Penal Populism in Romania, Paradoxically: Consolidating or Undermining the Rule of Law?
Alexandra Mercescu is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the West University of Timisoara (Romania) where she teaches comparative public law, legal philosophy and academic writing. She is also an Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Legal Education and Social Theory of the University of Wrocław (Poland) and a board member of the Central and Eastern European Forum of Young Legal, Political and Social Theorists. She holds a Master’s and a PhD degree from Sorbonne University (obtained in 2016). Her thesis – Pour une comparaison des droits indisciplinée – was awarded the 1st prize of the Centre français de droit comparé (an award granted annually in France since 1957). Her academic career has benefited from research stays or exchanges at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law (as a Van Calker Scholar), Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History and Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law. Alexandra publishes in English, French and Romanian. Her doctoral work appeared with the leading Swiss publisher Helbing Lichtenhahn in the “Grundlegendes Recht” collection. She is the editor of Constitutional Identities in Central and Eastern Europe (Peter Lang, 2020), and currently working on a co-authored book – Rethinking Comparative Law – forthcoming with Edward Elgar.
Penal Populism in Romania, Paradoxically: Consolidating or Undermining the Rule of Law?
My project intends to explore the question of knowing to what extent part of the Romanian reaction to the pandemic, one very much focused on military action, can be seen as an expression of ‘penal populism’. If so, I seek to identify several factors that might explain the emergence of penal populism in addressing the coronavirus crisis. Alongside remnants of the authoritarian past, I hypothesize that Romania’s anti-corruption fight might have played a role in cultivating a criminalizing ethos on the part of the state. This seems to respond to a correlative demand on the part of the public. Given the background of Romania’s undeniable progress against corruption, it is worth asking whether penal populism can constitute in fact an advantage in building solid institutions. However, when prosecuting comes to be seen as setting the country straight, a cure to all evils, doesn’t this positive penal populism risk converting itself into negative penal populism? Thus, I seek to show how such a penal populist attitude affects the rule of law, especially in times of crisis when the country tends to be governed by exceptional powers, including military ones as in the case of the pandemic’s management.
