ROMANIA: Young Turn Away from Politics

By Claudia Ciobanu Reprint | | Print |

Claudia Ciobanu

BUCHAREST, Mar 16 2007 (IPS) - Students in Romania have gone back to having student-like problems.

“Romania no longer has fundamental systemic problems, so students can afford to worry about individual concerns like better quality education or professional achievement,” Ligia Deca, president of the National Alliance of Students Organisations from Romania (ANOSR) told IPS.

ANOSR is the biggest student alliance in Romania, comprising more than 60 student organisations all over the country.

“Being politicised has a negative connotation for us,” Deca said. In the language of Romanian students, being politicised means being connected with one of the political parties, which in turn is equated with compromising the integrity of the students organisation.

“In such a situation you stop representing the interests of all Romanian students and begin representing the interests of a political party,” Deca said.

The other two national alliances are the Union of Romanian Students (USR) and the National Union of Romanian Students (UNSR), each with less than 30 member organisations.

USR is trying to break away from a past of formal collaboration with the Social Democratic Party. UNSR had as president Nicolae Banicioiu, now leader of the Social Democratic Youth, and it still maintains connections with the party.

In the early 1990s, being young and politicised in Romania did not carry this kind of negative connotation. At that time “doing politics” meant “fighting for democracy”, said Simona, a 36-year-old accountant from Bucharest.

In the 1989 revolution in Romania, a country of 22 million in south-eastern Europe, communist dictatorship was replaced by democracy through a combination of palace coup and popular uprising.

Many of those who fought in the revolution in December 1989 were students. Simona was one of them. “I went out in the streets, without telling my parents, and almost got shot,” she told IPS. “We had to get rid of the communists.”

Later, in 1990 and 1991, students were at the core of massive protests organised in Bucharest against “neo-communists” taking power in place of the Communist Party of Romania.

During the early 1990s, the student organisations were fighting simultaneously for changes in the larger political system and for improvement in student life, Ligia Deca said.

The campaigns organised by ANOSR over the last couple of years, on the other hand, have been focused on university life issues. The new campaigns have banners like “Give me 5” asking for 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product for education, or “What Hurts You?” publicising the everyday problems of students on campus.

When protests take place in Bucharest for other reasons, student participation is low. On Feb. 27, a support rally was held for the reformist justice minister Monica Macovei in front of the University of Bucharest campus. Around five hundred people showed up, not even a tenth of them of university age.

This was not fear of being associated with any political party, since the demonstration was called by six civil society organisations. What, then, accounts for this lack of student involvement in public life?

“Young post-communist Romanians live with the acute feeling of a destiny that is strictly individual, exceptional and autonomous,” says writer Traian Ungureanu. “With rare exceptions, the post-communists of the new generations only relate to professional achievement.”

Ungureanu claims that the behaviour of political leaders with students in the early 1990s also dealt a mortal blow to youth activism.

The student protests in 1990 and 1991 led then president Ion Iliescu of the Social Democratic Party to fear that his rule might collapse. In June 1990 Iliescu made a public appeal to miners from Jiu Valley to “come and restore order” in Bucharest.

He provided buses to bring workers to the capital. The miners stormed the University of Bucharest and physically abused people wearing glasses or ‘looking intellectual’.

But the lack of engagement of students with public life cannot be explained only by the brutality of the miners then. Many countries in Europe, even those without a dictatorial past, are confronted with the problem of youth passivity.

This still does not mean that students will not mobilise again if they start feeling society is in crisis. Asked whether such a moment is approaching in Romania, Ligia Deca said her colleagues in the country are getting increasingly upset by the continuous bickering among politicians, who seem to forget there is work to be done.

Deca said if she receives enough signals that students are displeased with the political class, ANOSR could organise a protest demonstration against the government.

But the time may not be ripe yet for another Romanian revolution.