Expat opinion. The Brexit vote and Trump’s victory make me even more grateful to be living in Romania

In BR’s monthly look at life here from the point of view of an outsider, our expatriate writer, grateful for the comparative stability of Bucharest life, bemoans Trump’s triumph and the resurgence of smoke.

Debbie Stowe

A break from Brexit berating this month, as that disaster has been temporarily trumped (sorry) by something even more depressing, if that were possible. The powerful prospect of the US’s first woman president has been derailed, and, in her stead, will be a racist, sexist, homophobic, vulgar, narcissistic, self-confessed sexual predator, who mocks disabled people, thinks women who have had abortions should be “punished”, wants to dismantle reproductive and gay rights, inflamed the ludicrous conspiracy theory about President Obama being born in Kenya… there’s so much more but I’m too weak to go on.

Like the UK’s own recent voting catastrophe, this result is further confirmation that Romania has no monopoly on bad politics or leaders. I’m not sure how Donald Trump would measure up alongside Vadim Tudor or Ion Iliescu, but at least they never had their hands on any nuclear codes.

As a Westerner, it’s easy naively to assume that no truly awful leader could come to power in your country, that the mechanisms of a long-established democracy would prevent a demagogue from achieving high office. Romanians are perhaps more realistic about this, having had a dictator within living memory. So it comes as a big shock to us when our political landscape goes so badly awry.

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It has been repeatedly noted that Trump’s election victory ironically took place 27 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Romania, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, has advanced hugely thanks to the crumbling of that symbol of separation and the greater integration and freedom it hailed. How devastating that the flagship policy of the incoming leader of the so-called Free World (albeit a policy that many doubt will ever come to fruition) is to construct another divisive wall (real-time update: now partly downgraded to a “fence”).

As with Brexit, the sad events in the US make me even more grateful to be living in Romania, far from the madness.

Progress goes up in smoke?

From one noxious presence to another: nicotine. What has happened to the smoking ban? At a popular expat pub the other night for a darts match, one game took place in a new sort of conservatory, in which punters were happily puffing away. From what I could tell (I didn’t inspect it closely because of the stink), this room was effectively inside – and would presumably have been covered by the ban.

Though it’s dreadful that it took the Colectiv disaster to galvanize Romanian lawmakers into protecting the public’s health, the smoking ban was a great leap forward for the nation, set to have a huge impact on the well-being of one of Europe’s unhealthiest countries. What a pity that – due, perhaps, to the special interests that fought the law aggressively when it was first adopted – Romania seems to have caved in and rolled back on this impressive step.

Kicking off

It was an ignominious night for Romania both on and off the pitch, when the national football team played Poland this month. The match was twice interrupted by crowd trouble, and a flare was thrown at an opposition player. Some Polish fans behaved no better – six were arrested after an Old Town bar was reportedly trashed. Though deplorable, the incidents were a reminder of how rare (away from football) public violence is in Bucharest.

Of course there are fights and muggings, but far fewer than in most comparable Western European cities – or at least that’s how it feels to many expats. I wouldn’t think twice about walking home, alone, through a city center park late at night here – something I’d never risk back in the UK. With protests in the US – now raging rightfully against Trump – often turning violent and sometimes even resulting in shootings, and both America and Britain suffering an upswing in post-vote attacks, hostility and bigotry, Romania is seeming an ever better bet.