1990 Romanian General Election

The 1990 Romanian General Election gave a sizable majority to a political formation that, in the account, represented the survival of the Communist Party under a new name and leader. Its result turned the apparent end of communist rule into a more unsettling question: whether the revolution had changed the political order, or chiefly its public face.

Background

In the months after the Romanian Revolution, the Ceaușescu regime’s collapse was accompanied by dramatic reports of mass slaughter. The graves at Timișoara drew particular attention: figures escalated from thousands to tens of thousands, and television images of exhumed bodies intensified fears of a final campaign of killings by the Securitate. The later discovery that a few dozen bodies had been taken from graves of people who had died natural deaths, and displayed for cameras, sharply contradicted those reports.

The new political order also contained personnel and institutions from the old one. The Communist Party was formally banned and charged with every imaginable crime, but the account describes it as having changed its name and leader rather than disappeared. Ion Iliescu’s National Salvation Front became the party of the new president, while former Securitate personnel entered the new administration.

The Vote and Its Result

The election took place in March 1990. The political formation descended from the Communist Party won a sizable majority. The book stresses the apparent paradox: after a revolution that had overthrown a communist dictatorship, voters freely gave a substantial mandate to Communists under their new political identity.

The result is presented not as proof that the revolution had never happened, but as evidence that the former ruling force remained politically powerful. Banning the party had not erased its organization or its appeal; the change of name and leadership allowed continuity to operate within the new electoral order.

Aftermath and Significance

The election, together with the disputed reporting from Timișoara and the persistence of old political networks, made postrevolutionary Romania seem to Emmanuel Carrère like a place where the familiar had become alien. The vote helped prompt his decision to take an assignment reporting in Romania that spring. In the book’s account, its central significance lies in the gap between the dramatic rupture of revolution and the electorate’s choice: a political force associated with the old regime could return through a free election, now under a different name.