Twenty-three years after the bloody uprising that freed it from the grip of the Ceausescu dictatorship, Romania seemed to have become a consolidated democracy, boasting membership in NATO and the European Union. Then came the summer of 2012, when the southeastern European country, already a cause of concern to Western Europe because of reports of creeping lawlessness and political corruption, tried on a more authoritarian political identity, as a second Belarus or a second Venezuela. Officials in the EU and US winced and unequivocally called upon the new Romanian government to abide by its commitments.
The country’s summer of discontent actually started in January, when street riots challenged the country’s leadership. Partly spontaneous, partly organized by the left-leaning, populist, anti–International Monetary Fund (or IMF) opposition, including the Romanian equivalent of “Occupy Wall Street,” the winter demonstrations may have failed to produce a robust social movement with coherent goals and a credible strategy, but they did preview the serious political tensions that would explode later on.
President Traian Basescu, a former sea captain twice elected to five-year terms in 2004 and 2009, has received the lion’s share of blame for drastic IMF-required austerity measures adopted in May 2010 and has suffered steady declines in popularity among voters. A reformist government headed by a former foreign minister and head of foreign intelligence, Oxford-educated historian Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, was voted down in April and a left-center coalition, the Social Liberal Union, formed the current government in May. The new prime minister, thirty-nine-year-old socialist Victor Ponta, is a self-proclaimed admirer of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. Writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller, who was born in Romania, called Ponta’s party “fake Social Democrats” and the n