Les élites politiques en Roumanie postcommuniste 1990-2008: les voies d'accés au pouvoir exécutif

Abstract

The political regime change that occurred in Romania, along with the dismissal of communism, elicited a process of emergence of new political elites and of new patterns in the functioning of the country's political institutions. But new political elites do not emerge ex nihilo and institutional changes are slower in practice than the ambition of change. Given the extensive absence of decision-making or technical expertise among the political actors, the new parties in government conducted a policy of cooption of personnel instituting new patterns of selection. The paper will emphasize the fact that, in the Romanian case, the process of professionalization of governmental personnel took the form of a long process, and that the protocols of the reconfiguration implied divergent strategies in what concerns the governments' ministers and the secretaries of state. It will be shown that although the ministerial careers suggest the institutionalization of recruitment procedures similar to other European parliamentary democracies, the junior ministers' level remained dominated by forms of cooption from outside the political realm.