly." The Great Man (whose intellectual capacity got him the nickname The Nitwit) appeared in the company of Dan Nica, the interim Minister of Interior, and Liviu Dragnea (nicknamed The Boss of Local Dons, as a reference to his office of president of the Union of County Councils, which he has been holding since 2000, and to his fabulous fortune, which his long career as a State servant can hardly explain).

The subject of the ceremony was not Liviu Dragnea"s coronation as Emperor of the Roman-German Empire, but the transfer of power from the interim to the recently appointed Dragnea. Dan Nica was preparing to give a speech, while the audience was anxious to find out the reason why such a ceremony had been staged for such a (ordinary) transfer of power. The problem was the microphone was not working.

Nica"s lips were moving. No sound. Some guy with insignia came, took the microphone, shook it and started making desperate signs to someone from the crowd who was not willing to step forward. Nica stood by the wall, next to Geoana and Dragnea. He was standing with his arms hanging along his body (this posture was Ceausescu"s specialty - you"d swear that he was born like that: he could stand still for hours without scratching, without trying to make some fly go away).

The microphone was finally fixed. Nica"s lips started moving again. This time, with a sound. No one could understand a word. And there is no transcript either. The audience only heard the poor joke at the beginning ("I was the interim, but the Ministry was not."). Nothing else was intelligible. Romanian words, one after the other. Making no sense.

The uniforms and the black suits started yawning. Dragnea started speaking. His mind was set to send out "messages." He said that, across the country, Administration and Interior staff were cooperating nicely and that should also be the case in the Ministry. Messages are "messages" so that you can start splitting hairs and thinking that "what he meant to say was..." If there was any message in his words, then what he meant to say was that the Mob across the country was having problems with the Mob in the central structures and that should stop and the Interior should work for "the local Dons," and not the other way around as before. The uniforms started exchanging meaningful stares. No one was sleepy anymore.

Geoana started speaking, too. In the meantime, the motorcade of President Traian Basescu, who had been invited to the ceremony, drove past the Ministry of Interior but did not stop. Why? A PSD boss hands over the Ministry to another PSD boss in front of the PSD president with military honours and the President can afford not to attend the pompous ceremony? Yet another presidential luxury.

In fact Basescu had said that a governmental reshuffle was no cause for champagne. Traian Basescu did not like Dragnea, as he had known him since he was still a member of PD. He probably accepted Dragnea, but specifically because Dragnea is in fact a "political hitchhiker," who is on no one"s side but his own.

Then this must have been the mysterious significance of the ceremony, which Dan Nica said he was about to explain, but no one understood a thing: they were celebrating the coronation of the perfect example of a politically colourless Don.