Bolojan was useful for exactly as long as he needed to be: long enough to sign off the budget.
Everything else is merely set dressing designed to distract.
I know you may be tired. I know you’ve been through this before, and at some point you probably stopped counting how many times. But let’s take one more look at what’s happening in politics this week.
Romania is once again being run by a caretaker government. Why? Because two parties that share neither ideas nor any common vision of what this country ought to be (PSD and AUR) voted together to bring down a government.
Now watch what happens next.
Predoiu: Ten Years in Office and a Whimper of a Resignation
Cătălin Predoiu. Three terms as Minister of the Interior. Three terms as Minister of Justice. Three stints as Deputy Prime Minister. Three spells as caretaker Prime Minister. Nearly a decade in executive office, interrupted only briefly.
And now he has resigned as First Vice-President of the National Liberal Party (PNL).
Out of disgust? Of course not.
The PNL’s extraordinary congress takes place on Sunday, and at that congress he risks being expelled from the party.
Under the party’s statutes, a leader elected by a congress can only be removed by another congress. If Predoiu resigns beforehand, he reverts to being an ordinary member of the local Ploiești branch. And the Prahova organisation — led by someone aligned with Predoiu’s own faction — is hardly going to expel him.
To complete the picture, should the new government secure parliamentary approval, Predoiu is already being mentioned as a possible Interior Minister or even President of the Senate.
Tuesday, 16 June: Trouble Comes in Threes — Veștea, Neacșu and Ponta
Here’s what happened in Parliament on Tuesday.
Adrian Veștea — the Prime Minister-designate nominated by President Nicușor Dan, explicitly rejected by the PNL leadership, the man whose own party publicly urged him to withdraw — arrives for negotiations with the United for Romania parliamentary group.
And he arrives accompanied by Marian Neacșu.
Who is Neacșu? PSD Deputy Prime Minister. Former PSD Secretary-General. Convicted in 2016 and given a six-month suspended sentence for conflict of interest after illegally employing his daughter in his parliamentary office. And now he is sitting in Parliament beside the Prime Minister-designate, overseeing negotiations.
Journalists asked him what he was doing there. Neacșu replied:
“I’m an escort. The intermediary.”
They asked whether a Veștea government would survive the parliamentary vote.
His answer:
“It will.”
And so Ponta sat in the room. Neacșu took notes. Veștea explained. And apparently nobody found any of it remarkable.
The Party That Doesn’t Know What It Is Without PSD
On Sunday, the PNL is holding an extraordinary congress attended by 2,500 delegates. The Veștea faction — together with Predoiu, Gorghiu and several county-level power brokers — faces possible expulsion.
The problem is that the faction advocating a return to PSD is the party’s hard core.
It is what the PNL has effectively been for the past decade: a party that has existed in symbiosis with PSD.
By 2026, the PNL no longer possesses a firmly consolidated electorate of its own and, more importantly, no longer has an ideological line it can defend without contradicting itself the following day.
What it does have are networks, relationships, a habit of governing, and a visceral fear of opposition.
All of those forces push it back towards PSD.
Because you cannot manufacture an identity out of nothing, no matter how many giraffes you remove from the party refrigerator.
Ponta
If we want to understand what comes after Veștea, however, we need to talk about Victor Ponta. Prime Minister of Romania from 2012 to 2015. The longest-serving post-communist government. Then came October 2015 and the Colectiv nightclub tragedy.
Ponta did not personally pay bribes for permits. But neither did he resign because he accepted responsibility for anything. He resigned because 30,000 people took to the streets and there was no other way out. Three weeks later, PSD was back in power.
Ponta was indicted on corruption, tax evasion and money-laundering charges. The cases were either time-barred or discontinued. He founded Pro România. It failed. He moved to POT. He moved to UPR. And now he is sitting in a parliamentary meeting room while Neacșu takes notes and Veștea negotiates.
Why Bolojan Was Useful
Bolojan signed the state budget. And that is the central point of the entire operation.
The budget — with all its spending commitments, obligations and accepted deficit — is the document that authorises the Romanian state to borrow money. To raise funds. To cover the gap between what it collects and what it spends. And Romania spends considerably more than it collects. We know that. The difference is financed through borrowing.
Some borrowing is transparent: Eurobonds, loans from the European Investment Bank, IMF facilities, government securities listed and publicly traded. You can find them in Ministry of Finance reports. You can track them.
Others are not.
There is an entire category of debt instruments placed on the domestic market — government securities sold directly to commercial banks, short-term Treasury instruments, drawdowns from pre-approved credit facilities — that do not pass through a visible public auction process, are not announced in advance, and do not appear in real time in any publicly accessible reporting. They surface later in consolidated state financial statements, buried in table entries nobody reads.
Who buys them? Banks. State-owned companies with surplus liquidity. Occasionally private entities with the right connections. Who determines the terms — the interest rate, maturity and volume? The Ministry of Finance, through direct negotiation with creditors. No competitive auction. No real-time transparency. No way for journalists or citizens to know, at the moment the transaction occurs, how much was borrowed, from whom, at what interest rate, or with what implicit guarantees.
Now put the pieces together.
Bolojan signs the budget. The budget authorises expenditure — salaries, pensions, investments, transfers. Those expenditures have already been committed. Already approved. Already promised. Nobody can stop them now because they are in the budget, voted through Parliament, signed by the Prime Minister and published in the Official Gazette.
Bolojan falls. The caretaker government arrives. Veștea arrives. Perhaps Ponta arrives.
And the new government — whoever forms it — must cover the expenditure approved by its predecessor. It has no choice. The budget is the budget. The money has to be found.
So it borrows. From the domestic market. Opaque borrowing. On terms negotiated directly. From creditors who know the state has no alternative and who understand that interest rates can be pushed higher precisely because the urgency is genuine and there is no competitive tender process.
And when somebody eventually asks where the money came from, who authorised the drawdowns, or under what conditions they were arranged, the answer becomes beautifully simple: We do not know who was Prime Minister at the time. It was a transitional period. There were three governments in six months. The documents are at the ministry. The ministry has since been reorganised. The State Secretary who knew the details has retired.
Bolojan was useful for exactly as long as he needed to be: long enough to place his signature on a budget that authorised the spending.
As a piece of political architecture, it is almost admirable. And it works. It is far easier for us to follow the circus of negotiations.
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