The victory of Klaus Iohannis in Romania’s recent presidential elections has been largely received with unhidden approval in both foreign and Romanian media. In a piece published in Public Seminar, Maria Bucur, chair of European history at Indiana University, sees in it a sign that populism is “on the retreat” in Romania. For The New York Times, Iohannis’s re-election means that Romanians “rejected years of scandal and chaos”, blaming the latter on the Social-Democratic governments with whom Iohannis institutionally cohabitated over the past three and a half years. The American daily emphasized Iohannis’s philo-Europeanism, as well as his anti-corruption stance, counterposing his seriousness to the tantrums and idiosyncrasies of populists such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Donald Trump in the United States.
In recognition of his philo-Europeanism, Iohannis will be awarded in 2020 the Charlemagne Prize: “The President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, embodies in the East the European canon of values, the consolidation of the European community governed by the rule of law and the common idea of a European future.” (my translation). In a similar vein, representations of a Romanian “civil society” that is constantly (and successfully) pushing for more democracy and the rule of law also circulate in both western and Romanian mass media. According to such representations, Romania has pretty much turned into the positive example in eastern Europe, as opposed to what is happening in countries such as Poland or Hungary.
For whoever has been following Romanian politics throughout the past three decades, it is nonetheless hard to avoid a feeling of déja-vù. Almost all previous local, parliamentary, and presidential elections – and recently also European elections - (e.g. 1996, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2016, 2019) have been framed around oversimplified dichotomies such as the aforementioned ones. The previous hype around the electoral successes of former presidents Emil Constantinescu (1996-2000) and Traian Băsescu (2004-2014) echoes the positive interpretation of Iohannis’s success. The latter is by no means the first post-1989 Romanian president who presents himself as being essentially different from the PSD and who wins elections mainly because he runs on an anti-PSD platform.
