With the political
class being completely discredited, with tens of thousands of protesters taking
to the streets this month and furiously chanting All parties – the same
abjectness, it is almost unlikely for Romanians to find role models among
politicians. Although rare, such emblematic personalities do exist. Born in
1914 into a family of militants for the Romanians’ rights in Transylvania,
which was under Austro-Hungarian occupation at the time, Corneliu Coposu grew
up and was trained in a monarchic, democratic, unified Romania after World War
I.
A graduate of the Law School, a journalist and athlete, he became the
right-hand man of the leader of the National Peasant Party and former prime
minister Iuliu Maniu, an authentic democrat and fervent opponent of both German
Nazism and Soviet Bolshevism. His loyalty to Maniu and to democratic principles
turned Corneliu Coposu into one of the favourite targets of the Securitate, the
political police of the communist dictatorship instated in Romania by Soviet occupants after World War II.
Arrested in 1947, he was a political detainee for 17 years; for some of them he
lived in total reclusion. In 1964, the communists emptied the prisons, convinced
that they had consolidated the regime and trying to improve their image both in
Romania and in the Western countries. However, Coposu remained under the
permanent supervision of the Securitate.
After the anti-communist revolution of
December 1989, along with veteran members of the inter-war National Peasant
Party, as well as with very young opponents of communism, he re-established
Iuliu Maniu’s party, subsequently affiliated to the Christian and Democratic
International and the European People’s Party. In the post-communist
atmosphere, when the left-wing leader Ion Iliescu, perceived as leader of the
revolution, had been voted by a large majority at the first presidential
election, the Christian and Democratic National Peasant Party was hit by anti-Romanian
forces through the miners’ raids, through the regime based on corruption,
banditry and seizing of power by any possible means as one of the close
collaborators of Coposu recalled upon his commemoration.
The Christian and
Democrat leader remained adamant in his creed: he was a royalist,
anti-communist, pro-Western and advocate of the reunification of the ex-Soviet
Republic of Moldova with a predominantly Romanian-speaking population with
Romania. As one of his fans has recently recalled, quote patriotism is a
discreet love for your country and readiness to give your life for it any
time. Unquote. Keeping his inflexible beliefs and humour, a sensitive
Christian poet and fan of the national football team, an Orthodox-Catholic
surrounded by Orthodox friends, Corneliu Coposu was the leader of the Christian
and Democratic National Peasant Party and of the Democratic Convention in
opposition until he died of lung cancer on November 11th 1995. The
deep collective emotion triggered by his death was to pave the way for the
victory of the Democratic Convention in the parliamentary elections of 1996.
Corneliu Coposu could not witness that triumph, but according to a press
formula of the time, he had already become the moral president of Romania.