There is one deeply entrenched view that Romania had solid traditions regarding the right-wing political thought and was poorly represented to the left of the political spectrum. One tends to name, to that end, great personalities who lived before WWII and to find explanations in the mentality of a rural society or of the orthodox creed. But not all great personalities serving as examples, like Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran or Constantin Noica, were that great at the time, and obviously not all the political right went to the extreme of the political right.
On the other hand, one tends to forget the great number of bright left-wing personalities we had. Obviously, one cannot put on a pair Alexandru Sahia with Nae Ionescu. But the string of people like Gherea-Stere-Ibraileanu-Zeletin-Ralea cannot be overlooked. Then there were Eugen Ionescu, Eugen Lovinescu, Mihail Sebastian, and many others who balance the view on what Romania was like.
It goes without saying that it is pointless to identify a political right if there is no political left to be weighed against. In other words, one cannot be to the right unless someone else stays to the left. Also worth noting is the demise of the conservative right after WWI and the leaning to the left of the Peasant Party (Christian-Democrats).
I, for one, believe that Romanians, and most of all Romanian intellectuals, do not fall into this strict two-boxes partitioning. Left and right are not innate choices for the local psyche, which is more likely to go either for comfortable neutrality or for propitious adjustment. Nae Ionescu himself, when asked what his position was on the political spectrum, preferred to say that he was "neither of the right, nor of the left, but more of the intelligent type!" Sandu Topor signed next to Sahia in the same publications ... Radulescu-Motru was a traditionalist at 1904, and a mo
