Many Romanians Ready to End Reform

Iudit Diaconu is worried, angry and--like about half of her fellow Romanians--ready to throw out this country’s reformist center-right government and vote former Communist Ion Iliescu back into power.

“There’s no honesty. There’s no fairness in the economy,” complained Diaconu, 72, who was waiting in a line outside the latest bank hit by panic withdrawals in a country buffeted for years by financial and economic disasters. “I’ll vote for Iliescu. He’s fair and honest.”

Iliescu, 70, who emerged as Romania’s leader in the bloody 1989 revolution that overthrew Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, is poised for a comeback. He enjoys a huge lead in voter preference polls for first-round presidential balloting set for Sunday and is heavily favored to win an expected Dec. 10 runoff between the top two contenders.

Critics charge that Iliescu’s years as president from 1990 to 1996 were marked by halfhearted reform and heavy-handed authoritarianism, the worst example being the use of coal miners to violently suppress student protests a decade ago. A deeply sarcastic advertisement aired on television by one of his center-right opponents in the race shows a young girl declaring: “When I grow up, I want to become a student and get beaten up by the coal miners.”

But Iliescu projects an image as an honest man of the people, drawing especially strong support from the villages whose residents make up half of Romania’s 22 million people.

The election pits the rural, poorer and older segments of society, which have suffered most in the post-Communist period and tend to favor Iliescu, against urban, educated or younger people who are more comfortable with globalization, care deeply about joining the European Union and tend to favor technocratic candidates such as Prime Minister Mugur Isarescu, 51, or Theodor Stolojan, 57, a former prime minister and former World Bank official.

Parliamentary elections also will be held Sunday. Iliescu’s Party of Social Democracy is expected to dominate those races, enabling it to pick the next prime minister.

“In Romania, Western political labels are not very accurate,” said Cristian Parvulescu, a political scientist at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest, the capital. “The main cleavage seems to be the one between urban and rural areas, between the tendency to agree to the new and the tendency to remain conservative.”

Reformist Economy Faring Poorly So Far

The popularity of Iliescu and his party is most of all a reflection of public disgust with the failures of the center-right politicians who have wrestled with Romania’s vast problems during the past four years. The economy contracted by 6.9% in 1997, an additional 5.4% in 1998 and 3.2% more last year. Growth this year is estimated at 1.5%, but that has not been enough to reverse public sentiment.

Worsening poverty and unkept promises to clean up corruption have left the government so unpopular that incumbent President Emil Constantinescu, who defeated Iliescu in 1996, chose not to run for reelection rather than face certain defeat.

A recent survey by the respected IMAS polling agency showed Iliescu with 40% support; Sen. Corneliu Vadim Tudor, 50, leader of the ultranationalist Greater Romania Party, at 19%; Stolojan at 16%; and Isarescu at 14%. There are eight other candidates with less support.

Romania requires a runoff unless the top finisher wins the support of more than 50% of all eligible voters, not just those who cast ballots. With turnout projected at 65%, a second-round vote is expected.

Iliescu’s party, like its center-right opponents, proclaims support for economic reforms and efforts to join the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But it argues that the priority must be on quickly reversing the past few years’ decline in living standards.

“The past four years were a big social catastrophe,” Iliescu said in an interview. “You can see this permanent decline of the economy, and the poverty which became the most dramatic characteristic of the life of the Romanians. So the main problem of this election is to change this situation.”

While the president has only limited policymaking authority under the constitution, Romania’s tradition of strong leadership gives whoever holds the post a key political role.

In a country where until 1989 anyone with a good career had to be a Communist, almost all leading politicians across the political spectrum are former party members. Even Constantinescu, who won the presidency four years ago as a strong advocate of fuller democracy and more rapid market-oriented reforms, once headed the Communist Party at the University of Bucharest.

Still, it is Iliescu’s party that plays the role here that in such East European countries as Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria has been played by reformed Communist parties: arguing for a slower pace of reform and higher social spending. These parties also benefit from nostalgia for the security of the past and anger over new phenomena such as high unemployment.

Candidates of the badly divided center-right portray the upcoming elections here as a battle over whether Romania will move forward with reforms needed to complete its transition from communism to a market economy.

“The country, in the next four years, has to ‘take off’ from the economic point of view, or we will remain behind the world for a long time. That is the point of this election,” Stolojan said. Both he and Isarescu, the other key center-right candidate, stress that they would take the tough steps necessary to keep Romania moving forward.

Iliescu and his party insist that the real issue is how to quickly improve life for the many people locked in a daily struggle to survive.

“If we continue to promote the economic and social program promoted by the present coalition for the past four years, we will fall permanently into extreme poverty, underdevelopment, despair and rejection of democracy,” Iliescu said in a televised debate. “During these four years, the social consequences of economic policies were ignored. . . . In our program, we include measures to stimulate economic growth and improve the situation of those going through very rough times now.”

Nationalist Votes Seen Going to Iliescu

Rivals attack Iliescu as promising more than he can deliver.

“The greatest danger for Romania at this moment is the ‘double D’--demagoguery and duplicity,” Isarescu said in a thinly veiled attack on Iliescu during the televised debate.

A wild card in the race is Tudor, who promotes a fiery brand of right-wing populism similar to that of Austria’s Joerg Haider or France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. Some analysts view him as favored to make it into the runoff, but he is given little chance of defeating Iliescu. If Isarescu is in the runoff, he is also seen as having little chance of victory, given the government’s lack of popularity and the likelihood that most Tudor voters would swing to Iliescu.

“Stolojan is the only one who can compete with Iliescu,” said Ion Cristoiu, director of the daily Azi newspaper and one of Romania’s most widely respected journalists. “He is more forceful, and the National Liberal Party is a strong party backing him.”

Even Stolojan probably “doesn’t stand a chance, but he would get enough votes to lose honorably,” Cristoiu predicted.