In the good tradition of the Russian playbook and Russian propaganda, leading member of far-right AUR party, Dan Tanasa is now posing as a victim after initially positioning himself as an instigator.
The sequence goes as follows:
- First of all, the AUR deputy launched an appeal of a rhetorical ferocity more worthy of a fascist and Nazist, urging his compatriots to refuse any order delivered by an Asian worker.
- Soon afterwards, a random individual follows the instigation of the AUR lawmaker by hitting an Asian national on a bicycle in the middle of the street. The man’s ‘sin’ was being a foreigner and delivering food; food produced by a Romanian company, intended for Romanian consumers, and taxed (the Romanian state budget is a beneficiary of work performed by innocent foreign workers).
- Against the background of the public uproar, Mr. Tanasa suddenly reverses the narrative: by playing the victim himself, while also minimizing the seriousness of his instigation.
It’s easy to recognize in the above episode to the methods Putin has applied to Ukraine:
- Initially, the dictator ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
- Then, his armies cross the border, unleash wide-scale killings (including crimes against humanity), and occupy territories.
- At the same time, the dictator in the Kremlin, other representatives of the Russian state and the propaganda apparatus reverse the narrative on two levels: on the one hand, by saying that there is no war; and on the other, stating that if there are indeed battles, this is because Russia has been attacked, not Ukraine. .
The Tanasă-AUR case is not an isolated one. It is not the first time and, as things show, it will not be the last time that AUR and its leaders act in a copy/paste regime following the Kremlin’s playbook.
Just as it is no longer a surprise that AUR and prominent representatives of this pro-Russian extremist party are in synchronicity (as if by natural coincidence and very quickly as well) with the Russian authorities at a local or central level – on multiple topics.
But if we are talking about the special treatment given to foreigners in general and to migrants from Asia in particular, which the AUR deputy instigates (and through his voice the entire party to which he belongs), it is hard not to notice the strange (only apparently strange) coincidence between Dan Tanasa’s appeal and two other events that occurred to in the country that has the misfortune to be led by Vladimir Putin:
- The measure taken in the Leningrad region, banning foreign couriers. 2. The measure taken in the Moscow region – a pilot project advanced in parliament, obliging foreigners to install an application on their phones through which the authorities can track and locate them around the clock. Quite honestly, it’s hard to imagine a more eloquent example of digitization and hyper-technologization of the pariah status that Russia grants to foreigners.
Putin – the dictator keeps repeating it, as does Russian propaganda – has been “denazifying” Ukraine hard, for over three and a half years now. At the same time, the same Russia, on the orders of the same dictator Putin and through the so-called democratic institutions, in reality but of the Potemkin type, acts that mirror standards put in place by the Nazis eight decades ago.
For any normal human being- with an ounce of common sense and a minimum decency- the genius of Evil that is is being manifested in today’s Russia is beyond comprehension.
But for any Romanian with a clear head and half a heart, it should be a big, even the biggest alarm signal of the last century, the fact that the normalization of this type of evil imported from Russians laced with fascist and Nazi overtones, is trying to find a place in our country, and infiltrate the minds of certain local politicians, and through them, reach ordinary citizens.
For a country like Romania, the tragedy would be twofold:
- On the one hand, profound economic, social and security turmoil would follow internally.
- On the other hand, if in time the “model” were to catch on in other countries, for example in Western Europe, the personal situation of millions of Romanians would become untenable. A quarter of Romania’s population is made up of Romanians in the diaspora– people whose jobs and whose lives, on every level, depend on the needs, goodwill and tolerance of foreigners. Many of them, at the elections, were tempted and still are by the “liberating” narratives of politicians like Dan Tanasă and and Călin Georgescu. These Romanians may have the misfortune of being the first targets for ‘Putinisms’ to take their cruel revenge. History is perverse, it’s ironic, it’s relentless, so watch out!
Rightly, Romanians were and remained sensitive when some foreigners treated them as second-class people or as wage breakers, in the West, as such, and as job thieves.
But, excuse me, today, in 2025, when Romania has become attractive to people other than Romanians, we shouldn’t follow the cynical example in which the slave dreams not only of freedom, but also of the moment when he himself will have his own slaves.
- PS: The demographics, the chances and at the same time the mirage of abroad have meant that, today, in Romania, if you want to order your food at home, you risk going without food, in case you let yourself be caught by the call of Tanasă-AUR and you start to refuse the food delivered by a foreign citizen; a man too, a man who works hard, who toils for modest money, who struggles to make a living thousands of kilometers away from their loved ones. A foreigner who does this in Romania not because there is a global conspiracy that aims to leave Romanians without a job, but on the contrary, because there are not enough Romanians to do this precarious job in their own country.
Far-right politician calls on Romanians to refuse takeway deliveries from foreign workers
