Romania in trouble: Levers of power SINCE winning office on an anti-corruption ticket in 2004, President Traian Basescu has disappointed his fans. His public utterances are sometimes erratic or foul-mouthed. His centre-right Democratic Liberal Party (PDL) seems as mucky as any. As a privileged figure in the Communist era (he worked in Belgium), he has little claim to offer a sharp break with the past. His choice and treatment of advisers were often dire. PDL governments" IMF-mandated austerity has struck many as harsh and clumsy. Not surprisingly, his popularity rating is a humbling 17%. Yet his political rivals" behaviour looks worse. Having gained a parliamentary majority thanks to defections from the PDL, the prime minister, Victor Ponta, has cut a swathe through the country's independent institutions. His government has replaced the ombudsman (the only brake on emergency government ordinances), grabbed control of the Monitorul Oficial, the official promulgator of laws and decrees, taken over the national cultural institute and threatened to fire the judges of the constitutional court. Most controversially, Mr Ponta has used his parliamentary majority to suspend Mr Basescu. The grounds seem flimsy: the constitution says the head of state can be impeached only for grave misdeeds, but none has been cited. A referendum on July 29th will now decide Mr Basescu's fate. Mr Ponta tried to change the rules on that too, cutting the threshold from half the electorate to a majority of those voting. But the constitutional court has ruled that the poll would be valid only on a turnout of over 50%. Mr Ponta seems to accept that. If Mr Basescu's lot boycott the vote, the president may be safe - at least for a while. The timing of Mr Ponta's move is odd. Mr Basescu's political camp is in tatters. His term ends in 2014. Mr Ponta's Social Democrats (PSD), the heirs of the old Communists, and their liberal allies, seem likely to win parliamentary elections in November. Claims that Mr Ponta plagiarised 85 pages of his PhD thesis seem to have done him little harm (he fired the academic-integrity body that upheld the charges). The trigger seems to have been the sentencing on June 20th of Mr Ponta's mentor, Adrian Nastase, a previous PSD prime minister, for corruption. That case was the first of the "big fish" convictions long demanded by the European Union, which placed Romania's feeble judicial system under a special regime of scrutiny in 2007. Some saw this as a belated triumph. But a different, friendlier president might pardon Mr Nastase, whose supporters say the whole case was trumped up. Local reaction to the presidential suspension (not just from Mr Basescu's pals) has been stormy. Mr Ponta may have also misjudged how upset outsiders would be. An EU spokesman said his hasty measures "put at risk all the progress made over the past five years." Sanctions could include cutting funds, extending the monitoring of the judicial system or blocking membership of the Schengen passport-free zone. Angela Merkel called the government's actions "unacceptable." The American ambassador was "deeply concerned." Yet visiting Brussels, Mr Ponta brushed off criticisms as misunderstandings and promised to "change course" if he had breached EU norms. His country remains one of the worst run in the EU.