Cluj-Napoca. Romania. 2015 “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; (...) a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; (...) a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; (...) a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; (...) ” Ecclesiastes 3

Romania. 2017 On January, the 31st, the former Minister of Justice issued a late-night emergency decree decriminalizing some forms of corruption e.g. grafting. As long as the amount of money involved was less than 200,000 Romanian lei, or about $48,000, grafting was OK. On the same night, he was asked by the press if he considered civil debate and if he had any justification for the emergency. The only answer the minister would bring during the 4 minute-long press conference was “Altă întrebare.” [transl. in English “Next question”]. He did this 24 times.

Cluj-Napoca. Romania. 2017 This February was a month of protests in Romania. Dodgy laws on justice were passed near to midnight on the 31st of January. The government was arrogantly refusing to explain the necessity of such emergencies. In the midst of a lack of justification, the people, those who are trying to imagine their future in Romania and not abroad, gathered onto the streets to protest. Numbers that have not been seen since 27 years ago, when a totalitarian communist regime had fallen, were asking a resilient government to either come back to its senses or back down.

It seemed as if we were back in 1946 when a puppet governments would take decisions according to their own hidden (at that time, Moscow’s) agenda. Back then the government was not there to serve the people, but to enforce the communist dream - slashing hard at any dissidence, any difference in opinion, any ties with the former democratic administration, and by slashing I mean social isolation, seizure of assets, imprisonment, torture, forced labour, assassination and execution. Oh, no! We don’t have that in Romania now. Please, don’t worry! What we do have is a shady government with an attitude that reminds us of those times, for the first time since 1989, threatening us with laws and blacklists whenever we hit the streets.