Ion Iliescu, Romania’s most powerful politician after Ceaușescu, dies at 95

Romania’s former President Ion Iliescu, who led its transition from communism and set it on the path to European Union and NATO membership, but faced charges of crimes against humanity for violently suppressing protests in the 1990s, died on Tuesday aged 95.

Iliescu had been admitted to hospital with lung cancer roughly two months ago. The government said he would receive a state funeral.

“History will judge Ion Iliescu, the main figure of the 1990s transition,” said current President Nicusor Dan.

Iliescu went from a rising member of Romania’s Communist Party to a leader of the bloody December 1989 revolution – which toppled dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and led to his summary execution on Christmas Day – to become the first freely elected president.

At the height of his popularity, Romanians were known to chant “The sun shines, Iliescu appears”. But when student protests against him broke out in the capital Bucharest in June 1990, he called on coal miners, then politically influential, to put them down by force.

After repeated failed attempts to investigate him, he was sent for trial at the start of this year on charges of crimes against humanity for his part in violence in which 20,000 miners entered the capital to crush peaceful anti-government protests. Four people were killed and hundreds injured.

He always denied wrongdoing and was never convicted.

Miners’ riots throughout the 1990s hampered Romania’s transition to a market economy and deterred badly needed foreign investment for years. Iliescu’s critics have accused him of delaying the transitions, trying to block reform and protect the political heritage and ruling elite of the Communist system.

But Iliescu was also the one who got all political parties to agree to support Romania’s path to EU and NATO membership. It joined the NATO alliance in 2004 and the EU in 2007.

The founder of the leftist Social Democrat Party (PSD), to this day the country’s largest, Iliescu is its only leader to have won three presidential elections. No other PSD leader has managed to win since his last term ended in 2004.

As Mihnea Lazăr commented for PressOne.ro, Iliescu posed as a savior of the country, but his real goal was to “save” the former Romanian Communist Party (PCR), dressed in the mantle of the new National Salvation Front (NSF).

In his words, the revolution and the Mining Riot are the great traumas of a generation and have remained as open wounds – as a legacy from Iliescu.

“In both files, Iliescu remained perpetually suspended as a suspect – never acquitted, never guilty. This state of uncertainty faithfully reflects the wall-to-wall ricochets that have characterized Romania’s entire political and economic journey from the Revolution to the present”, Lazăr writes.

“Revolution that remained a huge open wound that continues to fester after almost 36 years: even now we do not know clearly – from the point of view of Justice – “who shot at us.” Instead, we know that, from the Revolution of 1989 until today, no former officer of the former Securitate has ever been convicted in Romania for acts of political policing. None”, he hammers out.

“If Ceaușescu managed, at the end of 1989, to unite us all in hatred for him, Ion Iliescu managed in record time to divide us in hatred”, writes Lazăr.

In his words, Iliescu helped perpetuate the power of the secret services in Romania, known as Securitate under Ceaușescu.

“Ion Iliescu was not only responsible for “saving” the PCR. He was equally responsible for saving the old Securitate, transplanted in the 1990s into what later became known as the “force structures” that make up the SRI, SIE or SPP – to name just a few. We recently received the effects of this superstructure consolidated over more than 30 years, in full force, on the occasion of the presidential elections”, he wrote.

Decoding Romanian politics: The enduring legacy of Securitate

Lazăr says that on the other hand, there is still no rigorous documentation explaining the intimate reasons that led Iliescu to make Romania’s decisive turn towards the EU and NATO, which he considered as “the lesser evil”.

“To quote the same Ion Iliescu again: “It was said about me in 2000 that the lesser evil won then. The lesser evil, which was me, then led, together with the PSD government, Romania into NATO and the EU. The lesser evil brought the greatest freedom, made possible by the pro-European and pro-Atlantic attitude.”

With Reuters and Eualive’s partner PressOne.ro

Mihnea Lazăr’s commentary in Romanian can be found here.

Edited by Georgi Gotev

Caption: Romanian President Ion Iliescu during a meeting at Matignion Palace in Paris Thursday 20 November 2003 (re-issued 05 August 2025). Ion Iliescu, Romania’s first democratically elected president, died at the age of 95 the Romanian government confirmed on 05 August 2025. EPA/OLIVIER HOSLET