“The fact that you scored well at international mathematics olympiads does not qualify you to make other kinds of statements. And the office of President of Romania is certainly a difficult, stressful, exhausting position. I wish the President plenty of sleep, good sleep. The country needs him to come back in good form,” Laura Codruța Kovesi said on Friday about President Nicușor Dan.
On a scale from zero to ten, the acidity of this line, coming from the head of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, a European dignitary, is 11.
More important is something else. The statement by the former head of the General Prosecutor’s Office and the DNA comes almost a month after the interview in which Nicușor Dan said he was inclined to believe abuses had been committed during the period when Kovesi led those institutions. Why is this detail relevant?
The head of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office had enough time to reply to the president. But the fact that she chose to do so after Ilie Bolojan was dismissed under Nicușor Dan’s at least neutral gaze is no accident. And it is not the only, nor the most recent, sign that there is a rapprochement between Kovesi and Bolojan.
It is hard to say now whether this connection between the two will materialize into a formal collaboration. But if this happens, the justice-focused dimension of the political pole coalescing around the PNL leader will grow exponentially, and with it the chances of completely suffocating AUR’s false justice rhetoric – fake, as Trump would say.
One confirmation that Laura Codruța Kovesi’s Friday statement is not meant merely as a reply to a presidential remark she considers insulting is represented by her comments on the appointments of the new heads of the prosecutors’ offices. On this subject, the attack on the president is even harsher.
“When the president of the state, the person who appoints people to such positions, declares both during the electoral campaign and afterward, I will negotiate the appointments for the positions of Prosecutor General and head of the DNA, he sends a certain signal. And then I know very many good prosecutors in the system who did not submit their candidacies,” Kovesi said.
This is not the first time we have heard this criticism. But it is one thing for journalists to say it, and quite another for it to come from the head of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The significance? It is the first official confirmation that after the end of her European mandate, Laura Codruța Kovesi will get involved in the direction of justice in Romania.
It is the opening salvo on the new battlefield of anti-corruption, about which I wrote yesterday.
“Through his explicit and very vocal support for the new heads of the prosecutors’ offices, the president has already assumed that their performance will inevitably enter the evaluation sheet of his own mandate. In practice, he has tied his political image to the relaunch of the anti-corruption fight and to the efficiency of the judicial system.
If the prosecutors’ offices deliver serious results, Nicușor Dan will be able to claim credit for an institutional reset. If not, the political cost will no longer be transferable exclusively to the magistrates or to the Minister of Justice. It will reach Cotroceni directly.
And here a deeper political dimension appears: the pressure exerted by the Bolojan pole on the issue of justice reform could turn into the main battlefield between Nicușor Dan and Ilie Bolojan for the 2030 presidential election.”
What did Kovesi say yesterday?
“If anyone needs my experience in Romania, I am ready to help, and I do not want to be employed, and I can do it voluntarily, without asking for money. Anyone who needs my professional experience, I am ready to give it, I am ready to discuss with anyone, regardless of whether they want to talk about the prosecutor’s office, about changing laws, about how the justice system should be improved. I already have expertise in 24 member states; I have seen how justice functions in almost all member states of the European Union. If anyone in Romania needs this experience, I will certainly give it. I do not have to enter a party, I do not have to run for anything. It is experience you can offer even through volunteering, without being employed.”
In short, those who fear that Laura Codruța Kovesi will return soon may not be worrying for nothing.
P.S. I cannot help smiling when I think how some journalists “on the right side of the cause” will react to Kovesi’s return, perhaps even alongside Bolojan, voluntarily of course, considering how much and how harshly they attacked her after anti-corruption decimated their tribe.