Corneliu Vadim Tudor - Ideology

Ideology

In June 1990, Tudor and Eugen Barbu founded the nationalist weekly România Mare ("Greater Romania") - begun as a magazine favorable to the policies of the government. In 1991, they founded the Greater Romania Party, the platform of which Time magazine described as "a crude mixture of anti-Semitism, racism and nostalgia for the good old days of communism." Statements made and articles written by Tudor and his party colleagues can also be described as ultra-nationalist, anti-Hungarian sentiment, anti-Roma, and homophobic.

Of no less importance is Tudor's irredentism: the ideal of a Greater Romania is what gives the party its name, and Tudor has campaigned several times around the notion that he is the only Romanian politician to have maintained this particular goal. The reference is mainly aimed at the Republic of Moldova, a state whose legitimacy has been questioned by Tudor on numerous occasions. He has supported the cause of Romanians in Transnistria, and was involved in the efforts to set free the victim of a Tiraspol show trial, Ilie Ilaşcu. While Tudor was the one to embarrass the prosecutors by having Ilaşcu elected to the Romanian parliament on his party's list (in 2000), György Frunda—a preeminent ethnic Hungarian representative, and thus a main target of Tudor's attacks—has been the most active member of the Romanian delegation to the Council of Europe in obtaining a condemnation of the trial by the forum.

Besides Moldova, Tudor claims that Greater Romania must include Southern Bessarabia, the territory of Hertsa and Northern Bukovina which belong to Ukraine after the fall of the USSR, but were a part of historical Romania until the Russian anexation in 1812, and again between 1918-1940.

România Mare has been sued for libel with stunning frequency, often for Tudor's own writings (which he usually—if not always—signs under the pseudonym Alcibiade). Between 1993 and 1996, his party supported the leftist governmental coalition (the "Red Quadrilateral").

Tudor's and his party's change from national-communism to ultranationalism took place after 1996. In 1999, Dan Corneliu Hudici, a former reporter at România Mare, claimed there was a "secret blacklist" of dozens of politicians (including then-president Emil Constantinescu), journalists, and businessmen to be arrested if Tudor's party came to power. This allegation only served to increase his popularity: in the first round of the Romanian presidential elections on November 26, 2000, Tudor finished second with 28% of the vote. (Four years earlier, he had come in fifth.) However, nearly all other parties backed Ion Iliescu in the December 11 runoff, and Tudor only picked up five additional percentage points, while Iliescu surged from 36% to 67%. In 2001, the Egyptian dailyAl-Ahram called him the "Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Carpathians.".

Changing his convictions to what he deemed Christian Democracy, Tudor supported Romania's entry into the European Union and sustained its presence in NATO. In 2003, Tudor claimed to have changed his views of Jews, Judaism, and the Holocaust. In a letter of February 1, 2004, he retracted certain earlier statements he had made as inappropriately anti-Semitic; further, he wrote: I know that I was wrong to have denied the Holocaust in Romania, which happened between 1941 and 1944 under Antonescu's regime. Many publicly questioned the sincerity and motivations of this change, viewing it simply as a political ploy. Despite sharp criticism of the move from within Israel, Tudor hired a well-known Israeli public relations company to provide him consulting for the 2004 electoral campaigns. In the elections of 2004 he came out 3rd with a score of 11%, after Adrian Năstase and Traian Băsescu.

He fired Jewish advisor (and member of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies) Nati Meir due to allegations of bribery (according to Tudor) or old habits of anti-semitism (according to Meir). The Romanian press discovered that Meir had been convicted in Israel of banking fraud, thus incompatible with the office of member of the Chamber of Deputies. On November 15, 2006 Meir was brought to trial by the Romanian authorities for tax evasion, fraud and swindling, being accused of illegalities concerning work permits for Israel.

After stepping down as president of the PPRM (Partidul Popular România Mare—with the added People's Party) for a short while, he returned, firing Corneliu Ciontu (appointed president of the PPRM by Tudor) and taking over party affairs. The party has since reverted to its old name and its core tenets, as its more moderate stance appeared have lost old votes without gaining new ones. Tudor's publications continued to include articles that denied the Holocaust in Romania and took deliberately antagonistic positions toward Romanian Roma, ethnic Hungarians, and other minority groups.

In recent years, Tudor has also faced an increasing challenge from another Romanian populist leader, Gigi Becali, owner of the Steaua football team and president of the New Generation Party, but ended up allying with him when the latter was imprisoned, and subsequently both were voted into the European Parliament.

He has frequently styled himself The Tribune, a title that originates in Ancient Rome, but has an ever more combative meaning in Romanian history: tribuni stood for certain activists in the self-defence of Romanian communities in Transylvania against the Revolutionary government in Hungary (see The Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas).