We Have An Illegitimate Parliament

Koto Jozsef was sworn in as a Member of Parliament on Friday, about the same time as the Bucharest Court of Appeal was annulling his election to this office. Koto Jozsef was part of the Committee that validated the Chamber of Deputies. A logical problem: if Koto Jozsef"s election to office was annulled by Court, how valid are the offices of the MPs validated by Koto Jozsef? A logical answer: they are not valid. By putting Koto Jozsef on the Validation Committee (unanimously!), UDMR "corrupted" the Chamber of Deputies so that all MPs were validated by a panel that included a simple citizen (as the Bucharest Court of Appeal ruled). Of course, if the Chamber of Deputies is illegitimately assembled, the entire Parliament is equally illegitimate. The Parliament"s illegitimacy seems to be the conclusion of a speculative logic that exclusively relies on the Bucharest Court of Appeals" ruling to annul Koto Jozsef"s election to office. However, the logic is solid. The problem is that, in fact, it is not just Koto Jozsef who has the office of an MP which should not have been allocated to him by the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC). As BURSA wrote immediately after the elections, Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu himself is in a similar situation. So are Dan Radu Rusanu, Cristian Topescu and Sergiu Nicolaescu (just to name the most famous people on a longer list). In a series of articles headlined "Electoral Scams," BURSA warned that BEC had drifted from the legal procedure stipulating that the mapping between names and seats in Parliament was to be performed in several steps, first at constituency level and then at national level. By ignoring the first level, the BEC pulled out of the hat different names than those resulting from the ballots and the law. This is why the Parliament we have now includes Deputies and Senators who are in fact citizens "just like you and me" without any right to vote the country"s laws. A logical problem: if the Parliament is illegitimate, how legitimate can the laws passed by Parliament be? A logical answer: they are not legitimate. This time, it doesn"t matter that the logic is speculative. It will be enough that, sometime from now, someone, "just like you and me," is bothered by a law passed by this Parliament, that has an impact on their business, or on a court ruling or on their everyday life, and they can contest the validity of that law, by claiming that the Parliament is illegitimate. A logical problem: if the Parliament is illegitimate, how legitimate can the Government validated by this Parliament be? A logical answer: the Government will not be legitimate. From budgets and ordinances to tenders, programmes, fund allocation and investments, everything done by this Government will be legally vulnerable.

A logical conclusion: from now one, only one political institution is incontestable: the Presidency. Traian Basescu.

Shall I further comment on that?

No. That would be illogical.