Romania’s far-right party has fully entered the electoral campaign spurred on by the good omens shown by the latest polls, which place it in second place, only behind the Social Democrats. Although the presidential elections will presumably not be held before autumn 2024, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), George Simion, seems to have rescued the vandalism strategy of the legionnaire factions of the interwar period that they combined nationalism and anti-Semitic fundamentalism to radicalize their sympathizers.
Following several previous violent episodes, Simion attacked Energy Minister Virgil Popescu in early February when he blamed Russia for rising energy prices during a tense parliamentary session. “Go to Mr. (Vladimir) Putin so he can make gas cheaper,” Popescu said angrily to Simion, who kept interrupting his speech. Annoyed, the ultra-nationalist jumped onto the platform, grabbed him hard from behind and hit him several times on the back of the neck while he yelled in his face: “You’re a thief.” “I speak on behalf of millions of citizens”, he justified himself. It is the first time in Romanian democratic history that a physical attack has taken place.
Without a mask and without a covid passport, a score of ultras, with the co-leader of the far-right party in front, stormed the Timisoara City Hall on January 14 to force a meeting with its mayor, Dominic Fritz, a German citizen who converted a few years ago. more than a year in the first foreign alderman in Romania. “Come outside, you mangy dog” or “Herr [señor] Don’t forget Fritz, Timisoara is not yours”, the ultras shouted against the foreign mayor before forcibly breaking into the building under the acquiescence of an impassive local police, accused of sharing the same nationalist ideas.
“The people must control the institutions that are abusively run by foreigners’; that is a nationalist rhetoric in which all the foreign enemies of the nation are attacked”, Cristian Pîrvulescu, dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences of the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest, explains to EL PAÍS. “Politicians who are not Romanian will be accused of being traitors,” warns the political scientist.
Four days before that episode, Simion traveled to the center of the country, to the town of Sibiu, with almost 150,000 inhabitants, to protest in front of one of the houses of the Romanian president, the conservative Klaus Iohannis, of German ethnicity, descendant of the Saxons. who populated Transylvania five centuries ago. Surrounded by dozens of sympathizers, the ultra-nationalist asked the head of state to order the Prosecutor’s Office to withdraw the criminal file against him for assuring at the beginning of the year that the Holocaust is a minor issue and threatened to initiate an impeachment process.
Aligned with the postulates of European far-right leaders such as the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, or the French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in favor of national sovereignty against the EU and NATO, AUR exhibits its euphoria with this type of bellicose behavior after rising in the polls. The party went from 1% in September 2020 to exceeding 20% this month in voting intentions in the polls, driven by a long political crisis marked by the pandemic and which was closed with a government pact between the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL). And it intends to climb to become the first force in Parliament. “We grow in the polls and we are going to drive to Romania, we perceive it on the street,” Simion assured.
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The radical leader, whose messages go viral on his Facebook account, sees himself as the standard-bearer in the fight against vaccination after stopping the covid passport in some workplaces in December. First, through the parliamentary blockade; and then through another violent assault, this time on Parliament. The ultra-nationalist formation gathered some 2,000 people in front of the headquarters of the legislative chambers to express their rejection of the covid pass. The demonstration got out of control after more than 200 people invaded the perimeter of the enclosure without the gendarmerie intervening, which led to acts of vandalism. Protesters drew a swastika on a European Union flag.
“AUR has taken over most of the conspiracy theories, to which religious fundamentalism is added,” says Pîrvulescu, who is not surprised by the lax attitude of law enforcement, because he considers that exacerbated nationalism is in great measured in the bowels of the intelligence services, the police and the gendarmerie. “People with anti-Western views are in both the secret service and the security forces; those who put the so-called national values before international ones, who consider that joining the community bloc and the Atlantic Alliance are against the national interest, are presented as patriots”, emphasizes Pîrvulescu.
The Executive intended to press to increase the vaccination rate – just over 40% of the population has the complete guideline -, but the protest scared the parliamentarians, who decided to back down to avoid possible street demonstrations that could turn the the political situation.
Freedom of the press is also among the targets of far-right attacks. The ultra-nationalist faction urged its supporters to create a “black list” of media outlets labeled as “the most toxic and false press organs” on a social network. “It has unhinged them that we have named them by their name: extreme right-wing party; now they want to intimidate us”, explains to EL PAÍS Cristian Pantazi, editor-in-chief of G4Media.ro, a medium that topped the AUR ranking. “It is the first time in recent history that a political party has launched an attack of this type against a newsroom,” lamented Pantazi.
Political parties have never drawn a red line. The Union Save Romania (USR) and the PNL have made several calls to isolate AUR in Parliament. They even proposed signing a pact, but the initiative never materialized. For their part, the Social Democrats maintain cordial relations by considering the far-right party as a reserve option in the event of a breakup of the current coalition. So far, the government representative against xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the PNL deputy Alexandru Muraru, has been the only one in the government who has hinted at the outlawing of the far-right formation, which he considers “a threat to the constitutional order.” . “I have doubts that the legal actions against AUR will prosper, since a good part of the judges also promote conspiracy theories,” remarks Pîrvulescu.
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