With the death of Ion Iliescu, Romania is parting ways with the man who defined the country’s violent and chaotic exit from more than four decades of communist dictatorship.
Romania is separating itself from the man who defined our country’s chaotic and violent transition from communism to capitalism and from a closed and oppressed society to an open and, gradually, increasingly free one.
Last but not least, Romania is making a break from the man who left his ominous mark on Romania’s largest post-revolution party, the PDSR later renamed the PSD, the successor to its natural mother, the Romanian Communist Party. Implicitly, Iliescu’s imprint on the party’s DNA was a bad omen for Romania’s evolution in general.
Ion Iliescu hijacked the 1989 Revolution, held the post-revolutionary phase of the country prisoner and promoted a populism of the lowest kind – summarized by the slogan “poor, but honest”; a skillful smoke bomb, under which a new type of rapacious apparatchik flourished in the 90s and early 2000s, to the point that it made Romania, that had just got rid of Ceausescu, one of Europe’s most corrupt countries.
A better period in the political life of the late ex-president came only after he left the Cotroceni presidential Palace and finally departed from political life.
After 2004 (Eds: when he finished his third term as president), Ion Iliescu made visible efforts to buff up his image from an aggressive polyglot into a benevolent grandfather, reserved and wise like no other.
Iliescu always believed that history would fully rehabilitate and place him on the respectable pedestal that he deserved. In his mind, his contemporaries were simply blinded by passion and unable to recognize his true qualities.
It is true that Ion Iliescu showed unexpected elegance immediately after the presidential elections in May 2025, when in a sober and civilized tone, he praised the victory of the pro-Western candidate Nicusor Dan in the presidential election.
However, a moment of political honesty and moral lucidity was not enough to erase decades of ‘Iliescianism’ when he abjectly failed to demonstrate these qualities.
Iliescu has left us, but Romania remains. Part of his bad legacy has gradually disappeared with and without his will, but another part will remain with us long enough to haunt our daily lives and perspectives.
A diehard communist, an influential apparatchik in the decades before the ’89 revolution and the decades that followed, Ion Iliescu could not have done any better than he did and he cannot be rehabilitated by history at the level he dreamed of after retiring from active political life.
Before the 1989 Revolution, he was not a good communist, rather a better opportunist than the his competitors in the Communist Party apparatus of the time. Subsequently, he did not become an authentic democrat, but remained the same high-performance opportunist, able to adapt better than all the other “former” communists to the new political and geopolitical dynamics.
When he had the opportunity, Iliescu crushed Ceausescu. When he had the opportunity, Iliescu did not let Romanian anti-communist figures Corneliu Coposu and Ion Rațiu breathe.
He was cynical, he was ruthless, he was a predatory political animal.
On the face of things, Ion Iliescu played an extraordinary role in Romania’s post-communist history, but he will never have the statue he hoped for in the last years of his life, for the simple fact that he did not express one essential thing: remorse.
Remorse for the thousands of dead during the Revolution and the later miners rampages had their lives cut short through no fault of their own. Neither did he show remorse for the watered down communism that he presided over as a post-communist president.
No remorse at all… just an absence of remorse.
After a checkered life and the years when his longevity fueled black humor (Eds: he died aged 95), Ion Iliescu departed this life, like any ordinary mortal, to the world of the righteous and unrighteous.
Things will not settle down in Romania once the last shovel of earth covers his coffin, but only when the last candle of his political and social legacy he left behind is extinguished.
We will have to wait a while for that… .
