Ion Iliescu’s acquisition and retention of power is a depressing confirmation that Romania continues to be a victim of delayed progress or arrested development. A whirlwind of change swept through Eastern Europe nearly four decades ago and it was Romania’s un-envious fate to have him as the architect of its post-communist transition.
This orthodox communist survivor of Ceausescu’s chauvinist Stalinism was perturbed by the new European landscape opening up after the ending of the Cold War mainly on the West’s terms. He was determined to prevent the new paradigm of democratic change shaping Romania’s future. He thus set out to shrink the political stage to dimensions that would ensure the regimented socialist Romania that he was uncomfortable with would not be a casualty of the unwelcome geopolitical earthquake.
Being a patient and stoical figure, he had some (not all) of the qualities needed for this operation to make headway. Since the 1970s, he had remained a minor and unobtrusive part of the post-1945 communist system under its dynastic phase. He didn’t sign the ‘Letter of the Six’ in 6 March 1989, a gesture of revolt from mainly former leading communists relegated by Ceausescu. .
Of the motley crowd of communist dissidents and revolutionaries who gathered at the besieged state television headquarters on 22 December, it was Iliescu who displayed the coolest head and seemed to be thinking about the long-term rather than merely surviving the gun battles that had opened up in the sudden vacuum after the Ceausescu couple tried to flee a suddenly dangerous capital for them.
A key task for the embryo power group was what to do with the ruling couple after their apprehension near Tirgoviste. No doubt much to their amazement, they were placed before a drum-head court martial after Iliescu, along with Silviu Brucan, took the lead in establishing the Extraordinary Military Tribunal that organized a lightning trial in which the Ceaușescus were found guilty of genocide and other crimes.
Their execution four days after they had wielded exceptional power, gave the impression of a clean break with the past. So too did the banning of the PCR announced by Iliescu, but not without misgivings harboured by others near him engaged in rolling out the post-Ceausescu project.
How to tame and force back the popular appetite in the cites for the removal of communism altogether was another challenge swiftly facing Iliescu after he had been appointed interim leader of the National Salvation Front. What he instinctively felt was necessary was the mobilisation of those who had a lot to lose in the ominous new Romanian dawn.
In January 1990, after the decision of the FSN to transform itself into a political party, the provisional government discovered the weapon of enlisting coal-miners from the distant Jiu valley coal fields to intimidate and scatter anti-Communist demonstrators. The tactic assumed wicked dimensions after 11 June 1990 when Iliescu’s government organized special trains to transport some 10,000 miners to the capital. This was three weeks after the FSN had won a dubiously-conducted election and Iliescu had been elected President. The encampment of the golani in Piata Universitati, who disputed Iliescu’s right to interpret the revolution of December 1989 as a victory for Eurocommunism, was violently broken up in scenes of great brutality. Disputed official figures stated that seven people were killed and more than a thousand were wounded.
In the supposedly civic aftermath of Marxist-Leninist rule, the successor regime made it plain that it was ready to use old methods to entrench its power. Incontrovertible evidence, later admitted by the state authorities, showed that the miners had been „joined by vigilantes who were later credibly identified as former officers of the Securitate”, and that for two days, the combination had assaulted protesters and other targets. Iliescu’s reliance on the Securitate had been a public relations disaster, but it prevented him being swept away, the fate of other ambiguous ex-communists in some other parts of Eastern Europe.
The recruitment of the Securitate for essential duties had already been confirmed in many eyes by the violent clashes in the strongly ethnic Hungarian city of Tirgu Mures in March 1990. Peasants from farflung ethnic Romanian villages were bused in after being told that an historic enemy was poised to restore Hungarian state sovereignty in Transylvania. (Much later Iliescu refused to disavow that this was a valid fear.)
These events in the consolidation of power for Iliescu and his confederates were an ugly stain on the new supposedly decent order being ushered in. Miron Cozma, the miners leader, was sentenced for his role in the final descent of the miners on Bucharest in 1999. Showing chutzpah Iliescu pardoned Cozma in 2004. But he had to revoke the decision two days later, having faced the outrage of numerous Romanians as well as foreign media and political leaders.
This was at the end of his third term as President. He had been out of power between 1996 to 2000 when the centre-right opposition was able to occupy the Presidency. In truth surrendering the presidency to an unprepared and divided opposition was not a major concession. It bestowed legitimacy on an FSN which would soon rename itself the Social Democratic Party (PSD). In important Western capitals, it helped erase memories of the unsavoury methods deployed to consolidate its hold on Romania.
In the first half of the 1990s Iliescu played a historically-crucial role in imposing a hybrid system that was democratic on the surface but unrepresentative in practice. A hastily-drawn-up constitution, lacked the endorsement of the opposition parties when it was put to the people in a 1991 referendum. It created an edifice of power from the Constitutional Court (CCR) downwards to a justice system mostly under some form of political control since 1989, to a disfunctional bicameral parliament. The new order manufactured by Iliescu seemed designed to shield powerful shadowy elements such as the bloated intelligence services from scrutiny, produce legislative gridlock, and prevent regime loyalists who looted the state in different ways ever facing proper justice.
The failings of the rickety constitutional apparatus were graphically exposed to the world in the last weeks of 2024 when the CCR made decisions concerning who could stand for President, how the votes were counted, and most fatefully of all, what was the basis for cancelling a two round contest, behaviour that exposed the inadequacies of democracy in Romania in front of the world.
Most of the members of this court were former politicians linked to the PSD, some of whom had risen under Iliescu’s patronage. In its infancy, thirty years earlier, Iliescu’s dubious constitutional architecture had stood by as an oligarchy of ‘nomenklatura capitalists’ that had rapidly sprung up under Iliescu’s patronage. Among the cast of characters were ‘cardboard millionaires’ who had used their political connections to lay their hands on at least $2 billion obtained in credits from the largest state bank, BANCOREX
Essentially what was a facade democracy belonging to second echelon people from the communist era and more recent recruits to the PSD who shared their restrictive outlook on democracy was very much the handiwork of Iliescu and various collaborators.
In the early 1990s, Ion Iliescu carved out a major role in the perpetuation of Romanian structural backwardness. He was intrumental in laying the foundations of a new political order, which allowed politicians to both privilege themselves with unearned wealth, dishonestly obtained, and extend benefits obtained from the state to their clients, while ordinary citizens remained constantly excluded from the list of beneficiaries.
It is interesting that those whom he had relied on to weave a new power formula sooner or later parted company from him, sometimes in an acrimonious manner. First there was Petre Roman, who lasted until the autumn of 1991, then there was Virgil Magureanu who neatly oversaw a makeover for the intelligence service but who broke with him in the mid-1990s, and finally there was the assiduous servant of the late Ceausescu regime, Adrian Nastase who succeeded Iliescu as head of the PSD in 2001. He was increasingly resentful as prime minister from 2000 to 2004 at Iliescu’s refusal to assume a purely ceremonial role.
In a society less deformed and constrained by totalitarian controls, Iliescu’s period at the top would have been far shorter. He was able to sabotage the passage to a healthy democratic society because of the supportive cushion provided by only partially reformed power structures dating from communist times. His reliance on party holdovers, venal factory managers, an army of scheming intelligence operatives, and anti-reform bureaucrats in the ministries, ensured that an oppressive totalitarian order was replaced by a deformed capitalist system that benefited privileged interests who hoarded wealth produced by others.
The prospects of the communist-influenced democracy were enhanced by Iliescu’s public image. Much was made by sympathisers in the media of his simple lifestyle, his self-effacing manner, his wide cultural hinterland. I remember attending a musical concert in the Athenaeum around 2007 when he was spotted sitting in a box and many in the audience greeted him with approving applause. His long-term ascendancy was reassuring for many nostalgic for communism in Romania, at least as it had been up until the 1980s.
But his method of acquiring power and channelling it in ways that benefited elements who had sometimes cruelly exploited other Romanians, turned him into a hate figure for many, many people. He also generated lasting resentment in the way that he exploited the unsavoury features of nationalism for is own power-conserving ends. It is doubtful if, today, AUR, and different offshoots, would pose such a threat to the survival of freedom in Romania but for Iliescu’s systematic manipulation of the politics of identity for unscrupulous ends.
He and a swarm of propagandists from the communist era went to great lengths to try and convince impressionable Romanians that unless they voted for the PSD, Romania might soon cease to exist as an independent state. The opposition was characterised as disloyal and dangerous because it was ready to treat the Hungarian minority with a degree of respect. At different times, Iliescu pandered to ultra-nationalists, like Corneliu Vadim Tudor and his Greater Romania Party, borrowing some of their chauvinist rhetoric when it suited him. He preferred to keep the extremists in reserve and at other times was ready to show a cosmopolitan face to the West.
Iliescu was disinclined to frontally challenge the post-Cold War victors in the way that Milosevic did in Yugoslavia. He preferred a strategy of cautious accommodation, quietly confident that his power structure in Bucharest was determined and clever enough to drain Western-imposed norms for governance and economic relations of any meaningful content subversive to post-communism..
In uncomfortable retirement by 2006, he briefly toyed with setting up a ‘New Left’ party. It is the kind of party that the Ceausescus might have well have launched if they had not been sacrificed in 1989 in order that a shadow communism could survive them. Iliescu at that time was preoccupied with the successes of the anti-corruption prosecutors. But, by the economic downturn of 2008, he was perhaps the least uninhibited among the PS chieftains about concluding an alliance with the liberal billionaire Dinu Patriciu.
An accomplished political chameleon and inveterate intriguer, in death it is unlikely that there will be a vast outpouring of national grief for Ion Iliescu. The strongest reservations will be expressed by those who are well-aware of how he sabotaged Romania’s bid to integrate with the democratic West in a manner comparable to that of Poland or the Baltic States.
The newly-emboldened nationalist ultras of AUR, along with the sovereigntists for whom Calin Georgescu, is a convenient front man, are likely to be subdued or critical about the man responsible for ordering the execution of the Conducator who had brought Romania to the apex of national communist zealotry. But it is thanks to the tireless manipulation of Iliescu that a political order was created in the 1990s with power structures, mentalities, and a media and intellectual landscape from which enemies of freedom profit immensely today.
