We have learned to live on money that comes from others. We have forgotten that a country is built with factories, tractors, working hands and minds that invent. Not with projects written to be approved, but with things designed to be used. For 35 years, Romania has stopped investing in itself. And today, when we look around, we see a country standing in line.

(Staff: Romania / Opinion & Economics) – Editorial by Cristin Tomeci

Let’s be honest to the very end, without blaming our neighbours, Brussels, the times we live in, the communists, the Americans or whoever else we choose to blame. Romania’s problem is not that it has no European money. Romania’s problem is that it has learned to wait. It has learned that it is easier to ask than to do. It has learned that it is easier to write a project to obtain funding than to build a product, a factory, a farm or a brand.

We have become a country that lives on European funds. Don’t misunderstand me: European money is not a bad thing. It is a huge opportunity, and Romania needs it. But what has happened is something else. European funds have not been used as a development tool, but as a substitute for development. Instead of building on their basis, we have built in their place. Instead of producing, we have learned to write applications. Instead of investing in industry, we have invested in consultancy offices, companies that write funding applications, and intermediaries who take a percentage of every approved project.

Romanian industry: a memory from the textbooks

If you open an economic geography textbook from the 1980s, you find a Romania that produced tractors in Brașov, ARO off-road vehicles in Câmpulung, locomotives in Craiova, pipes in Roman, engines in Timișoara, household appliances in Galați and furniture in Târgu Mureș. It was not a perfect economy, far from it. But it was an economy that produced. It had factories, skilled workers, vocational schools that trained tradespeople, and a work culture passed from father to son.

Today, in those same cities, many industrial halls stand empty, rusting, sold for next to nothing or demolished. And where production still exists, it is most often carried out with old machinery and outdated technologies, for someone else’s market. We no longer have Romanian tractors, Romanian trucks or Romanian electronics. We are left with assembly – and even that no longer belongs entirely to us.

I saw Germany. I thought we would become like it. Then I saw how we were stealing our own country.

After the 1989 Revolution, my first trip to the West was to Germany. I wanted to see with my own eyes and learn how things were done there, how people worked, what a real factory looked like, and what a functioning economy was like. A German family who were friends of mine welcomed me with a hospitality I will never forget. They showed me West Germany in a short visit – enough for me to get an idea. And I did.

They showed me clean factories, immaculate roads, full shops and people who knew what they had to do. I saw what it meant to live in a country that respected work and its people. And, honestly, I felt small. But not desperate. Because I had a confidence that is difficult to remember today: I believed we would get there too. Quickly.

I told my hosts: “You’ll see. Romania will be like Germany in a few years. We have everything. We have industry, we have agriculture, we build our own aircraft, we build trucks, we build everything we need.”

I was right about the potential. We had everything we needed. The mistake was not mine, but that of those who, instead of building, destroyed. Because by the time I returned home, many of the factories I had seen in the textbooks had already been “privatised”. And by “privatised” I do not mean sold to serious investors, but stolen. Simply stolen.

The “little papers” system: the most ordinary form of theft covered up

The madness began with the “liberalisation” of factories and their sale to those who worked in them – to working people, as it was said. It sounded good. In reality, it was still a communist system, but with a different face. Instead of being sold for money, real money that would reach the state and return as investment, the factories were sold for little papers. Coupons with no real value, which many people did not even know what to do with. The ordinary worker was lied to and robbed once again…

And those who quickly understood what was happening – the so-called “entrepreneurs”, but in reality crooks with connections and nerve – collected these little papers from workers for next to nothing, sometimes for a bottle of vodka or empty promises, and found themselves owners of entire combines, factories and industrial plants.

They were not people who knew how to produce. They were not people who wanted to produce. They were people who wanted to sell. And they sold. They sold everything that could be sold – machinery, industrial halls, land – and left behind empty skeletons, former sources of pride of Romanian industry. Even today, you are still being misled by the slogan that foreigners stole from you…

The factories that disappeared

Roman Brașov, the heavy-truck manufacturer, suffered the same fate. The Craiova locomotive plant, Electronica, Tehnoton, Autobuzul București – all were swallowed up by the same system of little papers and back-room sales.

It was not privatisation. It was a legalised robbery. And the state, which should have protected these strategic assets, looked the other way. More than that, it encouraged the fraud. The officials who signed the documents had interests of their own. And so, from a country that produced aircraft, trucks, tractors, locomotives, household appliances and furniture, we became a country that imports almost everything.

I left for Germany full of hope. I returned home and found the factories in the hands of thieves. And since then, “hope” has become a word we use less and less. Because there is little left to hope for if we do not rebuild what we allowed to be stolen from us.

When was the last strategic investment made in the country?

Ask yourselves honestly: what is the last major factory built from scratch in Romania? What is the last major industrial complex opened in the past 30 years? What is the last complete industrial chain, from raw material to finished product, that we have built? We cannot find the answer because it does not exist. We have not built. We have sold. We have granted concessions. We have imported.

We have reached the point where we import even things we could produce without difficulty: vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy products, furniture, clothing and household goods. Why? Because domestic production was abandoned, while those who could have relaunched it were discouraged by bureaucracy, a lack of predictability, taxes that change overnight and a domestic market accustomed to buying cheaply from extra-EU imports.

Agriculture: 50 years behind, with the same tractors

Here, dear readers, the pain is greatest. Romanian agriculture today looks as it did 50 years ago, perhaps even worse. We have hundreds of thousands of small farms, most of them subsistence farms, with an average area of a few hectares. We do not have large-scale irrigation – of the millions of hectares of arable land, only a tiny fraction is irrigated. We do not have modern storage facilities. We do not have processing chains that add value. We do not have private producer cooperatives that allow small farmers to sell under decent conditions.

And the state, instead of investing heavily in irrigation, rural infrastructure, collection centres, slaughterhouses, processing and agricultural education, has settled for area-based subsidies – money that also often reaches large landowners, while small-scale production slowly dies.

An economy that lives on wages sent “home”

Another sign of this reality is our growing dependence on money sent by Romanians in the diaspora. Billions of euros enter the country each year from the work of Romanians abroad. This money is vital for many families. But at the same time, it is evidence of the failure to create well-paid jobs at home. Instead of producing and exporting products, we export cheap labour and import money. It is a vicious circle that cannot continue indefinitely.

What should we do?

We got here because of a lack of vision, not a lack of resources. Romania has resources: land, water, forests, intelligent people, a good geographical position, access to the Black Sea and a domestic market of 19 million people. What it lacks is political will and a long-term plan.

We need:

1. A national industrial and technological strategy that would reindustrialise areas with a tradition in manufacturing, based on the latest clean technologies – not on paper, but with funding, tax relief, infrastructure and vocational schools that prepare the workforce.
2. Massive investment in irrigation and modern technology-based agriculture – not just subsidies, but real, functioning systems.
3. Less bureaucracy for producers – Do not punish those who want to produce; help them.
4. A predictable tax framework – investors do not need favours, but predictability.
5. A national plan to bring production back home – so that we are no longer merely a market for others.

The question I put to you, dear readers

Now, at the end, I ask you directly: can you remember the last time you heard someone come forward with a concrete solution to a real problem? Not criticism. Not an accusation. Not a street protest. Not hitting with a club, a stick, a stun gun or tear gas. A solution. Just one. Simple. Applicable. One that actually solves something.

Everyone criticises. Everyone takes to the streets. Everyone points fingers. Everyone knows what is wrong. But nobody comes with a solution. And, in fact, nobody can come up with a quick solution because the system is so overcentralised that no decision can be made locally. Nobody can do anything without approval from Bucharest.

I will give you an example that may seem trivial, but says everything: a mayor cannot build a market on land belonging to the local community without asking Bucharest for approval. A mayor. Community land. Something extremely useful to the community. And yet the mayor has to ask “the centre”. Because the economy is overcentralised. Politics is overcentralised. And local independence – the kind that would allow quick solutions adapted to real needs – does not exist.

That is why Romania does not need solutions alone. It needs the power to apply them. It needs real decentralisation, local autonomy, reform of territorial administration, and people who can decide for themselves, on the spot, what is best for their community, without waiting for an order from Bucharest. Without that, however many solutions we find, they will remain on paper. And we will continue to criticise, take to the streets and hit with sticks – without solving anything.

Cristin Tomeci