Romania's false start 20 years ago

Twenty years ago Romanian civil rights activists in Timişoara published a draft for a lustration law proscribing that former members of the communist party and the secret service Securitate be barred from running for political office for the space of three legislative periods. If that law had been passed, this is how things would look in Romania today according to the daily România Liberă: "The country's capitalism would not still be dominated by nepotism and Romanian politics wouldn't be in the hands of cliques. ... Romania would have changed more swiftly and sensibly, bad roads would have been replaced by motorways and the best railway network in Eastern Europe wouldn't have been taken to pieces, the average salary would be between 800 and 1,000 euros like in the Czech Republic or Poland and the media wouldn't be in the hands of a few moguls. ... Romania missed its start because the parliamentarians never wanted to accept a lustration and preferred to privatise the secret service rather than the economy. Twenty years after the Proclamation of Timişoara an assessment of morals leaves much to be desired even though by joining the EU and Nato Romania managed to catch up a bit."

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