Ion Vianu on Romanians' longing for authoritarianism

According to recent surveys, at least a half of all Romanians feel life was better under the communist regime. In an article for the weekly magazine Revista 22 the Romanian author Ion Vianu compares his countrymen with orphans yearning for the authority of their fathers: "The human being needs a ruthless father, writes [the psychoanalyst] Fromm. It's difficult to be free and entirely independent, to make decisions about your life. ... To put it clearly, we [in Romania] don't live in a traditional civilian democracy but in post-communism, a society with its own special rules where the flight from freedom becomes nostalgia for the slavery of the past. Many console themselves however they can: Some have more courage, ... others live like unhappy orphans lost in their 'nostalgia for the father' whose commands ensured that you - the eternal child - never had to make decisions. ... The fact that the number of 'orphans' who long for an authoritative force in their lives is growing shows that the current system is not stabilising. On the contrary, fewer and fewer people will trust it as long as it fails to provide solutions."

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