It's all gone a bit victor-y

Another (insert large period of time) has passed since I last wrote here, but hell, you get what you pay for, I imagine.

Two weeks ago I was contacted by a research consultancy organisation asking if I could find some information about Korodi Attila (or Attila Korodi to give him his foreign media name).  Mr Korodi had just become the new minister for the environment, and as such had a big say in the approval or not of the proposed gold mine at Rosia Montana.  The man who contacted me, was very nice about it all, but I had my doubts about what was actually being asked. Was the information destined to be used to bring Korodi to heel and provide enough ammunition to get him to swing into line behind the forces of big business?  Was it designed to try and get him to vote against the proposal?  It was impossible to know (well, I asked, and I got a polite refusal).  (Korodi is a native of Csikszereda, which I suspect is why I was asked.)

Anyway, the point is now moot as Korodi was not only one of the youngest ministers in Romania (he's 34), but now he's surely one of the shortest in office, since he'd only been in the job two weeks before the government fell on Friday.  We now have a new government, headed up by a man named Victor Ponta.  I spent the weekend just completed (a very nice long weekend, thanks to the wonders of May Day and the great invention of what the Spanish call "puentes" - bridge holidays designed to link weekends to public holidays (pod zile?)) with a friend who is a well connected journalist in Bucharest.  This friend knows Ponta pretty well and his opinion is not entirely positive.  I understate fairly significantly.

So the upshot of all this is that Romania now has a new government, and in a rare moment of cross border harmony both Romania and Hungary will now have dickish Prime Ministers named Victor.