Romania Remains a Corrupt Country

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The 1989 transitions from Communism to electoral democracy were generally quite peaceful in the Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe. The big exception was Romania.

There, some 20,000 people were killed as dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, fought it out with his opponents, including the regular army.

Estimates suggest that the Securitate had a higher proportion of representatives per population than anywhere else in the Communist block and that by the 1980s as many as one person in thirty had been recruited as a Securitate informer.

The task assigned to the Securitate was to remove all so-called class enemies or counter-revolutionaries, by whatever means necessary, in the name of national security.

In the 1950s there were 72 forced labour camps in Romania, to which they were deported. The DO (forced residence) stamp – a mark of systematic discrimination – remained in the identity cards of these Romanian citizens until the revolution of 1989. Many others were summarily executed.

Ceausescu, who assumed power in 1965 when his predecessor, Romania’s first Communist leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, died, established an even more brutally efficient police state, which enabled him to maintain an iron grip on power until the dying days of Communist rule across Eastern Europe. 

Ceausescu promoted a cult of personality that was unprecedented in Romanian history and that served as the foundation of a dictatorship which knew no limits. To prevent the emergence of other power centres, he relied increasingly on members of his family, especially his wife, Elena, to fill key positions. 

In an effort to pay off the large foreign debt that his government had accumulated through mismanaged industrial ventures in the 1970s, in 1982 he ordered the export of much of the country’s agricultural and industrial production. 

The resulting extreme shortages of food, fuel, energy, medicines, and other basic necessities drastically lowered living standards and intensified unrest.

Once the Communist dominoes started falling one after another, Ceausescu’s own downfall had become overdetermined.

It began on December 16, 1989 with minor incidents in the Transylvanian city of Timisoara, where the Hungarian minority in this region of Transylvania felt particularly oppressed. The following day Ceausescu ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment demonstrators there. The demonstrations then spread to Bucharest, the capital. 

On Dec. 22, when the army joined the opposition, the Ceausescus fled the capital but were soon captured. Tried and convicted by a special military tribunal on charges of mass murder and other crimes, they were executed three days later.

A loose coalition of groups opposed to Ceausescu quickly formed the National Salvation Front (NSF) to lead the country but its commitment to liberal democracy was dubious. Indeed, former Communists dominated politics until 1996.

The Romanian economy suffered badly in the global financial crisis of 2008, prompting the government to launch a draconian austerity programme in 2010. This led to major street rallies and clashes with police in January 2012.

A new centre-left government under Prime Minister Victor Ponta of the Social Democratic Party made progress in reducing the budget deficit and public debt, but corruption allegations undermined its credibility and led to its collapse in 2015. He had in any case found it difficult working with the country’s president, Traian Basescu, who had won office under the banner of the right-of-centre Justice and Truth Alliance (DA).

Ponta’s successor, Dacian Ciolos, fared little better, and left office amid widespread discontent this past January. Sorin Grindeanu of the Social Democrats now leads a center-left coalition.

But Grindeanu got into trouble almost immediately, when his government passed an emergency ordinance that would allow the release of dozens of public officials convicted of corruption from prison.

He contended that the decree was needed to ease overcrowding in prisons but critics maintained he was trying to release allies convicted of corruption.

Mass protests involving hundreds of thousands of demonstrators ensued, forcing Grindeanu to scrap the decree, which would have weakened anti-corruption measures. 

But graft and nepotism within the political class remain the norm, and are blamed for high levels of poverty, polarization, and social and economic injustice.

Mircea Geoana, a former Romanian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, has warned that economic nationalism and authoritarianism remain popular among Romanians, particularly those in the less affluent, poverty-stricken small cities and underdeveloped rural regions.

Though Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union three years later, it remains far from being a consolidated democracy.