British expat eye: To leave, or not to leave the EU

In the return of BR’s regular look at life in Bucharest and Romania through the eyes of an outsider, we ponder Brexit blues, political positioning and the Hexi scandal.

Debbie Stowe

This week, the UK will vote on whether to remain in or leave the European Union, and I’m nervous.

As an expat, it’s always interesting to juxtapose attitudes to things in your home and adopted countries. Take privatization: in Romania, a desirable means to take companies out of inept/corrupt state hands and turn them into thriving entities. In the UK, a loathed way of selling off prized public services to profiteers who’ll strip them back and hike the prices.

EU membership is another one: in Romania, a glittering achievement that boosted the economy and wages and allowed people to travel freely for the first time. In the UK, an undemocratic and faceless bureaucracy that flooded the country with immigrants and let Brussels dictate what shape our fruit must be.

We don’t all see the EU like that, of course, and I’m hoping that at least 51 percent of my compatriots will be joining me in ticking the Remain box. If not, it could be back to the bad old days of queuing at the embassy for visas and minibus roundtrips to Ruse.

Those of us Brits with Romanian partners have often been teased that they’re only with us for our passports. If Brexit happens, the joke could be turned on its head.

Night-mayor

The hors d’oeuvre to the UK’s EU referendum vote was local and mayoral elections in May, when the big news was that Labour’s Sadiq Khan was elected London’s first Muslim mayor. Whatever your political colors, it was a great story: the son of a bus driver beats the son of a billionaire (Zac Goldsmith, whose father was financier Sir James Goldsmith).

Bucharest nearly had its own mayoral turn-up, in the form of long-term French expat Clotilde Armand, a candidate in Sector 1. An engineering company manager, Armand was running for Nicusor Dan’s USB, whose monitors were out in force to try and guard against the usual attempts at fraud.

Alas, some of them reportedly knocked off early to go to that evening’s Maroon 5 concert – with the predictable result that in the unguarded polling stations the results suspiciously diverged from the exit polls that had forecast a win for the Frenchwoman, handing victory to her PSD rival.

What a shame that a promising candidate who differed from the “male, pale and stale” formula that has a stranglehold on politics (not just in Romania) may have been robbed of victory by the same old skullduggery.

It prompted an internet meme featuring Armand with the caption, “You’re not a true Romanian until the PSD has stolen from you.”

Firea alarm

Another female did triumph in the Bucharest mayoral elections – unfortunately it was Gabriela Firea, the TV presenter who notoriously commented that President Klaus Iohannis did not have a proper family because he doesn’t have children.

Sadly, it’s easy to see how someone with such abhorrent views can reach high office in Romania. Firea probably enjoys high approval ratings among the 3 million signatories to a recent letter seeking to change the Romanian constitution to explicitly ban same-sex marriage.

She joins a list of shame of public figures and officials that have revealed their bigotry, misogyny or homophobia, such as the Education Ministry guy who said schools should be teaching girls to wear high heels and walk with their chests out to make boys faint (I’m not joking) and the TV talent show judge who compared being gay to being a terrorist.

Sitting in Bucharest’s hipster cafes sipping a high-end Ethiopian cappuccino among the well educated, fluent English-speaking clientele, the Romanian capital might be mistaken for any other progressive, modern metropolis.

But Firea’s election and the hateful letter from the 3 million are a sobering reminder that attitudes elsewhere have a long way to go until the country can be considered to have embraced European values of equality and tolerance.

A sickening story of the health system

Also falling a long way below European standards is the Romanian medical system – or at least some of the products used within in. The recent diluted disinfectant scandal reached some sort of horrible conclusion with the presumed suicide of the businessman most implicated.

In a story right out of classic noir film The Third Man, Dan Condrea’s company Hexi Pharma had been buying disinfectant at market rates from Germany, selling it on at hugely inflated prices via a Cypriot firm (no whiff of dodgy dealings there, then), diluting it so it was near useless and then supplying it to Romania hospitals.

The fraud came to light after the devastating fire in Colectiv, when the high number of deaths in the days and weeks after the tragedy prompted investigations into hospital infections.

For a young Westerner, traveling and living in less developed countries can be great fun. It’s only when incident or accident throws you into contact with the emergency services, that you might stop to wonder about the unseen infrastructure – medical facilities, health and safety regulations and law enforcement – that you can generally assume are functional back home.

For expats and Romanians alike, these are the wards where we and our children go when we’re most vulnerable. It’s stomach-turning to think how many patients’ safety was compromised – and how many lost their lives needlessly – because of greed. And this was one case discovered by chance. How many more have yet to be unearthed?

One rare positive to emerge from the Hexi scandal was the investigative journalism in evidence. The Romanian media is much maligned: it’s low-brow; the outlets are owned by crooks who use them to further their own nefarious ends; there’s more PR than journalism…

Some of this is fair, but there are bright spots: long-standing satirical titles like Academia Catavencu and quality magazines like Decat o Revista. The Hexi report came from an unexpected source (to me), Gazeta Sporturilor.

I last cast my eye over this paper years ago, an edition which had a front-page story about a football manager buying a camcorder (yes, a camcorder – it was that long ago). I drew my own conclusions about the caliber of the publication from that and have never looked at it again since.

So hats off to the newsroom, whose old-school investigative journalism would make Woodward and Bernstein proud, and shows that even on a poorly resourced media market, the profession can still thrive.

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