The future president will have to present the country’s new defense strategy. Marius Ghincea, security expert and researcher at ETH Zurich University in Switzerland, claims that this strategy must define, first of all, the risks to Romania’s security.
The normalization of the radical right is one of the threats to Romania. PHOTO: Inquam Photos
Security expert Marius Ghincea, researcher at the ETH Zurich University in Switzerland and visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, reviewed the most important threats to Romania’s national security, in the conditions in which these days should have been the first steps for (re)thinking and drafting the new national defense strategy (SNAP).
“A strategy like SNAP, which the law says that the new President of Romania must present to the legislature within six months of taking office, begins with the definition of threats, risks and vulnerabilities to national security“, explains the political scientist.
“At this moment, the most important threat to Romania’s national security is represented by the revisionist and bellicose policy of the Russian Federation. Whether or not it interfered in the previous presidential election, for which we still have insufficient evidence, Russia’s actions in our neighborhood, especially in Ukraine, Moldova and the Black Sea, place them as the main threats to our country’s national security“, claims Marius Ghincea in a post on Facebook. Regarding the most important risk to national security, Ghincea is of the opinion that “the most important risk is internal, it is represented by the normalization of the radical right.”
This normalization of the radical right facilitates, says the expert, at least from a cultural and political point of view, the rise of neo-legionary, mystical and ultraconservative forces in the public sphere and on the political scene: “There is a tangible risk that they will capture political power and impose a politically and culturally repressive regime.”
Cartelization of political parties
Ghincea is of the opinion that the most important vulnerability to national security is the “cartelization of political parties”:
“The formation of the PSD-PNL political cartel undermines the democratic foundations of the Romanian state and deprives almost all political institutions of any form of substance. Not that many of them were anything more than forms without substance, but cartelization has a deleterious effect on those that had any substance at all, and on the state-society relationship. As political scientists such as Sergiu Gherghina or Clara Volintiru have shown, the cartelization of political parties has exploitative, extractive functions that erode all political institutions”.
What is there to do?
The security expert also comes with the answer to the question “what is to be done?”, given that any national security strategy must come with solutions and courses of action to ameliorate threats, risks and vulnerabilities.
“I personally would start by fixing vulnerabilities, mitigating risks and containing threats. So, I would start by dismantling the cartel, identifying and eliminating the factors that support the normalization of the radical right, many of them economic but also cultural, and working more assiduously with our European and North Atlantic partners to provide Russian Federation a stronger response to revisionist and bellicose actions, especially regarding Ukraine and the Black Sea“, he explains.
Ghincea specified that the obligation of the president to present the country’s defense strategy (SNAP) does not appear in the Constitution, but in the defense planning law. “In our country, it is treated more like a government program of the president. Moreover, we lack a periodic review of the achievement of the objectives assumed in the previous strategy”he elaborates.
Iulian Fota, former presidential adviser on security issues, recommends Ghincea to write a national security strategy: “It answers the expert’s ‘how do you do’ question, not the decision maker’s ‘what do you do’ question. Romania has too many candidates for the position of president or prime minister and too few candidates for the positions of experts. How do we manage the Russian threat? How do we manage vulnerabilities, including political cartel? How do you take it apart?”
