by Ovidiu Nahoi, Senior Editor, Adevarul
(original article in Romanian can be read here)

18 Jan 2010

It was ten years yesterday [17 January 2010] since Ion Ratiu left us.

A great Romanian, a politician of principle, founder of the respectable newspaper ‘Cotidianul’ and, above all, a visionary. Ion Ratiu is also, nevertheless, a man who was wronged. Together with Corneliu Coposu and Doina Cornea, he was the man upon whom heaps and heaps of dirt were dished by the propaganda machine of the post-communist Romanian state of the 1990s. And this speaks volumes.

He was painted by these people as an unscrupulous “exploiter of the working classes” , because of his wealth. He was presented as a foreigner, because of his slight Anglicised accent. Yet Ion Ratiu remained serene under these attacks, jovial even. He continued to talk about capitalism and the West, at a time when these words sounded to many rather more like threats than promises.

He always maintained that Romania needed profound reforms, rapid privatisation, liberalisation of prices, and an open political system based on diversity and tolerance. He was one of those old-fashioned men able to carry the weight of a contradictory discussion wearing a smile on his face, and without hurting his opponent.

Ion Ratiu was one of the few politicians who were able to say what they were thinking, not whatever the majority would have liked to hear at any given time. There are many things that could be said about his legacy to us: about the Ratiu Foundation, about the grants offered in his name, about the Ratiu Center for Democracy, about his contribution to the development of the Romanian press, or about his political ideas.

But the most valuable legacy left by Ion Ratiu lies in the gesture he made during the miners’ attack on Bucharest in September 1991, when the troops led by Miron Cozma invaded the seat of the Parliament – then located in the palace on Dealul Mitropoliei (the Metropolitan’s Church Hill). When the attackers – armed with crowbars and axes – stormed into the Chamber of Deputies auditorium, only two men dared to face them while the majority of the parliamentarians were preparing to flee.

Both of them were members of the Peasant Party: poet Ioan Alexandru, holding a crucifix in his hands, as if facing a horde of vampires, and Ion Ratiu. “How dare you enter like this, to the very seat of democracy? Get out of here, immediately!”, Ion Ratiu – an elderly man – addressed the miners. Such was the power in his decisive tone of voice, that the fired-up miners silently left the building.

Maybe even today we do not fully understand how much Romanian democracy is indebted to that gesture born of conviction and courage. Today, when the country’s democratic institutions are again under attack – not with truncheons, as in 1991, but with the much sophisticated weapons of populism and demagogy – Ion Ratiu’s gesture is endowed with new significance.

Let us therefore be reminded of the symbolic legacy left to us all by Ion Ratiu. It’s well worth it.