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Romania: Fascism and nationalism

01 January 1991

Romania: Fascism and nationalism
artdoc July=1994

Coalition government brings nationalists in

Two ultra-nationalist parties, the Party of Romanian National
Unity (PRNU) and the Greater Romania Party (GRP), are to be
represented in Romania's new coalition government formed on 1
March. The PRNU's leader is Gheorghe Funar, the mayor of the
Transylvanian capital of Cluj, who has pursued a policy of overt
discrimination against the city's Hungarian population. The
leader of the GPR, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a former court poet to
Ceausescu, makes no secret of his anti-Semitism. Last April, in
an open-letter to president Ion Iliescu, Tudor wrote: `Jews give
you orders. Jews brought you to power and keep you at the top,
at the price of ruining Romania'.
According to the Independent, the two pro-Communist parties
with roots in the Ceausescu period which have been brought into
the coalition government also appeal to nationalistic and
nostalgic sentiment (Independent 3.2.94).

Nostalgia for war-time dictator grows

Nostalgia for Romania's pro-nazi wartime dictator, Marshal Ion
Antonescu, is growing. A patriotic new film entitled Oglinda
(Mirror) is playing to packed audiences, statues of the marshal
have appeared in provincial towns and roads are being renamed in
his memory.
The two hour long `epic' film has particularly angered Jewish
opinion. Hitler is portrayed as a tough but thoughtful soldier-
philosopher, while the persecution of Jews is hardly mentioned
at all. Furthermore, Antonescu is portrayed as having not been
responsible for the situation of 22,000 Jews in neighbouring
Bessarabia, now Moldova, who were sent to concentration camps
where over half died (Guardian 25.2.94).

IRR European Race Audit, Bulletin no 8, May 1994. Contact:Liz
Fekete, Insitute of Race Relations, 2-6 Leeke Street, London WC1X
9HS. Tel: 071 837 0041