“La Romania è corrotta”, ammette il presidente del paese in una confessione sbalorditiva

Can’t fix a problem if you don’t acknowledge it. Good for him.

No

Acknowledging the problem is a first step towards fixing it. So good job here. Just make sure it is not the only step you take on that way.

> “Romania is a corrupt country, and Romanians are right when they say they do not see a will from the state to fight corruption…” he said. “Still, we are less corrupt than we were 20 years ago.

> “It is also true that all the corruption during this period has held us back. We could have been much further along and living much better than we do today,” the president continued. “It is also true that in recent months we have not seen corruption at the top of the Romanian state.”

Tell me a country that ISN’T. And that includes the Vatican.

I’m surprised he had the balls to say it

that’s impossible!

next they are going to tell me water at room temp is a liquid

Just call it lobbyism and then its okay like in all other countries

You wanna see corruption, come here to Croatia. We basically have mafia masquerading as government. Corruption and nepotism hard coded into genes of Balkan people.

It’s not a secret

In all fairness is there a country where there isn’t corruption?

As a Romanian, anyone who does not believe the state is deeply corrupt is delusional.

A lot of it can be traced back to the fact that after the fall of communism, the people who took the power (with popular support) were the same people that were in the Communist party, except rebranded as first democratic socialist, and then social democrat, who kept doing business exactly the same as before.

The PSD has over 500k members countrywide, making it one of the largest parties in Europe probably, and there are big chunks of the country that they control completely. One example is the public health sector, where e.g. to be a hospital director in Bucharest you have to be a party member; even those who don’t join will begrudgingly admit “I hate them, but when I was in trouble, it was still PSD who helped me out”.

Recorder, one of our main investigative jouralist agencies keeps digging into cases where things go horribly wrong, like an illegally built LPG station exploding, state money embezzled via ghost contracts with churches (they are also ultra corrupt), children being abused, illegal building permits that put people in danger, etc., and 9 out of 10 times there is a PSD mayor or official behind it.

And PSD keeps winning sizable chunks in elections, because especially in rural areas that are full of old people without a firmly established and grounded democratic mindset, they will be voted for because “Mr. Mayor said so”, or occasionally because “Mr. Priest said so”.

The one president we had that went all out on corruption, who also had a lot of flaws, was completely assassinated by the media and had the entire political class turn against him, and although he managed to get some of the worst offenders behind bars, all his reforms have since been undone — the PSD narrative goes “look, we also want justice and to stop corruption, but it mustn’t turn people’s lives upside down!”

It is honestly very difficult to see the way out, given how deeply entrenched this network is, but I really hope that the work of Recorder and people like Nicusor Dan can make some changes.