Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

On August 10 around one hundred thousand people gathered in front of the government building to protest against Romania’s ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD). Despite its name, this oligarchic party has nothing to do with social democratic values. The protests centered on new laws that will decriminalize abuse of office and remove checks on connections between the political arena and shadowy private interests. The citizens in the frontline were not, as some officials claimed, hooligans picking a fight with the forces of order. But the protests did soon turn ugly. After some people began to lob stones, eggs, and bottles at the riot police, the gendarmes panicked and responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon. Peaceful protesters were hit with clubs, women with their children were tear-gassed and intimidated, random passers-by were brutally beaten, and journalists were shoved because they were filming the abuse. 455 people needed medical attention. Such repression reflects the weak-rootedness of democratic rights in Romania, not even three decades since the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Until recent years citizens were little used to taking the streets and demanding their rights; demonstrations that were not party-political tended to rally few Romanians. But despite their lack of formal organization, today’s protests also stem from a deeper radicalization, encouraged by the involvement of some of Romania’s near-four million emigrants.

Radicalized It is unsurprising that corruption is at the heart of the current protests. This plague is rooted in the early 1990s, and Romania’s transition from the old one-party Communist regime to democracy. Many “smart guys” who had held key positions during the Communist era remained in power and took over the private businesses which now absorbed public funds. The disarray in the transition period, plus the lack of democratic institutions and civil society, allowed corruption to flourish. For some, this became a model of success — a way to get rich quick. Today in Romania, bad roads are built by shady firms, doctors have such low wages that they have to ask for bribes, and rich kids can get into better schools because their parents have the money to bribe the principal, while poor children are left behind in classrooms with no heating and collapsing ceilings. This has led to mass emigration for Romanians looking for a better life. Almost four million Romanians — close to a quarter of the population — work abroad in all kinds of jobs, from doctors and engineers to cleaners and strawberry pickers. Romania’s 2007 entry into the European Union allowed its citizens far greater opportunities to make their way elsewhere — an opening many of them took. According to a recent UN Report, Romania in fact had the world’s second-highest increase in its diaspora between 2007 and 2015. With an average 7.3 percent annual growth rate in the number of citizens living abroad, Romania came behind only war-torn Syria (with an annual increase of 13.1 percent). If these millions “voted with their feet,” the level of social mobilization in Romania itself was low in the 1990s and 2000s. This began to change in 2013, as tens of thousands of people marched through the country’s largest cities to oppose a controversial mining project. Gabriel Resources, a company based in Canada, had announced plans to dig the biggest open-pit gold mine in Europe using cyanide extraction. It sought to access the gold deposits, known since Roman times, under Roșia Montană in Transylvania’s picturesque Apuseni mountains. This would have meant blowing up four mountain peaks and destroying three villages. This sparked the largest mobilizations since the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989. The protesters mobilizing against the project ranged from local villagers to young graduates, anticapitalists, and even Orthodox-Christian nationalists opposed to international corporations “exploiting our resources.” These protests were particularly driven by fears of environmental disaster, triggered by the government’s likely incompetent handling of the project. But the corrupt ties between state officials and private developers again fed the mistrust. The Romanian Parliament tried to pass a bill that would allow state authorities to grant all the approvals needed to start the project, regardless of any possible legal violations or court rulings, such as expropriating locals who refused to sell their homes and land. The mining project was ultimately halted, and the gold mining corporation said that it would leave the country, mainly thanks to the stubborn resistance of the “Save Roșia Montană” campaign. This was the first time that civil society scored a victory against shadowy private interests. In the wake of this campaign, the issue of the authorities’ disrespect for the law was again at the center of the next wave of protests. On October 30, 2015, sixty-four people were killed, and hundreds burned and injured, after a fire broke out at a Bucharest nightclub. The next day, the press reported that mayor Cristian Popescu Piedone had granted the club an operating license without the legally required permit from the fire department. The figure of the protester now became a little more mainstream. In response to the blaze around thirty-five thousand people took the streets of Bucharest under the slogan “corruption kills.” Almost every young person in Bucharest knew someone who had lost a friend in the fire: they could easily empathize with the suffering. Demonstrators demanded early elections and a total overhaul of the political class. Prime Minister Victor Ponta and the mayor of Bucharest both resigned in subsequent days.

Indictment This cycle of protest accelerated in 2017, in response to OUG13 — a pack of emergency decrees that would have weakened judicial independence and made it harder to prosecute high-level corruption crimes, while decriminalizing abuse of office if the sums involved were less than $48,500. This law was specifically tailored for the president of the ruling party and president of the Chamber of Deputies, Liviu Dragnea, who is currently on trial in an abuse of power case. He was already convicted because of an attempt to rig a referendum in 2012. For many Romanians, this was the last straw. Around five hundred thousand protesters took the streets in all the major cities in Romania and in several European Union capitals: two thousand in Bucharest alone. The most prominent slogans in this #rezist movement were “Thieves! Thieves,” “You won’t get away!” and “Justice, not corruption!”. The slogans also reflected protestors’ association between PSD oligarchs and the old Communist regime, as they termed the ruling party “the red plague.” After weeks of protests and international pressure, including from the European Union and the US Embassy, the OUG 13 order was revoked and the justice minister Florin Iordache, who had pushed the decree, took responsibility and resigned. Democracy in Romania is twenty-eight years old — a year older than this writer. The battle for its future still hangs in the balance. A National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) founded in 2002, has been at the forefront of the fight against official misconduct and corruption. According to a European Commission Anti-Corruption Report, this judicial agency “has built a notable track record of non-partisan investigations and prosecutions into allegations of corruption at the highest levels of politics, the judiciary, and other sectors such as tax administration, customs, energy, transport, construction, healthcare, etc.” Its work has led to 1,500 convictions. The DNA’s role has in recent months been subject to political pressure, in particular since the president of the ruling PSD Liviu Dragnea was indicted on fraud charges. A DNA statement accused him of creating an organized crime group, committing fraud to secure EU funds and misusing his position for personal gain. But Dragnea fired back. Although his conviction for electoral fraud bars him from becoming prime minister, he controls the government through members of the PSD and its allies, including the minister of justice. He also controls parliament and used this power to force the president to remove the DNA’s chief prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi.