35 Years Since the First Post-December Elections

The parliamentary and presidential elections of 20 May 1990 were the first free elections since the fall of the communist regime in Romania on 22 December 1989

Steliu Lambru, 26.05.2025, 13:22

The parliamentary and presidential elections of 20 May 1990 were the first free elections since the fall of the communist regime in Romania on 22 December 1989. They were dominated by the National Salvation Front, the organization and then the party that succeeded the Romanian Communist Party, and its candidate, Ion Iliescu. They were the clearest scores in electoral history after 1989, with a good chance of remaining the highest in the entire political history of Romania. The presence at the polls was huge, with approximately 86% of those eligible to vote wanting to express their will. In the elections for the first Parliament, the National Salvation Front won 67% of the seats, the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania obtained 7.2%, the National Liberal Party 7%, the Ecological Movement of Romania and the National Peasant Christian-Democratic Party 2.5% each. Ion Iliescu, the National Salvation Front candidate, became President of Romania for two years with 85%, followed by Radu Câmpeanu, the Liberal candidate, who won 10.5% and Ion Rațiu, the Peasant Party candidate, with 4%.

The elections 35 years ago, held on the feast of Blind Sunday, were the ones that legitimized the new power that was starting the reform program. But they would succeed each other at a slow pace, far from having the pace expected by Romanians, let alone being carried out to the end. The great imbalance between the National Salvation Front and the opposition parties, the so-called “historical” parties abolished by the communist regime in the late 1940s, is explained by the lack of political exercise of Romanian society as a whole for 45 years. Romanians were relearning democracy, and the relearning process was not without intolerance, hatred, manipulation, and physical violence. The elections of May 20, 1990 were the most difficult, and many political analysts and historians consider them, despite their character of societal renewal, to be the origin of the current defects of Romanian democracy.

The Oral History Center of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation recorded the memories of those who participated in those elections. English teacher Sorin Botte, a young liberal activist in 1945 and a political prisoner during the communist years, recalled in 2003 with what hopes he and those who had re-established the National Liberal Party in 1989 awaited the elections on May 20.

“We hoped, first of all, that Câmpeanu would become president. Which, obviously, was a great naivety to imagine that the KGB would let Câmpeanu become president! If it hadn’t been for the system of influence agents, which operated formidably in Romania and launched rumors about Câmpeanu killing his sister in Timişoara, that he had a brothel in Paris, there would have been other results. Such vile acts as the national television perpetrated, the national radio less so, were never seen since. The heads of national television were Comrade Răzvan Theodorescu, after that it was Emanuel Valeriu, who was the grey eminence and a “total KGB tool.”

In the same year, 2003, Ion Diaconescu, the Peasant Party president, remembered the violence during the electoral campaign.

“Some foreign journalists came here, French, to my headquarters, and they wanted me to take them with me to see the campaign in the rural area. Where should I take them, because I knew they wanted us to fight wherever we went. And I see a teacher in the lobby, he was from Dobreşti, the village next to mine, Ion Mihalache’s village, and whom I had made a delegate to form a party in Dobreşti. I tell him, if we couldn’t do this ourselves, let’s take the foreign journalists there. And he tells us to come to Dobreşti. We’re holding a funeral for Mihalache on Sunday and on that occasion we’re also organizing a political meeting. I’m leaving here from Bucharest, with the French and two cars, I call Piteşti and other members, and some cars come from there from the county, and we go to the cemetery, in Dobreşti. There, in the village, about 10 more had come, we were about 20 guests. We had the service, we gave a few speeches among ourselves, in a small church. Leaving the church, we had left the cars lower down, about 100 meters, because you couldn’t go up by car, it was somewhere on the hill. On the right side was Mihalache’s garden and Mihalache’s house, further on. About four women and a man came out of Mihalache’s yard, with stones, and they started throwing stones at us and booing us. We dodged the stones, the French were staring at us with their jaws dropping. We left quickly, took the cars and left. The professor told us to stop at his place because he had made a meal. We stopped, and while we were at his place, the people who had thrown stones came and when we were inside they threw stones at the windows. Opposite was the police station, the people there said it was a political matter and they wouldn’t interfere. And we escaped. I’m telling the story in Bucharest, Coposu tells me that in his village, in Bobota, in Transylvania, the same thing happened. Ion Puiu told me that in his village, in Bucovina, it was the same. Ion Raţiu was almost beaten up in Buzău.”

The elections of May 20, 1990 were of their time. They could not have had any other result than the expectations of Romanian society at that time.