From Volume I, reproduced in full.

The path of refounding: signatures, referendum, constitutional calendar

1. The legal map of the road

Refounding has a single legitimate path, and I swore by it from the Prologue: the path of the law in force. But within that legality there are, properly speaking, three distinct roads — and the reader deserves to see all three, with their honest chances, before I set out in technical detail the one on which we are staking everything.

The first road — democratic-electoral. A party (or a coalition) which explicitly takes up refounding enters Parliament with at least a quarter of the number of deputies or senators — the threshold of art. 150 para. (1) for the parliamentary initiative to revise — and then builds, through negotiation or through successive elections, the two-thirds majority in each Chamber required by art. 151 para. (1) for adoption. This is the “normal” road of the great European revisions; here it is, for the time being, unlikely — no parliamentary party has taken up the project in full, and the two-thirds arithmetic presupposes precisely the consensus of the elites whom refounding disturbs. But historic windows change arithmetics: parties do not embrace refoundings out of virtue, but out of calculation, on the day when refusal costs more at the ballot box than assent.

The second road — presidential. A President of Romania determined to force the deadlock open may use the weapon of art. 90: the consultative referendum on “matters of national interest”. The question — do you agree with the revision of the Constitution in accordance with the set of principles of the “Constitution of Sovereignty”? —, validated by popular vote, adopts nothing in law; but it creates a political pressure which no parliament can ignore indefinitely. The precedent of 2009 (a unicameral parliament, 300 members) demonstrated both the force of the instrument — crushing majorities — and its present weakness — non-execution; which is exactly why the Referendum Act in our package ties the result to a mandatory deadline for legislating. A President-initiator, with the consultative referendum won and public opinion mobilised, can turn the second road into the antechamber of the first. It too is unlikely — it requires a man in the supreme office willing to spend his mandate on a work that is not personally his own — but the constitutional history of the French Fifth Republic was written in exactly that way.

The third road — civic. The one we have chosen, not because it is the easiest, but because it is the only one that depends on none of those who have an interest in its not happening: the citizens’ initiative to revise, from art. 150 — half a million signatures — through to the referendum of art. 151 para. (3). I set it out technically below, step by step, because a project which does not publish its road does not deserve trust; but bear in mind the order above: if either of the first two roads opens — a party which takes it up, a President who forces it — all the texts of this book are at its disposal, already drafted. Refounding has no pride of road; it has only stubbornness of destination. And since 6 December 2024 it has something more, a ground which none of the ordinary roads of politics can offer: as I demonstrated in Chapter 8, the defect of legitimacy which strikes the authorities and the acts subsequent to the annulment of the elections cannot be covered over by the organs which live off the tainted source — neither by a fresh ballot organised by the same contested authorities, nor by the passage of time. It can be covered over only by an act of re-founding by the holder of sovereignty: precisely the procedure described in this chapter. The road below is therefore not merely the path to the best possible Constitution; it is the only procedure for the retroactive validation of a state which functions, in law, as a ghost.

Step one: the initiative to revise (art. 150 of the Constitution in force). Revision may be initiated by at least 500,000 citizens with the right to vote, coming from at least half of the counties of the country, with a minimum of 20,000 signatures in each of those counties or in Bucharest. It is the highest threshold in the whole of Romanian constitutional architecture — and we have already faced it once: the signature campaign for the Constitution of Sovereignty, with the lists, the authorised agents, the completion instructions and the special powers of attorney documented in the project’s archive, was the practical school of this step. We know exactly what it costs, how long it takes and where it stumbles: the authentications, the certification of the lists, the verification at the Constitutional Court. That is why the project itself provides, for the future, the digital signature — but the first passage is made under the old rules: on paper, door to door, as all true refoundings have been made.

Step two: the review by the Constitutional Court (art. 146 letter a)). The Court rules of its own motion on the initiative to revise — it verifies compliance with art. 152 (the limits of revision) and the regularity of the initiative. We built the project, as I showed in Chapter 9, for this examination: no provision touches the intangible domains, and the comparative dossier in this book is, at bottom, the project’s amicus brief.

Step three: adoption by Parliament (art. 151). The revision is adopted by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate by a two-thirds majority in each Chamber (or, in case of divergence, three quarters in joint sitting). Here lies the political narrows: no present majority votes, of its own free will, to limit its own power. The strategic answer has three arms: electoral pressure (half a million signatories are a constituency which no party ignores indefinitely), the historic window (majorities refuse refounding until the day when refusal costs more than assent — and the crises now approaching will present the bill), and the vanguard laws: everything in the refounding package that does not require constitutional rank — the Referendum Act, the George Act, Green Romania, demilitarisation, Solidarity — can be adopted by ordinary or organic law before the revision, by way of the citizens’ initiative of art. 74 (100,000 signatures today), building the normative fait accompli and the habit of victory.

Step four: the referendum of revision (art. 151 para. (3)). The revision is final only after approval by referendum, organised within no more than 30 days of adoption. Here the people sign the act of foundation — and here too the validity thresholds (30% turnout, under Act 3/2000 in its present form) demand the mobilisation which only a decade of civic pedagogy builds. This book is one brick of that pedagogy.

2. Machiavelli’s warning — and why we go forward all the same

No author has described more exactly the ground onto which any refounder steps than Machiavelli, in chapter VI of The Prince: “there is nothing more difficult to undertake, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to make oneself the initiator of a new order of things. For the initiator has as enemies all those who profited from the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit from the new” (note: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513/1532), ch. VI; rendered here from the Italian original — “non è cosa più difficile a trattare, né più dubia a riuscire, né più periculosa a maneggiare, che farsi capo a introdurre nuovi ordini” — and, in the Romanian edition used by the author, Machiavelli, Principele, trans. Nina Façon, Editura Științifică, Bucharest, 1960 (in the English version: “There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things...”); verified against two independent sources (Wikisource, Detmold translation; Constitution Society, full text of ch. VI).) — lukewarm, he explains, out of fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side, and out of the incredulity of men “who do not truly believe in anything new until they see it proved by experience”. Five hundred years later, these lines read like the minutes of every day of the Sovereignty Act campaign: the beneficiaries of the old order — mobilised with “the zeal of partisans”, as Machiavelli also says; the beneficiaries of the new order — sympathetic, but prudent, “let us first see whether it comes off”.

And to Machiavelli’s lesson the Sovereignty Act campaign added an arithmetical lesson of its own, which I recorded with all its sources in the Prologue and which I refuse to forget when planning step one: in the very months in which the citizens’ committee was gathering, with notarised powers of attorney and certified lists, some thirty-three thousand signatures for a law with a real constitutional route, a political mobilisation machine was announcing more than two million signatures for a course of action — the suspension of the President — which had, constitutionally, no possible outcome. The conclusion is not that Romanians do not sign; it is that the energy of mobilisation exists on the scale of hundreds of thousands and of millions, but has hitherto been directed towards spectacle rather than procedure. Whoever controls the direction of mobilisation controls the fate of refounding — which is why the first step of our road is not the gathering of signatures, but the pedagogy which teaches people the difference between a petition that sounds good and an initiative that can become law.

Why do we go forward all the same? Because Machiavelli describes a difficulty, not an impossibility — and because it is precisely he who shows, in the same chapter, the key: the arming of the prophet. Armed prophets conquer, unarmed ones perish, he writes; and our weapon — the only one we accept, and the only one against which the old order cannot defend itself indefinitely — is the one described in this chapter: constitutional procedure itself, the signature, the referendum, the law. The old order can delay an initiative; it cannot indefinitely delay a people that has learnt the road. And there is one further detail which Machiavelli, counsellor of princes, did not reckon with, but which Switzerland has seen: after the first victory of a new order voted by the people, the “lukewarm defenders” become ardent — because experience, the only thing that convinces them, has become their own.

3. The realistic calendar

I sell no calendar illusions: between the first signature and the proclamation of the Third Republic there stand, in the best scenario, several years — the gathering of signatures (12–18 months with a seasoned network), the examination by the Court, the parliamentary battle (possibly across an electoral cycle), the referendum. France went from the crisis of May 1958 to a Constitution promulgated in October of the same year — but it had a de Gaulle and the collapse of a regime; our realistic scenario resembles rather the long road of the Swiss initiatives: years of signatures, rejections, returns — and victories which, once won, can no longer be taken back, because the people voted them. What matters is not the year; what matters is the irreversible. A law given by one parliament is repealed by the next; a Constitution voted by the people can no longer be touched except with the people.

4. What the reader can do — concretely

I wrote this book to be used, not merely read; here is the toolkit, in order of commitment. Read the source texts — the full drafts, with their explanatory memoranda; nothing in this book asks for blind trust, everything is verifiable. Sign, and gather signatures, when the campaign is active — one person with a list and a weekend makes a hundred signatures; a thousand people like him make a hundred thousand. Ask candidates, at every election, for their written position on the refounding package — not declarations of love for “reform”, but YES or NO article by article: recall, the mandatory referendum, demilitarisation, 6% for education; a refusal to answer is an answer. Use the existing institutions as though they worked — petitions, administrative litigation, complaints to the Ombudsman: every use obliges them to exist. And — I say it with the gravity, not the pathos, of the word — stay: every family that stays in the country or comes back is a vote for refounding which no one can annul.

5. “A republic — if you can keep it”: the cornerstone

A last word about the oldest of our afflictions — THE COMPLEX OF THE PERIPHERY, because the road described in this chapter is, at bottom, the reckoning with it. For a thousand years, Romania’s salvation has always been scheduled to come from somewhere else: from a Christian empire, from the Porte against another, from Paris, from Berlin, from Moscow, from Brussels, from Washington — the periphery awaiting its redemption from the centre, with imported forms and a substance forever postponed. This waiting is not idleness; it is historical memory sedimented into reflex: small peoples set at the crossroads of empires have been told, for centuries, that their fate is decided elsewhere — until they believed it. Well, the road described above — signatures, review of constitutionality, parliamentary vote, referendum — has a property that no plan of salvation from outside has ever had: it depends on no one from outside. It asks the approval of no chancellery, it awaits no favourable geopolitical context, it needs only one ingredient which cannot be imported: the will of the holder of sovereignty. That is why refounding is not merely a constitutional project; it is the act of maturity of a people that ceases to wait — the first major political work in our modern history conceived, from the first article to the last signature, with no external saviour in the cast. No one is coming to save us. This is not bad news; it is, for the first time, the good news.

On leaving the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the framers had given the Americans: a monarchy or a republic? The old man answered with the phrase that became the testament of all republics: “A republic — if you can keep it” (note: Benjamin Franklin’s answer — “A republic, if you can keep it” —, recorded in the journal of the delegate James McHenry (1787), published in The American Historical Review, 1906; verified against two independent sources (the McHenry journal, AHR edition; the archives of the National Constitution Center).). We received a republic in December 1989 and we did not know how to keep it: we let it be confiscated from within, and then we watched it die, on 6 December 2024, at the hand of its own institutions. The Third Republic is written with Franklin’s answer on its pediment — but with a Romanian correction, paid for with everything we have lived through: a republic is not kept; it is guarded. And it can be guarded by no one but its holder.

I close Part Four by returning to the thread confessed in the Prologue. I have built, in twenty-four chapters, an edifice of norms, comparisons and calculations — but I know, and have known all the way, that it is not norms that found cities. Cities are founded on what people believe together; laws merely guard that belief from oblivion. “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner” — and the stone rejected by all the builders of the two republics so far has always been the same: the man of this land, with his faith, his labour and his endless patience, treated in turn as a manoeuvring mass, an electorate, a human resource, a diaspora, a “deplorable”. The Third Republic is not, in the last analysis, a project of constitutional engineering: it is the setting of this stone where its place was from the beginning — at the head of the corner. The rest — I have shown, I hope, in this book — is legal technique. Hard, painstaking, but technique. The stone is the holy part. And the stone exists: I have seen it, with my own eyes, at the signature tables.