About the Forgotten Romania Politics in a Minute – Vlad Adamescu and Răzvan Petri

V: On the morning of November 24, 2024, I went with a very good friend to the polling station to which we were both assigned. We got out of the voting booth, got in the car, and, completely surprisingly, he told me that he voted for the 11th-place independent, the independent he was sure was going to win the presidential election.

A: That same evening, on the way to a TV station where I had been invited to analyze the results of the exit poll from the first round, I was surprised to observe that the taxi driver was pretty sure that an independent candidate, on his name Călin Georgescu, would win. I also notice that dozens of videos of the independent candidate and his wife, Cristela, are playing on his dashboard-mounted phone. Amused by the situation, I take a picture and head to the studio where, by 1 a.m., along with the rest of the analysts, we were to have a wake-up call, live on TV.

V: We heard the same narratives and lines of argumentation from so-called experts and professional commentators for weeks after that November 24, both when we were in the TV studios and when we were passively watching what was being discussed on TV. The repetitive explanations: Russia, TikTok, hatred of the political class seemed important but incomplete. Online manipulation by hostile external or internal actors first needed fertile ground. As political scientists, we felt that one element was missing which we consider crucial and which we will talk about with you tonight: the huge economic inequality in Romania.

A: Why didn't the “experts” (at least those of good faith) see the monster of inequality hiding in plain sight? Partly because we are blinded by statistics that confirm a nice and pleasant variant, a confirmation bias of those who are in urban areas and developed regions and feel the benefits of EU membership and economic growth. On the other hand, it is because politicians prefer the narrative that under their governance and careful eye, Romania's GDP has grown by almost 800% since 2000 to date.

Moreover, the percentage of people suffering from material and social deprivation has fallen from 46% in 2014 to 23% in 2023, and the gross minimum wage has risen from 310 lei in 2004 to 4050 lei in 2025. We have overtaken Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Hungary, Bulgaria and even Poland in GDP per capita. From the airplane, we are doing much better than before EU accession, and this is true... ON AVERAGE.

On the other hand, these statistics have become instrumentalized and used as a political weapon by both the well-intentioned and the ill-intentioned. These statistics do not tell the whole story of the transition. They must be supplemented with others and their own interpretations. Statistics will never speak for themselves.

V: Without realizing it, in the last 18 years since joining the European Union, we have created two Romanias. One of big urban centers, fully integrated into the EU, and one of forgotten places, left behind. We call it the forgotten Romania. It is the one we can identify when we scrutinize these statistics, in the data hidden beneath the huge increase in GDP. It is not a question of extreme poverty, although it has not been completely eradicated, nor of one that has lost out from the transition to democracy and free markets, but of a Romania that just has not gained as much. Not because of its own fault, but through the carelessness and ineptitude of politicians.

It is also the case for the region in which we find ourselves, the North-East region of Romania, which is at the bottom of the EU in terms of economic development. Even though the standard of living has risen, the region is barely half the EU development average while Bucharest is at 190% of the same average. Both regions have climbed since 18 years ago, but not at the same pace, not with the same speed. Romania is today the fourth most unequal EU member state, with the biggest gaps, the highest gaps between regions.

A: The vast majority of Georgescu's voters come from what the Friedrich Ebert Foundation describes as “Romania's rural middle”, but also from “old rural and industrial regions with significant socio-economic challenges”. The former, in translation, is the Romania of small towns and villages, the latter the one of industrial hubs and poor villages, where life expectancy and income levels are low, with few job opportunities, especially in new, modern sectors. In total, about 13 million Romanians.

V: These counties traditionally voted with mainstream parties, but in this election, something interesting happened for the first time: the aforementioned parties were not able to mobilize their supporters to vote as well. Of course, there were also some vote rigging and votes were redirected to other candidates, but this does not explain the 2.1 million votes for Georgescu. The people, motivated also by relatives who have left either for the big cities or for Western Europe, have slapped the "system" that has abandoned them and left them in perceived or real poverty, while the big cities prosper.

A: Again, we're not saying that nothing has changed in 35 years in these parts of the country, on the contrary, most have seen sewage systems, new roads and bridges, higher wages, but nothing compares to the advances made in places like Bucharest, Cluj or Iași. Bucharest-Ilfov is in the top 10 richest in the EU, above all capitals in central and eastern Europe.

V: What should our elected representatives do, the politicians who, for better or for worse, have to solve these problems, whatever their political color? In general, a redirection of investment to the regions left behind, from the regions that have benefited enormously from EU membership. Still here, it would be excellent to unblock the payments from the PNRR through the reforms that were demanded of us by the European Commission, because most of the funds there also had a fair transition component and were destined for the regions left behind. Secondly, it has already become a cliché, but we have to look at education. In order for people in these regions to have a chance for a prosperous future, we need to invest more in the education of pupils who are at risk of social exclusion.

A: Romania has an unhealthy obsession with high-performers: olympians and schools that produce olympians are always in the public eye and receive most of the funds from the education budget. No one is saying that olympians are not important or that they should not be rewarded for their work, but today's situation shows that an extremely small minority of the school population receives most of the funding. Access to quality primary and secondary education is extremely unequal in our country, and the results show later: Romania has the lowest percentage of university graduates in the European Union: 16% compared to the EU average of 30%.

V: To end on a more optimistic note, more and more analysts, commentators, and ordinary citizens are realizing that the levels of economic inequality in Romania are becoming dangerous for our democracy itself. We can only analyze the growing number of academic and press articles analyzing the phenomenon, or simply see that the number of searches for the word "inequality" have increased in recent years, especially in the counties that are most left behind.

A: Another reason for cautious optimism is that the young people voting for the first time in 2024 were born on the eve of Romania's accession to the European Union. What for some has always seemed like a distant, almost unbelievable dream is becoming, for the new generations, a normal, almost ordinary, thing. They have experienced only a European, free, democratic Romania and are free from the traumas of communism or those of the post-communist transition. They have internalized the values of liberal democracy like no other generation has done until now.

V: They are not afraid to express their identity, they are confident, critical and convinced of a global duty to protest against injustice, whether it is in Ukraine or Gaza. They are optimistic that the big issues of the present and the future - climate change, wars, inequality and discrimination - can be solved through engagement and with determination. Today, a growing part of Romania is sophisticated and open to the world. They dress better, they go out and drink specialty coffee, they go out to the theater and to the movies, if possible to an independent theater or cinema, they go to Pride, they choose boutique festivals over the big ones, they take a gap year before deciding where to go for their bachelor's or master's degree and usually at least one is completed in a European capital. The rights won by their parents or (already) grandparents in 1989 come naturally, but the new generations seem to have understood that the fight for new freedoms never stops.

A: Otherwise, if we do not seriously address these inequalities, the forgotten Romania of villages and small towns, abandoned to poverty by the governments of the last 35 years, will continue to rebel rightly so against a system that has generated and perpetuated totally unsustainable inequalities, while the islands of wealth in the big cities will give up involvement altogether and take the path of apathy, disinterest and disgust with politics, betrayed by the projects and politicians' reform promises.