Post-Communist Romanian political nationalism is the heir of a century-and-a-half old development of doctrines and traditions of thinking, which in turn derives from philosophical constructions, initiated another two centuries earlier. In the 17th century, the first lay chroniclers from Wallachia and Moldavia started to systematize the history of the two states, to bear witness to contemporary events and to search for specific traditional elements in the evolution of various institutions. This laid a foundation upon which a nationalistic doctrine could be created .

After the revolutions of 1848, in Wallachia and Moldavia a generation of intellectuals who had already studied at the great European universities, began an intense political and cultural dispute concerning the modernization of the country, the preservation of its traditional values, and the absorption of new institutions of the West. The union of the two Romanian Principalities in 1859 and the coming into being of a multi-party parliamentary life added to this dispute a more defined political space. However, the vote was not yet universal and conservative nationalism was still elaborating its theories within clubs and cultural currents such as ‘Junimea’ or ‘Samanatorism’.

After World War I, which brought into being Greater Romania, the state was ruled for a long period of time by the Liberal National Party, which promoted industrialization, dissolution of the great estates, and the introduction of Western institutional reforms. At the same time, the nationalist movement reorganized and diversified itself, adapting to the new realities, but also to the new European ideologies.

In 1925, the Romanian National Party of Transylvania, led by Iuliu Maniu, was searching for a space of action adapted to the existence of Greater Romania, for whose creation it had fought for decades. It satisfied this desire to some extent by absorbing the Democratic Nationalistic Party, founded in 1910 in the Old Kingdom of Romania. A year later, it merged with the Peasant Party, led by Ion Mihalache. The newly born National Peasant Party, led also by Iuliu Maniu, attempted during the following decades to combine a national and social message, thereby becoming the main electoral opponent of the liberals, led by the Bratianu family. Nevertheless, the National Peasant Party ruled Romania only during the ill-fated period of the 1929-1933 economic crisis.

After World War II, the National Peasant Party became the main opponent of Communism, which was imported from the USSR. However, after the falsified parliamentary elections of the autumn of 1946, the National Peasant Party was suppressed, along with the Liberal Party. The members of the historical parties were kept under surveillance and most of their leaders died later in prisons.

It was a populist and centrist nationalism, but at the same time, a calm and pedantic one, in love with the past and scared by a present, which seemed to desire a too hasty embrace of the future. At the same time, much more radical movements were being born, occupying quickly and dynamically the extreme right wing of the political spectrum.

The Christian National Defense League was created in 1923 in Iasi under the leadership of university professor A. C. Cuza, former co-founder with Iorga of the Democratic Nationalistic Party. Cuza was a committed anti-Semite and the CNDL was nothing more than an ambitious attempt at organizing the anti-Communist and anti-Semitic student movement at the end of the 20s. In addition to Jews and the left-wing, the enemy of the CNDL was liberalism, which created the Constitution of 1923 and the 1926 Electoral Law. In the 1926 elections the CNDL obtained 10 out of 387 seats in Parliament. Nevertheless, the election campaign generated irreconcilable differences between A. C. Cuza and his main lieutenant, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The latter left the CNDL and in 1927 founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael.

The Legion, which bore various names throughout the years, was restricted in various ways from time to time by the authorities. It can be said to be the standard political structure of Romanian ultra-nationalism. It functioned in accordance with all the extreme right wing movements in the region and in contemporary Europe.

A charismatic character, accused and sometimes convicted for violent crimes including assassination, Codreanu set in motion a spectacular and ingenious propaganda mechanism, which would soon prove its efficiency. By organizing marches throughout the country, religious processions, volunteer field work among the peasants ‘to set an example’, by manipulating the political and cultural press, by using patriotic hymns and campaigns for helping the poor, the Legion gradually attracted adherents. It proposed, in the usual anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal mixture, a new way of policy-making, denouncing the classical parties who ‘sold’ the country and protected their political clientele by corrupt means. A strong Orthodox spiritualism, displayed ostentatiously, enriched the arsenal of images of democratic nationalism. Moreover, this irrationalism became the spearhead of the Legion’s discourse among the intellectuals who joined it in significant numbers.

During the December 1936 elections the Legion obtained 15.5 percent of the votes, thus officially becoming the third political force in the country, behind the Liberal and the Peasant Parties. However, King Carol II’s opposition postponed their entry into the government until September 1940, when Romania was proclaimed a Legionary National State meant to function in the context of the King’s abdication and of the alliance with Germany. For a few months, Hitler saw the Legion as a possible alternative and, implicitly, as a barely veiled blackmail to the military supported authoritarian rule of General Ion Antonescu. Nevertheless, the Legion’s cohabitation with Antonescu lasted only until January 1941, when its coup d’etat was defeated by the army. The movement’s leaders took refuge in Germany, while the ones who remained in the country were imprisoned.

The four months of the Legion’s co-government were marked by waves of violence: pogroms, systematic assassinations, robberies, imposition of a system of racketeering in the commercial and financial sectors. Many leaders of the former governments were assassinated, notably historian Nicolae Iorga, a former prime minister, who was shot in the Strejnicu forest, near Bucharest. These extremely violent crimes damaged the image of the Legionary Movement and were used for five decades by the Communist propaganda, as proof of the state’s dissolution, before the Soviet intervention in Romanian political life.

After August 23rd, 1944, when Antonescu was arrested and Romania signed an armistice with the Allies, some of the Legionnaires joined the small Communist Party, while others remained imprisoned, or even joined the detachments which fought the Soviet occupation, and the Soviet-installed Communist regime, from the mountains for almost a decade.

After 1946, any kind of nationalism disappeared for more than a decade from the public discourse and from Romanian political and cultural life. Its place was taken by proletarian internationalism as the compulsory doctrine imposed by the single party.

Many writers, historians, classic or modern philosophers’ works were either forbidden and eliminated from textbooks and publishing plans or primitively reinterpreted from a Marxist perspective. The Russian language became compulsory and Russian literature was to be published by a special publishing house. Any attempt to affirm national specificity was seen as chauvinism and therefore repressed.

After the Russian troops withdrew and the political counselors and leaders imposed by Moscow were gradually eliminated, beginning with the last years of the 60s, Romanian Communism began to also look to nationalism for legitimacy and support. A relative cultural opening took place in the seventies, in which most of the classics of national culture were ‘rehabilitated’ and many major literary works from abroad were translated. Nevertheless, the concentration of political power in the hands of Nicolae Ceausescu, leader the Romanian Communist Party since 1965, would have as a consequence the elaboration of a national-Communist ideology.

The history of the country was rewritten as a succession of heroic moments, which cinematography was compelled to illustrate through dozens of expressive sagas. Romania’s economic and social backwardness was explained as the martyrdom of a nation, which sacrificed itself so that the West could build cathedrals, roads and industries. Propaganda offered a theoretical reason for the officially practiced political, economic, cultural and human isolationism. The ‘foreigner’ was seen and treated as a potential spy, while trips abroad by Romanians were described as an opportunity for recruitment by foreign agencies. During the last decade of Communism these tendencies reached epileptic proportions. As the East itself began to implement decentralizing, democratic reforms, the enemies were to be found everywhere. What came from the outside was evil. During the 80s access to books, films, shows, or television programs which expressed the trends of contemporary culture was almost forbidden.

After the spectacular fall of the totalitarian system set up by Nicolae Ceausescu, the voice of Romanian nationalism was not heard for several weeks. Other themes filled the yet insufficient mass media space. Day after day forgotten characters or ones totally unknown to Romanians appear on the TV screens: former political prisoners who belonged to the historical parties, banned artists, ex-Communist leaders removed from power by Ceausescu two or three decades earlier, students, revolutionaries, or house wives who became stars overnight, sometimes just for a night. The essential themes were freedom, getting closer to the Western world, which became suddenly accessible, and the denunciation of censorship, abuses, and falsifications.

Apparently the national Communist values violently promoted for two decades, seemed to have been swept away by the will of a nation which always had wanted something else. However, beyond the televised speech an enormous silent majority, with all its reflexes formed during the dictatorship, with its destiny dominated by Communism, having as its past the small demanded betrayals and the achievements allowed by the system, was wondering more and more whether it had lived in vain, whether the values they acclaimed for decades were really false, whether they will pass out of history, for ever being despised by their children and by the generations to come.

It is with this social category that the new left wing authorities attempted to some extent to communicate, needing a far less radical partner than the revolutionaries in the streets or the frustrated intellectuals who bombarded the television screens. They needed a partner who was content with more food in the stores and more football matches on more color TVs.

Yet, not even the quickly founded National Salvation Front dared to resuscitate nationalism. It was a moment of openness, which had to be appreciated for what it was. The West was a rediscovered partner; Gorbachev was a visionary; the dialogue with the Hungarian minority was a component of democracy.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the reborn National Peasant Party gave up gradually, but forever the nationalist discourse. Its new profile was that of a fortress against Communism. The public speech of the senior members who had spent many years imprisoned for political reasons was primarily focused on pluralism, political and economic freedom, openness toward foreign capital, and the rewriting of the historical truth. The NPP redefined itself in a modern manner, as Christian and democratic, but the close relations between its leaders and the Greek-Catholic Church, banned by the Communists, created communication problems with the all-embracing Orthodox Church, which passed through the years of the atheist dictatorship by extensively collaborating with the authorities. Ten years later, the NPP completely abandoned the realm of the nationalist discourse. Finally in power, its political alliance with the party of the Hungarian minority made it vulnerable to the Transylvanian radicals.

Two years later, during the parliamentary elections of 1992, PNUR obtained 7.72 percent of the vote and seemed to evolve into a national party. It now has representatives and senators not only from Transylvania, but also from Bucharest, Moldova, and Dobrogea. In fact, it became for several months a governing party, alongside the PSDR [The Party of Social Democracy of Romania] of Ion Iliescu, holding the portfolios of agriculture and telecommunications. However, similar to other extremist parties, which are forced to moderate when confronted with governmental responsibilities, the Party began to lose its profile and popularity when it gave up the extremist and colorful language. Furthermore, the Party broke with unusual characters, such as the mayor of Cluj, Gheorghe Funar, who was accused of many verbal and administrative provocations toward the Hungarian minority or the authorities in Budapest. After 1992 the name of the Party came to be easily linked to a big scandal of the financial pyramid games, which left thousands of Romanians bankrupt.

In 1991 Marian Munteanu, the leader of the Student League of the University of Bucharest, a participant in the marathon anti-Communist manifestation on University Square in the first months of 1990, founded ‘The Movement for Romania’, which took much of the ideology and communication strategies of the inter-war Legion Movement.

The Movement for Romania presented itself as an innovative youth party, based, nevertheless, on Romanian traditional values, including Orthodoxy. The party claimed that it wanted to breathe new life into the political body, by using new people who did not reject reforms meant to orient Romania toward the market economy, the only difference being that they opted for these reforms in a climate free of corruption and clientelism. Therefore, the Party claimed to reflect the norms and values of the Romanian traditional world. Munteanu organized white shirt or popular costume processions. The local activists were urged to work alongside the common people in order to set an example. Joining the Party was intentionally difficult, allegedly to prevent opportunism and thus to make sure of the sincere belief of the adherents. Therefore, the political and social language of the Party resembled the art of Codreanu’s arsenal, but it lacked his charisma and extremism against enemies from which the masses had to be protected. The Movement for Romania did not develop an anti-Hungarian nor an anti–Semitic message. It was a harmless, non-aggressive Legion, a club where you could play the character of the Iron-Guardist, without annoying anyone. Although it aroused a certain initial interest in the mass media, Munteanu’s party did not have any real electoral results and practically disappeared after four years.

Another attempt to develop a political nationalist structure took place in 1992 when the National Right Party (PNR) was formed by a group of more or less obscure intellectuals. The party proposed a naive projectionist economic speech by taking over some inter-war slogans such as "buy only from Romanians" or a strategy of action against the Gypsy minority, which was accused of illegalities. The press published a series of interviews with the party leaders, after which the party almost fell into oblivion. It is true that during different elections the PNR still displays posters to the voters with imperative slogans such as "We make order!" beside the picture of totally unknown people.

The Party of Greater Romania was set up in May 1991. However, the social phenomenon, which this name reflects, had already been in existence for more than a year. The birth of this political organization was closely related to the public success of the Greater Romania magazine, which came on the market in March 1990. Contrary to the usual rules, the Party’s gazette was released before the incorporation of the Party, so, the communication was opened before the structuring of a real political movement.

The expression, "Greater Romania" is a concept which describes a geopolitical reality which emerged immediately after World War I, when the Kingdom of Romania united with Transylvania, Banat, Bassarabia [today the Republic of Moldova], Northern Bucovina and the Hertza province [today a part of Ukraine], as well as a region in South Dobrodgea, which is now part of Bulgaria. Therefore, it is closely related to the idea of the national State, meant to include within the same frontiers almost all the territories inhabited by compact groups of Romanians.

The founders of the Greater Romania magazine are the novelist Eugen Barbu and the poet-journalist Corneliu Vadim Tudor. Barbu made his debut as a writer in the Stalinist period, when he published several short stories and novels that described, in the style of that era, how the Communists were trying to change Romanian society, or the ‘hard life’ of the workers before the war. In the 60s, he had mainly written novels and movie scripts, inspired from the Romanian history of the 18th – 19th centuries, using a language full of archaisms. In parallel, through another type of writings, he continued to reinforce the myth of the Communist resistance in Romania during World War II.

In the 70s, Barbu took over the leadership of the Cultural Weekly of the Capital [Saptamanalul Cultural al Capitalei], which he rapidly turned into a tribune for the affirmation of national-Communist ideas. The pages of the weekly represented a virulent attack against on cultural works or trends in Romania which do not correspond to their views, and thus embarked upon fierce polemics with the representatives of the Romanian émigré community and with the Western mass media as well. At the same time, the magazine was fully involved in the personality cult of both Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, through propaganda feature reports and exceedingly long poems about their virtues. The main author of this kind of material was a young journalist with the official press agency, AGERPRESS, named Corneliu Vadim Tudor.

Born in Brasov, in Transylvania, to a poor family, C.V. Tudor studied Marxist sociology. Then he entered the world of official journalism, trying at the same time to achieve recognition as a nationalist poet, following the already explosive example of the Adrian Paunescu era. In early 1980, his volume of poems, Saturnalia [Saturnalii], was withdrawn from the market by the authorities due to its anti-Semitic flavor that resulted in international protests.

By December 1989, the Cultural Weekly of the Capital and the Barbu-Tudor team had already been discredited in Romanian cultural circles inside and outside the country. However, being criticized in different publications became over time either a certificate of cultural value or of moral rectitude.

On January 4, 1990, the Minister of Culture, the philosopher Andrei Plesu, banned the magazine. Barbu and Tudor were sentenced to a two month silence. The documents subsequently published confirmed that the release of the Greater Romania was supported by the left-wing authorities in Bucharest, who intended to make use of the polemic talent of the two against the fragile political opposition and the key figures of the emerging civil society. It was a gesture meant to help them, mainly in terms of the first parliamentary elections scheduled for May 1990, when the National Salvation Front, the political formation which was in provisional power, actually obtained more than 66 percent of the votes, while its candidate for the Presidency, Ion Iliescu, got 85 percent of the votes.

Ever since its first publication, Greater Romania set for itself three major topics to be dealt with. First of all, a debt had to be paid back. Therefore, all the opponents to the authorities – either former political convicts of the Communist era, or intellectuals and journalists who criticized the power – were to be savagely attacked. The weapons used were impressive. Mockery of the physical traits or of the alterations brought by the old age, forgery of biographies, publication of texts and caricatures abundant in insults, ethnic origins – supposed or real [mainly Hungarian or Jewish] of different public figures, older or newer – revealed with innuendoes assuming guilt.

Secondly, a pro domo pleading is obvious. The former editorial staff of the magazine adapted to the environment of the newly-born anti-Communism; they attempted to demonstrate that they had been the real opponents of the Ceausescu regime, and used to write incriminating letters to the dictator, and that they were never partisans of the atheism, censorship, or the demolition of historic monuments.

The third topic was substantially linked to the creation of the social basis of the Party, which was to be set up a year later. Greater Romania provided a positive reevaluation of the immediate Communist past. It argued that the national interests were defended at that time, that values were created and the economic interests of the citizens were protected. Furthermore, that all this was accomplished despite the existence of a real ‘international plot’ started in Moscow and completed in Washington. Even the personality of Nicolae Ceausescu was rehabilitated to some extent after a three month period when all the media in Romania had intensively attempted to make a demoniac picture of him. The dictator is presented as an example of patriotism, a character that turned negative – and this is why the country had to get rid of him – solely on the account of his behavior problems in his final years. The December 1989 events took up considerable space in the pages of the magazine, where they are described as a de-stabilization attempt organized by irredentist Hungarian circles, the KGB, CIA or Mossad, eventually thwarted by a few patriotic officers and politicians, which was then endorsed by the people at large.

Hereby, hundreds of thousands of people received a much more reassuring perspective on recent history and on the present as well, in a time when all the values around which they had tried to organize their lives were in a process of thorough analysis, while, on the other side, signs of inflation and unemployment had just begun to appear menacingly. The Greater Romania form of speech became a drug meant to medicate the growing shortcomings of everyday life by identifying a well-defined perpetrator: international capital which was striving to buy Romania for nothing; the Hungarians who longed to retake Transylvania; the new politicians, already corrupted, who made easy money by selling their offices.

In this context, the Greater Romania magazine reached by the summer of 1990 a circulation of almost one million issues. It is of course true, this was part of a general flourishing of the recently-born written press, in which Romanians took a special delight. However, today, the most important daily in Romania hardly reaches 200,000 issues, while the social-political weeklies have a very discreet existence. Greater Romania also is now unable to sell more than 30,000 copies a week.

The birth of the Greater Romania Party, in May 1991, was mainly welcomed with smiles and reticence by political analysts and the media. Barbu and Vadim Tudor gather around them former officers of the Army, the Communist Militia, and the Securitate, as well as official historians of the Communist regime, writers and publicists who could not find a place in the cultural environment and journalistic circles which emerged after the fall of the dictatorship. They set forth a political platform devoid of any substance, where economic policy was reduced to populist slogans [‘economic protection’, ‘protection of the country’s resources’, ‘revival through our own efforts’, ‘fair economic relations with other countries’], while foreign policy was left at the level of a draft, primarily in an attempt to promote again the strategies of Ceausescu, good relations with everybody, in a context of suspicion towards everyone.

From this very moment, the controversy appeared around the question of whether this party could be analyzed in terms of the classical patterns of political science. It declared itself to be a left-center party. However, its economic program, to the extent one exists, can only be labeled left-left, which could even be considered to have noticeable Communist elements. At the same time, the representatives of some bodies of the civil society, along with the organizations of ethnic minorities consider it a right extremist party. Based on the behavior of the Party since its founding, I think we can describe it as a national-Communist party, which employs in the democratic political arena, the official Romanian ideology of the 70s and 80s. In certain areas it went even further, in that it freed itself of Ceausescu‘s self-imposed restrictions concerning comments about Hungarians and Jews. However, for ten years the concept of nationalism overtly expressed by the Party in its platform and ideology has been attempting to fill the vacuum of solutions in economic and social areas. The Communist era remains the lost positive reference point for the Party, as in that period the economy is said to have been functional, exports existed, houses were built, and there was no unemployment or inflation. Nevertheless, these assertions fail to consider the inevitable collapse of the internal and external structures of the system, which were simply allowing a simulation of reality. Internally the full concentration of resources and decisions in the hands of the state could clearly not continue, while externally, international cooperation mechanisms, such as COMECOM, where political interests became substitutes for the economic rules.

During the September 1992 elections, when Greater Romania participated for the first time, it succeeded in getting 3.9 percent of the votes, thereby fulfilling its objective of exceeding the 3 percent limit. Eugen Barbu became a member of the Chamber of Deputies, but died a short time after the elections, while C.V. Tudor became a senator. As for the Party, it received Parliamentary mandates primarily in the regions without ethnic minorities and its share of the vote in Transylvania was only minor. The aggressive nationalist comments attracted first of all Romanians who were not in direct contact with the representatives of other ethnic groups and therefore received their only information about the latter from the nationalist publications.

Between 1992 and 1996, the Party provided parliamentary support to the PDSR led by Ion Iliescu, while that latter was in power, and tried several times, but failed, to gain important positions in the Cabinet. The alliance with the nationalists was problematic for the party in power in the area of foreign relations. However, late in 1995, when President Iliescu attempted to distance himself from Tudor, during a visit to the United States, an open conflict broke out between the two.

During the 1996 elections the Greater Romania Party managed to double its electoral results. A large number of PNUR supporters defected to the Party, along with some of the nationalists in the ranks of the PDSR. In the first two years of the right-center government, which took power after the 1996 elections, the popularity of the Party constantly increased, as it became a receptacle of the social discontent fermented by reform. In the winter of 1999, the leader of the Party openly supported the violence unleashed by the miners who twice came to bloody clashes with the police. At the same time C. V. Tudor tries to set off several scandals based on speculation and deception, directed towards the private life of the elected President, Emil Constantinescu. The fact that the Parliament withdrew the immunity of C. V. Tudor in connection with several slander trials, represented a heavy blow to the image of the nationalist leader. His popularity seems to be declining. Toward the end of 1999 it stood at 7 to 8 percent.

The Greater Romania Party essentially communicates through three vectors: C. V. Tudor, the media outlets of the Party, and through the manufacturing of events. First of all, lets consider the public performance of its leader. A massive, choleric character, with an overflowing oratory, who employs no self-censorship at all, Senator C. V. Tudor makes weekly appearances in press conferences, where he releases long communiqués which I would characterize as ongoing appeals to insurrection and violence, combined with a dismissal of the political class as being unfit, corrupt, and made up of ‘anti-Romanians’. The following is an attempted translation of one of Mr. Tudor’s talks. Though something may be lost in the translation, I believe it is true to the spirit of the original Romanian:

This is a classic pattern of a C. V. Tudor speech. Sometimes, the TV channels or the radio broadcasting companies invite the leader of the Party to talk shows where he speaks at length before an attentive public, which may or may not agree with him, but the one who calls himself the ‘Tribune’ is never boring. He always discovers a new ‘scandal’ or a new ‘treason’. On such shows he has an open field, as few politicians or analysts are willing to stand in public next to him. This type of speech finds a receptive audience in retired people, whose fixed incomes cannot hope to keep up with inflation, or in confused young men with little education, who feel they are left out, primarily the youths of the urban areas with high unemployment rates. Here they can hear in public what they can only say in private, that Romanians are not to blame for their difficult living conditions, that the guilt rests with political leaders and their acolytes from abroad, who work hand in hand. Turning its back on an obsolete Communism and facing the specter of a difficult capitalism, the Party has permanently suggested a mysterious third way, capable of solving all problems, of bringing wealth, and of defending the state against the always imminent danger of ‘disintegration’.

The Party’s second communications vector is its media outlets. The Greater Romania magazine is of course the most significant. However, its appendix, Politics [Politica], released after the incorporation of the Party, which is quite similar to its parent, save for the date of issue and number of pages, is also available. These magazines appear to be a chaotic mixture of vitriolized comments on the key figures of the political, cultural and media environments, of tedious historical tales, of letters from readers expressing their desperate hope that the Party will soon take power, exposés of ‘plots’, and corruption cases based upon the information collected from ‘honest officers’ of the intelligence services, football comments, and quotations from articles found in other publications, if the latter endorse, at least partially, the campaigns run by the Party. At the same time, the poorly educated are offered a bazaar of topics, with sensationalistic overtones, such as stories about the mistresses of heads of state, the end of the world, the Jewish Kabbalah, famous murderers, pictures of nudes, along with caricatures of the Romanian personalities in prison or in ludicrous situations.

The third vector used by the Party is manufacturing events. In using this vector, the Party attempts to build up its image of a pillar of culture and religion, and a provider to the poor. The monthly ‘Christian supper’ organized by the Party provides food for many people, while Senator Tudor himself gives money for the rehabilitation of churches and monuments which he considers significant to the national history. On anniversaries of events or personalities, the Party gathers its supporters in public areas, organizes concerts of traditional Romanian music, and distributes calendars with the image of the ‘Tribune’.

If we try to integrate the Party’s approach into the history of Romanian nationalism, we can easily see the continuity of classic patterns, along with some innovations. The Party has clearly adopted the classic ideas of the democratic nationalism which existed prior to World War II, related to the existence of a centuries-old, deep-rooted rural tradition, on behalf of which one has to resist the values imposed from abroad, either modern managerial methods, rights granted to ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities, or foodstuff and media techniques.

Greater Romania took over from the Legionary Movement the idea of the everlasting culpability of the political class, who are forever incompetent and corrupt, and therefore must be replaced with representatives of the Party. Although the Party is currently participating in the political game within the given Constitutional framework, some of its proposals are quite troubling in this regard, and imply that it would dismantle the liberal-democratic structure. Specifically, if it should come to power it intends to seize, in 24 hours, all "illegally obtained fortunes," provide brief trials for those responsible for the ‘country’s disaster’, censor or ban publications according to the criteria of adhesion to the national values, and dismantle minority organizations.

It is obvious that both the theoretical basis and the social support which responds to this type of speech are rooted in the reflexes created by Communism: suspicion of foreigners; the idea that the state has to offer wealth to everyone, beyond any competition or competence; the theory of the permanent danger threatening Romania; and the idea of history as a never ending sacrifice serving a West which now declines to help. All of these ideas can be found in the national-Communism of Ceausescu.

On the other hand, several elements are missing from this fresco. Unlike the Legionary Movement, the Greater Romania Party does not extensively communicate by example. Its activists do not express much interest in working "side by side with the people." Another important missing element is Orthodoxy. Trained in the Marxist school, C. V. Tudor showed after 1990 a special respect for Christian values, but has not taken over, in any way, the spiritualist speech of the legionaries related to Orthodoxy, and even less the related use of icons. However, such appeals are less important to the Party’s target audience: people who were shaped by Communism, with at most an average education, who are frightened by economic uncertainty, but who are less driven by spiritual imperatives.